Jason Horowitz spotlighted Vice President Biden's personal activism for Catholic sisters who dissent from Church teaching in a Friday article for the New York Times. Horowitz trumpeted how Biden sang the praises of "the sisters who remained the target of a Vatican crackdown for their activism on issues like poverty and health care." The writer underlined that "the nation's first Roman Catholic vice president [is] in the middle of a protracted political fight between the pope he admires and the American nuns he reveres."
Horowitz later played up Biden's apparent Catholic credentials as he documented the politician's diner outing with some of the "progressive" nuns:
...Mr. Biden hugged the nuns, spent more than half an hour shaking nearly every hand at the rally and then boarded their bus...the bus dropped him off at the Waveland Cafe, one of Iowa's best-known campaign stops. Mr. Biden entered the diner and...took his seat in the middle of a table full of nuns. They ordered burgers and Reuben sandwiches. Mr. Biden ate French toast with peanut butter and maple syrup. Then, for an hour and a half, he shared his views with them on subjects both theological and temporal, including St. Thomas Aquinas, the political origins of papal infallibility and the fallout from the sexual abuse scandal in the church.
The journalist led his article, "Biden, a Catholic School 'Kid,' Praises Nuns Under Fire From the Vatican," by noting that "at a Vatican meeting a few years ago, Pope Benedict XVI unexpectedly asked Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for some advice. 'You are being entirely too hard on the American nuns,' Mr. Biden offered. 'Lighten up.'" He quickly followed with his "Vatican crackdown for their activism on issues like poverty and health care" line, and continued his slant towards the dissenting sisters as he quoted from the Vice President's Wednesday appearance with the "Nuns on the Bus:"
"You're looking at a kid who had 12 years of Catholic education," Mr. Biden, wearing a white shirt and a red tie, said before a backdrop of the gold-domed Iowa statehouse and a "Nuns on the Bus" coach bus. "I woke up probably every morning saying: 'Yes, Sister; no, Sister; yes, Sister; no, Sister.' I just made it clear, I'm still obedient."
The issue of obedience has weighed on those nuns of late, as the Vatican has deemed the women on stage with the vice president radical feminists who pay too much attention to social justice and too little to promoting church teaching on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
Three paragraphs later, Horowitz began quoting from the head of the "Nuns on the Bus," Sister Simone Campbell, and continued his loaded "crack down" language about the Catholic Church's examination of the sisters' theology and pet causes:
"All politics begin here in Iowa," said Sister Simone Campbell, the head of Network, the group that organized the tour and described Mr. Biden's papal conversations. She expressed delight that the vice president had lent some star power to what she called "our little, teeny event."
In an interview, Sister Campbell said Mr. Biden had expressed a willingness to join the nuns after their first tour in 2012, "Nuns on the Bus: Nuns Drive for Faith, Family and Fairness." That was the year that the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith cracked down on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group that represents about 80 percent of America's 57,000 nuns. The report explicitly cited Sister Campbell's group, which helped lobby for President Obama's health care law, as being a particularly bad influence.
The continuing inquiry has prompted tension in the Vatican.
Many Catholic progressives have looked to Francis, who has stripped some of the American church's most powerful traditionalists of their power in Rome, to end the investigation and affirm that the nuns' work with the poor is in sync with his own priorities. So far, they have been disappointed.
Sister Campbell said Obama administration officials had offered to help make her group's case through diplomatic channels and added that the president's chief of staff, Denis McDonough, a Catholic whose brother is a priest, "is like totally into" the nuns' approach to the faith.
The writer never explained in his article that the Vatican's investigation isn't about their "work with the poor." It's much more about their "approach to the faith," as he put it. The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith's 2012 document pointed out the "manifest problematic statements and serious theological, even doctrinal errors" at the annual meetings of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). For example, one featured speaker at one of the conferences proposed "'moving beyond the Church' or even beyond Jesus."
Horowitz also omitted that another umbrella organization represents the remaining 20 percent of sisters in the U.S. The orthodox congregations in that group also tend to have more young women entering than the orders represented by the LCWR. Oprah Winfrey actually featured one of the orders in the faithful 20 percent – the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist – on three episodes of her program. Another order in the smaller coalition, the Little Sisters of the Poor, is actually fighting ObamaCare's contraception mandate in the courts – another detail that the writer left out of his write-up.
The New York Times journalist never quoted from any of those sisters, nor from supportive Catholics. Instead, he featured Sister Campbell, and later quoted from the author of a book who supports the sisters being investigated by the Vatican:
At the event on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said, "The Nuns on the Bus fought like the devil for health care." He then helped kick off their 10-state tour to increase voter turnout by saying, "I know no group of people who bring a greater sense of justice and passion to what they do."
The prelates of the church, he suggested, would be wise to listen to the nuns, because "guess what, they are more popular than everybody else."
The Holy See's press office declined a request for comment. Privately, Vatican officials' responses to Mr. Biden's appearance ranged from indifference to annoyance.
"There will be people unhappy in the Vatican if this becomes an occasion for the nuns to get a big vote of support from the White House," said Kenneth Briggs, the author of "Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns."
