I grew up in the same Catholic Church with a lot of family friends who were nuns and very cool people in the 1970s. Many of them were older women, who joined in reaction to nuns in Europe who helped refugees, hid Jews, and really made an important difference. Nuns were protesting nuclear proliferation and getting arrested. They were fighting for civil rights. And while “obedience” was part of the vows, I’m not sure they saw it anymore as complete obedience to the hierarchy or believed that hierarchy would ever be at odds with what they believed was the Work of God.
Not if you’re facing the wrong way.
Nobody expects the Roman Inquisition!
Cleric class spells and blunt weapons, IIRC.
Hm, what about getting declared bishop by that guy who says everybody is a pope? Or pick a new religion and nip into line … I myself am a mail order minister.
I followed this link, and I was convinced it was a Saturday Night Live character possibly played by John Belushi until I Googled her. Jesus.
I think I had her for a teacher in 4th grade…
Unless you speak fluent Latin and tear up when you see a ruler, I doubt that. 
Ego loqui fluens porcum latina, si iuvat.
The nuns I work with kick butt. They are far more often admirable people than your average girl. Like everyone else, they have to reconcile themselves to things they can do nothing about. Those may be different than your things. My guess is that the nuns who didn’t follow the mass exodus into secular life following the feminist movement in the 1970’s mostly stayed because they found their lives as nuns fulfilling and meaningful.
Personally, I find ignorant rants about the Catholic Church as dull as ignorant rants about anything else. Why do a billion people belong to it? Are they all every single one utterly stupid and misguided? Or could there maybe be, gasp, nuance, ambivalence, a mixture of bad and good? Are you really so much smarter than Thomas Aquinas?
I know people who have spent their whole lives in search of a church where they could have a spiritual feeling without anything being said or promoted that they disagreed with in any way. Amazingly enough they are still looking decades later.
I don’t defend the Catholic Church when it does evil, and the present Pope is certainly rather a blight. I trust that the nuns will follow their consciences before they will follow the Pope’s dicta when they are in conflict with each other. In fact I depend on them to do so.
Great post Ulfreida, I really mean that.
And if the nuns need to follow their consciences, they can do like a certain monk once did and say “Here I stand, I can do no other”*
*Okay, that particular line may be apocryphal, but it was what he meant.
Indeed.
It would be nice if some Christians would, you know, read the damn book every now and again.
Any chance you could explain why you have contempt for “social justice” Or maybe at least how you define it? If you’d rather PM me your response, that’d be fine.
Obviously I’m not Crafty, but I feel confident saying that it’s pretty much a case of “Holy crap, all I have going for me is that I’m a straight white guy. If not for bigotry, I’d have nothing!”
If Jeep’s Phoenix started appointing bishops left and right, that might get somebody’s attention.
The obedience in the standard three monacal vows is to the Abbott/Abbess; the Jesuits are the only ones who have a fourth vow of direct obedience to the Pope.
Why that fourth vow? For several reasons, a few off the top of my mind:
They were founded in the middle of the Reformation, when new foundations were being heavily scrutinized and a bunch of guys led by an unordained ex-soldier were extremely suspicious.
Ignatius Loyola knew his boys would have argued theology with God and human laws with the Devil if he didn’t put a stopper on it - here, big stopper: “I promise that whenever the Pope tells me to shut up, I will say ‘yes, Your Holiness’ and then proceed to shut the fuck up”.
He had seen more than his share of troops rising against their Captains led by those Captains’ own Lieutenants; Henry VIII’s CofE was pretty much a religious version, although by no means the only one that had ever been… the history of the Church is full of arguments, more than one of them leading to blows or to outright massacres. By adding that fourth vow, the Jesuits point to the Pope as the ultimate arbiter of any argument one of them is involved in.
We do, it’s the interpretation that gets us in trouble. 
Try interpreting it as modern dance, that is probably pretty harmless. Probably.
Since when are nuns supposed to think for themselves anyway?!
It seems like what the report is saying isn’t “Stop spending time on social justice issues”. It’s “Stop taking positions, like the moral goodness of homosexuality and supporting the ordination of women, that the church has already decided against, and start paying attention to some things the church feels is important, like abortion.” It looks like it actually praised the group for its work with the poor.
Oh no, my mother’s church did that once. It was anything but harmless.