{"id":135,"date":"2012-06-06T10:18:23","date_gmt":"2012-06-06T16:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/?p=135"},"modified":"2016-05-02T11:09:17","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T17:09:17","slug":"on-fire-st-barbara-modowd-sr-farley-and-the-grand-inquisitor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/06\/on-fire-st-barbara-modowd-sr-farley-and-the-grand-inquisitor.html","title":{"rendered":"On Fire: St Barbara, MoDowd, Sr Farley and the Grand Inquisitor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The day began with fire.<\/p>\n

I smelled smoke at 4 a.m. and walked outside to see billowing grey clouds reflecting two-story flames and full of lightning flashes, just half a block away. Burned power lines cracked like rifleshot. Sparks and pieces of burning roof tar paper sailed toward me on the wind. I swear I saw a bird on fire, furiously beating wings of flame. In the predawn darkness, I prayed a storm novena (9 consecutive seconds of very intense prayer, a devotion I learned from my ex-mother-in-law) to St Barbara, invoked against fire and lightning and patroness of artillerymen.<\/p>\n

Apocalypse: It\u2019s what\u2019s for breakfast. The fire\u2014of \u201csuspicious origin,\u201d consuming one of the vacant homes my real-life urban neighborhood has too many of\u2014only added to my sense of unease at starting my first day in this new virtual neighborhood. Patheos is so . . . big<\/em>, so full of bloggers with things to say. My mind, this morning, was a smoke-damaged blank. I had blogoraphobia. Now that I\u2019m here, would I ever have anything to post about?<\/p>\n

Praise God, I had reckoned without Maureen Dowd. I missed her latest rant<\/a><\/strong> yesterday in the flurry of blog-moving, but there she was, waiting for me today\u2014hair as red as flame, breathing out self-righteousness like choking smoke, with the Vatican in her artillery crosshairs. Mo, who never met a Church leader she didn\u2019t loathe, felt it necessary to remind her readers yet again that THE CHURCH HATES WOMEN<\/strong>. (I\u2019d say \u201cemphasis mine,\u201d but she really does write at that volume.) Yesterday\u2019s entry focused on the Notification<\/a><\/strong> issued this week by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith taking issue with Just Love<\/em>, a 2006 book on sexual ethics by Sr Margaret Farley. Like many in the popular press, Mo sees this as Crackdown on Nuns: The Sequel<\/em>. Or maybe War on Women, Part 666:<\/em><\/p>\n

Just the latest chapter in the Vatican\u2019s thuggish crusade to push American nuns \u2014 and all Catholic women \u2014 back into moldy subservience.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thuggish crusade! Moldy subservience! I wonder sometimes why she doesn\u2019t simply self-destruct in her Tasmanian Devil hissing and spinning, but Mo is not all wrong about the link between Rome\u2019s criticisms of positions taken by the LCWR\u2019s leadership and this recent critique of Sr Farley\u2019s book. There\u2019s a tipoff to that connection in the CDF\u2019s letter to Sr Farley\u2019s religious superior, to whom the Notification criticizing Just Love<\/em> was addressed:<\/p>\n

In closing, I call attention to the important responsibility of a Major Superior of Religious to oversee the publications of the members of the Institute, so as to ensure that these publications are in conformity with the Magisterium of the Church (cf. Code of Canon Law<\/em>, Can. 832).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So no, the timing is not coincidental. The US title of this drama may be Crackdown on Nuns: The Sequel<\/em>, but in Rome it\u2019s known as What in Hell Are These People Thinking? (Again)<\/em>. The plot of this drama might best be summed up with a line stolen from another movie about systems and the people who buck them: \u201cWhat we\u2019ve got here is a failure to communicate.\u201d On one side, you\u2019ve got Catholic feminist academia, claiming the rights of free inquiry. On the other, you\u2019ve got the head office of a multinational wondering why the US franchise can\u2019t keep its direct reports in line.\u00a0(She: I just think we should give masturbation, gay marriage, remarriage after divorce, and contraception a chance. Is that so wrong? He: Yes. Now shut up.)<\/em> Both leave lots to be desired, and as moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt so convincingly argues<\/a><\/strong> about our divided and divisive world, neither is capable of even comprehending the other side any more. When Cardinal Levada, the head of the CDF, speaks, Sr Farley hears the\u00a0wah-WAH-wah<\/em> babbling of the adults in the Charlie Brown movies, and vice versa.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s the smoke, but I just can\u2019t buy that either of these positions\u2014wrongheaded, ineffective, even scandalous though they very well may be seen to be\u2014is inherently evil. Both Cardinal Levada and Sr Farley are doing, I am certain, what they believe is in the best interests of the Church and the Gospel she proclaims.<\/p>\n

I served with Cardinal Levada, a number of years ago, on the USCCB\u2019s Communications Committee. At that time he was newly returned to the US from a stint as then-Cardinal Ratzinger\u2019s assistant at the CDF. One night during a Committee dinner, someone asked then-Bishop Levada what he had liked most about his time in Rome. With a sincerely rapturous smile, he responded that he had loved reading the writings of theologians with a red pen in hand, circling potentially heretical statements to forward to his boss. There was a somewhat stunned silence\u2014we had expected descriptions of favorite churches and trattorias, I guess\u2014but there was simply no denying that this was a man who knew what color his parachute was. I could sympathize; I tend to approach a lot of life with a red pen in hand, myself. And when Cardinal Levada was appointed to succeed the Holy Father in the Holy Office, I was happy for him in an odd sort of way.<\/p>\n

Being the Grand Inquisitor is a really crappy job, but somebody (as long as this broken world offers up stuff to inquizz) has to do it. Cardinal Levada is doing it with relish\u2014tone-deaf relish, for sure, but not, I think, Snidely Whiplash mustache-twirling. And while I never knew him to be particularly comfortable in the company of women, I don\u2019t think his red pen is gender-specific (which is another way of saying, Be warned, ye Jesuits<\/em>).<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know Sr Farley, but her curriculum vitae and the respect she has earned from peers and students leads me to believe she does what she does with equal sincerity and relish\u2014and similar quantities of tone deafness.<\/p>\n

If only we\u2014Catholics ourselves, the orthodox and the MoDowdy, and the hysterical media\u2014didn\u2019t feel the need to haul out the artillery first and ask questions later, to throw more fuel on a fire whose origins are not at all suspicious, having been set by the eternal arsonist to scorch the earth he envies. If only we could sit down and reason together, theologian and inquisitor, nun and bishop, woman and man, Catholic and Catholic, Church and world. If only we could see and hear one another through the smoke. \u201cIf only,\u201d as Maureen Dowd writes in a wholly other context, \u201cthe Church could muster that kind of clarity\u201d\u2014we might find we had so much to say to one another, so much to learn from one another, once the smoke has cleared.<\/p>\n

Santa Barbara, ora pro nobis!<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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