COMMENTARY: Mother Angelica _ no model for women in the church

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ Perhaps it’s time women stop complaining that they have no power in […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Perhaps it’s time women stop complaining that they have no power in the Roman Catholic Church.


After all, the most powerful person in American Catholicism is a woman _ Mother Angelica of the Eternal Word Television Network.

Indeed, the Alabama-based nun is so powerful she can, in effect, depose a cardinal _ Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony _ and thereby exercises a power normally only a pope enjoys. The nun has accused Mahony of heresy and has told his people they must no longer obey him _”zero obedience,”in her words.

She is unhappy over the cardinal’s pastoral letter on reforming the liturgy, a document she believes shows Mahony does not does not believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. The cardinal was not even permitted a trial. Mother decided he was a heretic and that was that.

Moreover, so great is Mother’s power that not a single American bishop has publicly raised his voice in the Mahony’s defense. Presumably, since the cardinal belongs to the bishops'”club,”he has received private expressions of sympathy. But in public, not a word of support.

Presumably the Vatican realizes Cardinal Mahony is orthodox. Was he not, after all, one of the presidents at the recent Synod of the Americas? But so far the Vatican’s silence suggests that it too is afraid to offend Mother.

EWTN is a sectarian operation. It speaks for a tiny faction within American Catholicism which believes it and it alone is orthodox and therefore it has the right to denounce in the most stringent terms anyone and everyone it judges are sufficiently orthodox.

That it is allowed to get away with such behavior seems to indicate EWTN and Mother Angelica do indeed have a monopoly on Catholic truth and that there never was a Second Vatican Council.


Mother is powerful, but she is no model for women aspiring to play a richer role in the life of the church.

Another example of power gone awry can be found in the diocese of Lincoln, Neb., and Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz.

Recently an anonymous columnist in his diocesan newspaper condemned Patricia Crowley as a”degenerate.”If the bishop didn’t write the column himself, he surely read it before it was published.

Mrs. Crowley, along with her husband Patrick, founded the Christian Family Movement a half century ago and has been for a long time a Catholic leader in Chicago and the nation. Her offense? As a member of Pope Paul VI’s birth control commission some decades back she voted with the majority for a change in the teaching that bans the use of artificial contraception.

Her vote was overruled by the pope. However, if men and women who honestly vote their conscience when a pope asks for their opinion are afterwards to be denounced as degenerates who will want to serve on such a commission _ and what does that say about the church?

I wonder if the leaders of the American church realize just how unattractive such phenomena are and how they reinforce the image of Catholicism as an oppressive, inhuman religion.


Certainly, there ought to be free speech in the church. Mother Angelica has the right to proclaim the cardinal a heretic, but unless others stand up for the cardinal, Mother becomes the church. Certainly the bishop of Lincoln has the right to say a woman who has served the church with distinction for much of this half-century is a”degenerate”but if no one says on the record that the bishop has abused his freedom of speech, then he becomes the church.

If this kind of abuse continues unchallenged, why bother spending all that money on evangelization? Who would want to be a part of a church like that?

DEA END GREELEY

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