Let’s Talk about Sexism: Women Religious and the Bishops’ Perpetual Self-Indulgence

Barron Mind, A Series of Grievances

I’m trying to take a break, I swear! I have a family! A job! Interests and hobbies! As such, I was initially content to stand by as the (not actual) Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence/LA Dodgers “controversy” circled the drain of terminally online discourse. For one thing, the bad guys lost: the tongue-in-cheek, admittedly bawdy but very much service-minded “Order of queer and trans nuns” is rightly back in as honorees at the Dodgers’ upcoming Pride Night, no matter how much conservative chumps want to cry wolf about it. For another, the whole thing was a fake controversy to begin with, yet another pathetic “gay Hannibal at the gates” Catholic League psyop. This is the same outfit which recently (and laughably) questioned the legality of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s marriage, thus dragging the Church’s already much-sullied reputation through the “what year is this?” mud (swing and a miss with that one, at least per the League’s half-hearted retraction).

But then, as if on cue, Bishop “Tucker Carlson in a Collar” Barron showed up a day late and a brain cell short to stop up this proverbial toilet, continuing his eternal quest for the Holy Grail of throw-your-phone-at-the-wall clickbait. For once, he actually succeeded in claiming his ethereal title as Catholic Twitter’s main character, tweeting a video calling for a boycott (?) of the LA Dodgers and decrying the SPI as an “anti-Catholic hate group.” This guy truly never misses an opportunity to strut his bona fides as the “media savvy cultural evangelist” with zero read on media, culture or the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in this case claiming that “for Catholics, it’s hard to imagine anything more offensive” than the SPI’s pseudo-religious cosplay. Nothing? Not even, gee, I don’t know, the rampant economic injustice, racialized violence, trans-antagonism, misogyny, preventable gun death or environmental degradation plaguing modern society?

Fine, we all know all that hippie-dippie, “Matthew 25” crap’s not really Barron’s bag, and that he’s got a clear ax to grind both in terms of anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy and the Church’s fall from cultural-political grace (in a “God, I hate Minnesota” cry for help, he makes sure to mention that he once threw out the opening pitch for the Dodgers!). Still, irony abounds. A mere ten days earlier, his Wor(L)d on Fire (thanks, Bill!) blog decried “victimhood” as a woefully “progressive” tendency, yet here Barron is engaging in the precise “we will ruin you if you don’t publicly celebrate us” (WOF’s words) brand of “chauvinistic coercion” he projects onto the “woke” left (did you know “anti-Catholicism” is “the last acceptable prejudice” in America???). 

More importantly, it’s all a blatant misdirect. Because when it comes to the targeting of women religious, the biggest threat is, shockingly, not drag queens, but most often their own episcopal conferences.

“Sister” Christians?
It wasn’t too long ago, mind you, that the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith chose to investigate the LCWR, the largest conference of women religious in the United States. Officially commencing in 2009, per America magazine the inquiry followed nearly two decades of “concerns” among “conservative bishops in the United States” around the conference’s accused lack of “conformity to the teachings and discipline of the Church.” A subsequent 2012 doctrinal assessment lobbed charges, among others, of “radical feminism” against the collective, such as “theological interpretations that risk distorting faith in Jesus” and “commentaries on ‘patriarchy’ [which] distort the way in which Jesus has structured sacramental life in the Church” (translation: man-hating, anti-clerical wenchery!). Not for nothin’, at issue also was the LCWR’s evolved attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community, with the report charging that “these sisters collectively take a position not in agreement with the Church’s teaching on human sexuality.” What followed was a “five-year window” of oversight by then Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain, one in a string of BXVI ordinaries installed to combat wayward Left Coast culture.

To be fair, few bishops to my recollection or research expressed much of an opinion one way or the other at the time (I’d say “wisely,” but these guys also weren’t tweeting their brains out back then). Still, it doesn’t take much to glimpse between the withered vines. Take Barron, who in 2016 (about a year after the cessation of Vatican LCWR oversight) urged us all to rethink this whole “women’s empowerment” thing, warning that “many boys and young men feel adrift, afraid that any expression of their own good qualities will be construed as aggressive or insensitive.” One assumes, then, that the effort to rein in these sirens of social justice sat perfectly well with him, especially given (as the doctrinal assessment put it) their “distorted ecclesiological vision” and “scant regard for the role of the Magisterium.” After all, he, too, is at heart just a scared widdle (in this case) voluntary celibate, unmoored from his safe space of unquestioned, “yes, Father” subservience and adulation—both within the Church and without.

Yet now he and his fellow firebrand clerical charlatans are somehow tripping over their albs in defense of these Holy women of God. This includes, preposterously, partisan prize(for the perfect)fighter Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, as well as “how is he still a” Bishop Joseph Strickland, who co-signed both Barron’s video and Dis-Cordileone’s tweeted gripe for over the SPI’s alleged “desecration and anti-Catholicism.” If I were a skeptic, I might think this is all just a convenient opportunity for the latter to go after the gays yet again (and again and again and again). After all, while Cordileone’s plaudits for women religious (who “devote themselves to serving others selflessly”) are admirable on their face, I don’t seem to recall such fawning prose while these same women were under attack from the very seats of power at which he sits.

There’s No Crying in Baseball!
The issue for these Bishops obviously isn’t upholding sisters as servants of God, but rather as cultural signifiers of the Church writ large—and, by extension, their own ordained authority. Which is exactly the type of self-serving, “first shall actually be first” behavior the SPI is skewering: not the humble witness of women religious, but broader institutions and their anti-Reign marginalization of vulnerable groups (including the LGBTQ+ community to which they themselves belong). That’s how one SPI member puts it, at least. Again, per America, “a member who goes by the drag name Sister Roma” says the group “shed[s] light on the hypocrisy of all organized religion, and the way that people interpret the teachings, the word, and use it as a weapon to justify their own homophobia, their own transphobia, their own hate” (Word on Fire fan, I presume?).

Thankfully, at least some (and I’d imagine many) actual sisters understand this perfectly well. In that same America article, Holy Names Sister Jo’Ann De Quattro affirmed her admiration for SPI’s work, labeling their efforts to “visit the sick,” “feed the hungry” and “clothe the naked” as “corporal works of mercy.” In terms of their costumes and performances, she is more ambivalent, but at least appreciates the good fundraising and mobilization sense behind it (“individuals rallying people around a cause do whatever they can to attract attention and donors”). At 84 years old, I’d imagine she’s also developed a fairly thick skin: after all, the image of nuns in habits has been used for comedic effect is ubiquitous in popular culture, in everything from the Blues Brothers to Sister Act to Late Night Catechism, all of which tend to be taken in relatively good humor. 

Which is partly what makes the “outcry” so farcical. We all know the real issue here is the unapologetic queerness of it all—and the fact that, given the glaring hypocrisy in how so many self-described disciples of Jesus actually treat the vulnerable in which he resides, the punch actually lands. De Quattro, of course, would get this. A “retired activist,” she “protested against U.S. military involvement in Central America in the 1980s, fought the death penalty in California and advocated for a stronger social safety net for Californians.” In other words, she’s exactly the kind of sister which raises the ire of anti-Vatican II, “modernity took my toys away” bishops like Barron and Cordileone, and spurred that fully unwarranted LCWR investigation. 

Stolen Valor
To be fair, presumably not all sisters feel the same way. Gail DeGeorge, the (lay) editor of Global Sisters Report, penned a passionate upbraiding of both the SPI and the LA Dodgers for (twice) deciding to welcome them at Pride Night. While DeGeorge doesn’t “presume to speak for Catholic sisters,” she has reported on them for the past seven years, and, as such, says she’s “had enough” with what she considers blatant disrespect. In her view, the Dodgers have “gone too far,” choosing “to honor an organization that since 1979 has based its existence, its very identity and so-called ‘acts’ on disparaging women who dedicate their lives to serving others.” 

Look, I get it. I’ve written myself in admiration of the brave witness of women religious, and wholeheartedly agree that they “do more to assist those in marginalized communities than many realize.” But, as I’ve also noted, they do so often in necessary subversion of or opposition to bishops who work to constrain, undermine and punish their audacious Gospel witness. DeGeorge, I6’m sure, knows this, perhaps better than anyone outside of women religious themselves. An offshoot of the National Catholic Reporter, GSR was officially founded in April 2014, two years to the month after the release of that CDF assessment—and, as many will recall, largely as a presumed rebuttal. In addition to lifting up the good works of women religious across the world, the publication has also covered said investigation and fallout extensively. Cardinal Sean O’Malley, they reported, called the investigation “a disaster” which “looked like a crackdown from men at the Vatican”; their reporting on aftershock inquiries cited the dissonance between the USCCB’s abortion obsession and sisters’ more sympathetic focus “on issues like food, water and shelter for marginalized populations”; they provided extensive coverage of the Vatican’s apostolic visitation via a feature series. The list goes on.

All of which is exactly why it was so unfortunate to see GSR take the episcopal bait. Better Call Salvatore and his League of Extra-Ornery Gentleman are pitting the two groups against each other, both of which they openly disdain and marginalize. They are, quite bluntly, profaning the sacred, leveraging the sisters’ deservedly and comparatively strong reputation against the suffering and the oppressed groups the SPI represents and serves. Just as they do with the Eucharist itself, all in service of a cultural crusade which, to evoke the great Alan Moore, is “wildly ahistoric, homophobic and just completely misguided.”

A History of Silence
That war rages on. Earlier this year, Portland Archbishop and ageless vampiric council member Alexander Sample released “A Catholic Response to Gender Identity Theory,” which instructs that all Catholic school students should “participate in sports and use names, pronouns, attire and bathrooms that correspond to their sex assigned at birth.” As I’ve noted before, there is  highly selective (at best) doctrinal underpinning and zero scientific basis for such absolutist policies, a sentiment echoed by Dr. SimonMary Asese Aihiokhai of the University of Portland, who charges that the document shows a “disregard” for the interdisciplinary study of gender identity issues and, in fact, any “findings outside of the literal reading of the Genesis account.” More importantly, though, such exclusionary practices increase suicidality among transgender teens. But then, protecting children seems to be of little concern to the Catholic right flank and, let’s be honest, much of the hierarchy.

Again, take Barron. His video lament of the Dodgers’ SPI reversal dropped just one day after the Illinois Attorney General released a report documenting the underreporting of sexual abuse by the state’s six Roman Catholic dioceses. Barron’s “last acceptable form” lamentation crassly parrots the “look anywhere but here” online deflections over that AG investigation (“What about public school teachers, huh? HUH!?”), as if no neutral observer would investigate an institution with a proven history of abuse and cover up and which also happens to run the largest private elementary school system in the country. In a subsequent tweet responding to the Dodgers’ promotion of a “Christian Faith and Family Day” (the exact sort of public piety the Christian right is always demanding), he fully co-opts the language of victim-survivor advocacy. “Not enough,” he screeches, “If you really want to reach out to Christians [re: ‘victims’], don’t celebrate anti-Christian hate groups [re: ‘abusers’].” 

Given Barron’s own disreputable history with excusing sexual misconduct, I presume this is language he’s heard before. Just as he’s heard Jesus’ admonishment to remove the wooden beam from your own eye before removing the splinter in your brother’s—or, in this case, sister in drag’s. And, on that front, the Church has a few Bishop-sized, abuse-shaped battering rams to which it might well attend.

G. Fault