Commentary
By Gary Kopycinski
Dominicans taught me in grade school, and I work for Dominicans now.
These women are amazing.
There are stories I cannot tell you right now. Stories of sisters caught up in excruciating circumstances, literally seeing their lives on the line, literally seeing people slaughtered before them.
In countries, all over the world.
These women have amazing stories to tell.
The Vatican, that place so, so far away, and so, so isolated from the rest of the world, wants these women to curtail their devotion to those living in poverty, and direct more of their efforts to curtailing the (supposed) evils of gay marriage and contraception.
Our bishops are lost, I fear.
Lost.
We need to support our Catholic Sisters.
All of us, regardless of denomination. Regardless of faith.
These amazing women have been keeping the Gospel for millenia. While our bishops studied law. While our bishops worked to protect themselves, and the priests who sinned gravely.
These amazing women have kept alive the teachings of Christ. And they deserve more, far more, than the insulting treatment they’re receiving from the United States Catholic Council of Bishops.
The USCCB could, and should, learn a lot from these women.
It is typical of the pope’s sense of priorities that, at the very time when he is quashing an independent spirit in the church’s women, he is negotiating a welcome back to priests who left the church in protest at the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. These men, with their own dissident bishop, Marcel Lefebvre, formed the Society of Saint Pius X—the Pius whose Secretariat of State had a monsignor (Umberto Benigni) who promoted the Protocols of the Elder of Zion. Pope Benedict has already lifted the excommunication of four bishops in the Society of Saint Pius X, including that of Richard Williamson, who is a holocaust denier. Now a return of the whole body is being negotiated.
The American bishops are wrong.
Pittsburgh Bishop Dave ‘to Hell with you‘ Zubik, a man I admired when he was a priest and my spirtual director, is wrong as well.
Horribly, terribly wrong.
Why can’t he see this? Why is he so obtuse?
Because he’s a man who thinks that maybe, perhaps, one day, he will be pope?
And all will bow down?
Who knows?
We need our sisters.
All of them.
We Catholics need them today, yesterday, and tomorrow.
To keep us from the instanity of power.
To keep us focused on the Gospel.
The poor.
Those in poverty.
Those Christ really cared about.
Jesus’ motto might well have been, "To Hell With Power. Embrace the Poor."
Bishop Zubik, and others like him, seem to be lost among those seeking the power.
The Gospel requires understanding.
