Around the middle of October, the Roman Catholic Pope in the Vatican made a very surprising announcement. On that occasion he invited the Church of England, which had been separated for 478 years from the Catholic Church, to rejoin his flock. As an inducement, the Pope said that married preachers could remain married and, after a period of retraining, they would be welcome in the Catholic Church. Another inducement had to do with hymnals. Apparently the Anglican hymnals will be accepted on a restricted basis in the new Catholic Church after the Anglicans rejoin.
You may recall that the Anglicans left the Roman Church after a dispute involving King Henry VIII. It seems Henry had a collection of wives, some of whom he wanted to divorce; others he executed. The Roman Catholic Pope would not agree to a divorce for Henry VIII from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. That set the stage for Henry establishing his own church for England. Not only that, but he specified that the reigning monarch would be its head. In effect, the Anglicans could have their own pope. As a matter of interest, he was the reigning monarch at the time, so he in effect became the new pope of the Anglican church.
And so for the better part of 500 years, the Anglicans have gone their own way, separate from the mother Church. Apparently the Pope is intent upon collecting the low-hanging fruit. There is an ongoing dispute in the Anglican Church. The dispute involves naming females as bishops and the existence of a gay bishop in New Hampshire of this country. The calculation seems to be that a sufficient number of Anglicans will be turned off by female bishops and the gay bishop and will move toward the Catholic Church, abandoning the Anglican Church.
I am not a Catholic or an Anglican. However, the Pope’s move to welcome back the Anglicans on a limited basis seemed to me to have material for possible comment in these essays. For a week now, I have been pondering whether to treat this lightly or as a matter of great substance. I confess that after a week of pondering my thoughts are still askew. But the problem was solved on Sunday, October 25 when Maureen Dowd, op-ed columnist with The New York Times, published her column. Bear in mind that Ms. Dowd is a practicing Catholic who, I presume, is still in the good graces of the Church. I have always admired Ms. Dowd’s prose and in the instant case, I decided that I could do no better so I would use Maureen Dowd’s column. Without further ado, here is what she wrote on Sunday, October 25.

October 25, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Nuns’ Story
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda. Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom.
Sister Hiltruda looked ready to pop, but she couldn’t say a word to me, then or ever. There was no more unassailable patriarchy than the Catholic Church. Nuns were second-class citizens then and — 40 years after feminism utterly changed America — they still are. The matter of women as priests is closed, a forbidden topic.
In 2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating “feminine values” like “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.”
Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.
The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.
Nuns who took Vatican II as a mandate for reimagining their mission “started to look uppity to an awful lot of bishops and priests and, of course, the Vatican,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”
The church enabled rampant pedophilia, but nuns who live in apartments and do social work with ailing gays? Sacrilegious! The pope can wear Serengeti sunglasses and expensive red loafers, but shorter hems for nuns? Disgraceful!
“It’s a tragedy because nuns are the jewels of the system,” said Bob Bennett, the Washington lawyer who led the church’s lay inquiry into the pedophilia scandal. “I was of the view that if they had been listened to more, some of this stuff wouldn’t have happened.”
As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer.
“Most of the Anglicans who want to move over to the Catholic Church under this deal are people who have scorned women as priests and have scorned gay people,” Briggs said. “The Vatican doesn’t care that these people are motivated by disdain.”
The nuns are pushing back a bit, but it’s hard, since the church has decreed that women can’t be adversarial to men. A nun writing in Commonweal as “Sister X” protests, “American women religious are being bullied.”
She recalls that Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, who heads one of the investigations, moved a meeting at the University of Notre Dame off campus to protest a performance of “The Vagina Monologues.” “It is the rare bishop,” Sister X writes, “who has any real understanding of the lives women actually lead.”
The church can be flexible, except with women. Laurie Goodstein, the Times’s religion writer, reported this month on an Illinois woman who had a son with a Franciscan priest. The church agreed to child support but was stingy with money for college and for doctors, once the son got terminal cancer. The priest had never been disciplined and was a pastor in Wisconsin — until he hit the front page. Even then, “Father” Willenborg was suspended only because the woman said that he had pressed her to have an abortion and that he had also had a sexual relationship with a teenager. (Maybe the church shouldn’t be so obdurate on condoms.)
When then-Cardinal Ratzinger was “The Enforcer” in Rome, he investigated and disciplined two American nuns. One, Jeannine Gramick, then of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, founded a ministry to reconcile gays with the church, which regards homosexual desires as “disordered.” The other, Mary Agnes Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy, headed the Michigan Department of Social Services, which, among other things, paid for abortions for poor women.
Marcy Kaptur, a Democratic congresswoman from Toledo and one of Bishop Blair’s flock, got a resolution passed commending nuns for their humble service and sacrifice. “The Vatican’s in another country,” she said. “Maybe people do things differently there. Perhaps the Holy Spirit will intervene.”

As far as I can tell, there is no move to lift Miss Dowd’s membership in the Catholic Church. She is a much better writer than I could ever hope to be, and so I will let her column speak for itself. When I can write as well as Maureen Dowd, which may take another 478 years, I will let you know.
E. E. CARR
October 26, 2009
Essay 415
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Kevin’s commentary: Welcome to 2014! Feels very weird to say it. I wonder when Pop was a young man, what he thought would be the latest year he’d get to see would be. Connor and I were talking about it today — I think I’d be very happy to make it to 2080.
By the end of 2014 I should be near the end of this project. In total there are seven hundred and something essays, and I post at the rate at about five to six per week. Especially if I pick up the pace a little bit then we are looking at a tentative end time of around April 2015. I’m pretty sure that’s a safe bet.
More topically, the Catholic church is full of assholes, our new Pope is a million times better than ol’ Ratty (though he does have his own flaws,) and you can read more of Pop’s views on nuns here.