Sisters Are Doing It!

Isn’t it funny that gay men have always resonated with nuns? 

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI), also called Order of Perpetual Indulgence (OPI) in Australia and elsewhere, is a charity, protest, and street performance organization that uses drag  and Catholic imagery to call attention to sexual intolerance and
satirize issues of gender and morality. At their inception in 1979, a
small group of gay men in San Francisco began wearing the attire of nuns in visible situations using high camp make up and crazy names to draw attention to social conflicts and problems in the Castro District.

In the news this week,

The largest organisation of US Catholic nuns has
rejected a Vatican assessment that they had fallen under the sway of
radical feminism.

The assessment said the nuns needed to hand control of their group over to a trio of bishops.

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, whose members represent
about 80% of nuns in the United States, issued a sharp statement
calling the Vatican’s rebuke unsubstantiated and “the result of a flawed
process that lacked transparency.”  

The nuns said the Vatican’s report has “caused scandal and pain
throughout the church community and created greater polarisation.”

Tensions between US nuns and church authorities, both in Rome and in the
United States, have been simmering for decades as nuns have taken an
increasingly independent and outspoken role in politics and social
outreach. 

To bring the sisters into line, the Vatican announced earlier this
spring that it would put the Leadership Conference under the effective
control of three bishops, who would have the power to rewrite its
statutes, its meeting agendas and even its liturgical texts.  

In their response on Friday, announced after three days of discussion
and prayer in Washington, D.C., the conference board called the
punishment “disproportionate” and said it “could compromise their
ability to fulfill their mission.”

You Go Girls!!

This morning, The Vatican  sharply criticized a book on sexuality written
by a prominent American nun, saying it contradicted church teaching on
issues like masturbation, homosexuality and marriage and that its author
had a “defective understanding” of Catholic theology.

The
Vatican’s orthodoxy office said the book, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics
by Sister Margaret Farley, a member of the
Sisters of Mercy religious order and emeritus professor of Christian
ethics at Yale Divinity School, posed “grave harm” to the faithful.