ChiTrib Blogger: Do Pro-Abortion Nuns 'Strengthen the Church'?

In what is easily the dopiest question I've read from a religion blogger in a while, Chicago Tribune's Manya Brachear closed her  December 8 The Seeker blog post by asking readers if "dissenters" like pro-choice nun Sister Donna Quinn of Chicago "strengthen the church." In November, Quinn went public with news that she has "been rebuked for escorting patients into a Hinsdale clinic that provides abortions."

In "Pro-choice nun still fighting for women's care," Brachear explained how Quinn "is not backing down from her support of abortion rights, applauding the defeat of an amendment today that would have added restrictions to the health care bill for women seeking abortions."

Oh, it gets worse. Quinn apparently used the Virgin Mary as cover for sanctifying her pro-abortion views:

Citing a poem about the Virgin Mary, Quinn noted the providential date of the amendment’s defeat.

“I was reminded of being with men and women from the Unitarian faith tradition last year as they celebrated Mary who by her assent, they believed, was one of the first women in the New Testament to express Choice,” Quinn said.

Far from being a mere religious disagreement, that quote shows just how dangerously askew of orthodoxy Quinn's theology is, something a religion reporter like Brachear should have clued in on. Couple that with her active role in escorting women seeking abortions into abortion clinics, it's painfully obvious that Quinn is unrepentent in her disregard with church teaching on the sanctity of unborn life and hence if anything weakening the church as long as she goes undisciplined for further transgressions.

Quinn is hardly an average Jane laywoman in the pews. She did, after all, take vows of obedience to the Church, which she most certainly knows to view as a grave moral evil the aborting of unborn children.

And yet out of all this Brachear puts the Church on the defensive?