Pius XII

Don’t you hate it when the Catholic Church gets all, you know, Catholic? Washington Post “She the People” columnist Melinda Henneberger does. In her April 19 column, “The instructive timing of the Vatican’s crackdown on nuns,” she twisted the Catholic Church’s critical doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) into a story of a power-hungry male Catholic hierarchy attempting to crush the more sophisticated Christian consciences of poor, defenseless nuns.

Henneberger huffed, “After a lengthy investigation by the office formerly known as the Inquisition, Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle has been signed up to oversee a forced reform of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents about 80 percent of the 57,000 Catholic nuns in this country.” Henneberger quoted one of her Catholic friends: “Only do what Jesus told us to do,” in their hospitals, schools, and orphanages, “so no wonder they’re in trouble.”