AP Rehashes Old News To Help Obamacare -UPDATE

Likely Members of the LCWR

The AP headline reads: Catholic nuns urge passage of Obama’s health bill:

Some 60 leaders of religious orders representing 59,000 Catholic nuns Wednesday sent lawmakers a letter urging them to pass the Senate health care bill. It contains restrictions on abortion funding that the bishops say don’t go far enough.

The letter says that “despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions.” The letter says the legislation also will help support pregnant women and “this is the real pro-life stance.”

What the AP is leaving out, Jammie Wearing Fool reveals:

This is a lie, of course, not to mention three month old “news” . . .I guess a rehash from late December is all part of the AP’s advocacy journalism effort on behalf of their bosses in the Democratic Party. Then, as now, Catholic bishops hit back hard.

JWF is quite right that this is old news. If the sisters have reissued their inaccurate letter, the media is rehashing the story as a means of minimizing the recent statement from the Catholic Bishops, that they could not and would not support the HCR bill as it is written. The Bishops took much too long to say it, but in finally doing so, they have been forceful and unambiguous.

Obamacare – like much of Barack Obama’s agenda – depends upon ambiguity and confusion in order to thrive, and so this story has been hauled out as a means of muddying the waters.

The sisters (not nuns) who signed this endorsement are part of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). While they do represent some 59,000 sisters in the US, that should not be taken representative of the feelings of all those sisters. Just as the Firefighters Unions regularly endorse Democrats while the firefighters themselves tend to vote more conservatively, not all of the sisters whose leadership belongs to the LCWR will endorse or agree with this December/March statement.

I wrote a little about the LCWR here, from which I invite you to draw your own conclusions.

These religious are basically what is left of the leftist sisters – the mostly boomer sisters who have issues with the authority of the hierarchy and have come to rather delight in sticking their fingers into the eyes of Catholic orthodoxy. I would never recommend anyone casually passing judgment on their overall faithfulness; that would probably be unwise and uncharitable, too. But I do not think it is inaccurate or uncharitable to suggest that some of these sisters “self-actualized” in 1972, and have decided to stay right there, in that heady chapter, as the narrative has moved on.

Most of the orders these women are attached to are dying out because young Catholics are not attracted to their way.

I know some are up in arms over this story; I had one exceedingly uncharitable poster go so far over the line that I had to ban her, and I rarely do that. Do not be alarmed, and do not allow these inveterate objectors to color your opinion of all religious.

Do they “give scandal” by this letter? Yes, they do. As I’ve said before:

We all make mistakes; we all try, we fail; sometimes we really blow it and disgrace ourselves and our creed and thereby give scandal to the Body of Christ. I know more than a little about that. But we must get up and keep trying – keep trying to see each other within that Body, first and foremost – with ideologies shoved somewhere behind us.

Unfortunately, all of us, no matter our faith or piety, still bring our faulty selves into our faith.

And we’re all “useful idiots’ about some things, at some time or another. Sigh.

UPDATE: And here is what other sisters are saying.