The Nature of Things

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church is a paternalistic and misogynistic medieval institution that believes it is infallible and all-powerful. It exists in the alternate universe of the fabulously wealthy and self-deluded that has little to do with the real world that the rest of us live in. The hierarchy shows no understanding of or empathy for the lives and struggles of real people. There is, however, a segment of the Catholic Church that stands with common people and that spends every day on the front line struggling right along with them. That would be Catholic nuns. These women, with their devotion to being living examples of the gospel of Jesus , have earned the admiration even of people like myself who view the Catholic Church as an anachronism. It would stand to reason then that these same nuns would not be in the good graces of the hierarchy of a church which views women, in general, with a jaundiced eye, the instigators of sin in the world. In recent years, American nuns esp...

The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia. - New York Times story A lot of the reading I've been doing this summer has been set in the Middle Ages, particularly in the 12th century and 14th - 15th centuries. One of the things that has struck me about all of the books I have read is the attitude toward women during these periods. That attitude could be pretty well summed up by saying that the prevailing opinion seems to have been that women were less than zero. The average woman had no power and was completely at the mercy of men. If she was lucky enough to have a man who valued and respected her, she was lucky indeed, but if she lost him, she lost everything. With attitudes like that, I guess it should be no surprise to us that an institution of the Middle Ages like the Catholic Church would still retai...