New York Times Talks About Catholic Sisters and Their Fear of the Vatican

The Anchoress has a major post on this that is very good. See Nuns & Sisters & bad hymns. She has a line here I love (which I bold in Red). Here is a part

A few people yesterday asked me to comment on the NY Times piece, but I really have nothing to say. The only reason this is a story at all is because of a rather notoriously unwelcoming (and yes, paranoid) email (approved-for publication but since pulled) written by the progressive IHM Sister, Sandra M. Schneiders, who wrote of the Visitation:

“I do not put any credence at all in the claim that this is friendly, transparent, aimed to be helpful, etc. It is a hostile move and the conclusions are already in. It is meant to be intimidating… We cannot, of course, keep them from investigating. But we can receive them, politely and kindly, for what they are, uninvited guests who should be received in the parlor, not given the run of the house.”

Sr. Schneiders (whose missive Rod Dreher calls “snotty”) also suggested that the Visitation would be doing “violence” to the “new form of Religious life” she and her aging sisters are “birthing…” All I can say is, they’re having the longest gestation-and-delivery I’ve ever heard of, clocking in at about 40 years, now, and it seems to be a stillbirth. These “progressive” sisters are not attracting new vocations, at all, and their orders are dying out.

I already said my piece on all this ‘way back in March, when I wrote for First Things:
Sister and her associates seem to have birthed a form of Religious Life that no longer receives “everyone as Christ” but parcels out the hospitality like upper-crust dames who will nod at the social climbers (and even condescend to having them to tea, if it will dispense with an obligation) but who will have the place fumigated once the undeserving have finally been shown the door. Sounds like she’ll count the teaspoons, too.…Religious Life for women in the United States will be defined in the next few decades by those orders that manage to thrive in a world where the values of chastity, humility and obedience are misunderstood. What is “new” and “it” at this moment in history – younger women taking back the habit and the breviary (even as they establish a variety of ministries in preaching, in the streets, hospitals, schools, retreat houses and elsewhere) and expressing fealty to Rome – is as counter-cultural and even radical as Schneiders and her now-establishment sisters used to be.
You can read my entire piece here. I thought I was pretty bold, but a few emailer back in March thought I should have been tougher.

Read the whole piece it is good.

I do disagree with the Anchoress when she says this:
Sr. Schneiders, if she is completely unwilling to conform to the stated constitutions or her own order, and the advice of the church she says she loves and serves, will undoubtedly be one of the first in line at the formation of the destined-to-be-created “American Catholic Church” which I suspect we’ll see emerging (and quickly dominating) in schism. As I’ve written elsewhere, that Oprah-approved church (which will very much resemble the imploding Church of England) ........

Who knows it might happen but I doubt it. The people that would lead such a charge are dying out. Plus there is Peter!!! You Can't have a Catholic Church without Peter. Everything else is just a imitation. People I think sense that even the dissenters. That is why many have stayed around though their theology would be much better accepted elsewhere. If they leave then no pays attention to them.