JESUIT SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY AND VATICAN

MY BOYFRIEND’S BAAAACK

I don’t usually troll the blog sites ecclesiastic, but somebody sent something along that struck me as significant.

An “influential American nun” has apparently urged her sistern to the barricades against an invasion by foreign agents: the Vatican is making an inspection tour of American convents.

We have come soooo far. A hundred-and-fifty years ago, the good Catholic sisters were in danger of Nativist and Know-Nothing mobs assaulting them in their convents in the name of patriotic and religious purity – as happened at the Ursuline convent near Boston.

Now their professional – not to say spiritual – descendants are preparing to repel boarders from the Vatican, that place in Rome that could reasonably be described as their corporate HQ – y’know, where the Pope lives and such. It may seem strange, the nuns sort of – ummmm – working for the Vatican and all, but let us judge not lest we be judged, as Lincoln wisely advised, taking his own cue from that big Book with which the nuns themselves even nowadays are supposedly professionally familiar.

One imagines some sort of Merovingian military encampment that refuses an inspection tour by the Royal command staff. Perhaps the American sistern have – in the polite military argot – ‘been left on patrol too long’.

More likely – again in the polite argot of the Raj – the local garrisons have ‘gone native’. Don’t forget, in that storied decade now called ‘the Sixties’, in the same year that LBJ and MLK were blindsided by the ‘revolutionary’ second phase of ‘liberation’, the Roman Catholic Church completed its remarkable four-year Second Vatican Council, called to order by good Pope John in order to ‘open the windows’ to ‘let in some fresh air’.

The Sixties, alas, were a windy decade indeed; Mao was demanding that a hundred flowers bloom over on the other end of Eurasia, the Soviets had just shown Nikita Khrushchev the door for embarrassing them in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the British Raj was in the final processes of divesting itself of its imperial possessions, and Betty Friedan – in the same year as the Council ended and the Voting Rights Act was signed into law (celebrated forthwith by the Watts riots) – had concluded that the American home, family, and indeed marriage itself were for women pretty much the functional equivalent of “Dachau”.

Ah, those were the days, my friend; we thought they’d never end ... and they haven’t. Indeed, over here at least, they have been erected into a Plan (not to say a coherent and effective national policy).

Which brings the readership back to the good sisters. One Sister Sandra Schneiders is urging “non-violent resistance”, which I imagine rules out anything so strenuous as burning herself in public in the manner of that awesomely dedicated Vietnamese bonze who wished to emphasize his protest against the fighting in Vietnam – into which American ‘advisers’ were now being sent in combat formations.

As reason therefor, affiant doth affide that the Apostolic visitation – that’s the technical term for it – will be “aggressive and dishonest”. Call me crazy, but it sounds a lot like the now-former apparatchiks of the Bushist Imperium and their running-dog lackeys piously bleating that at this point any investigation into their doings and writings leading up to deceitful and aggressive war, torture, and the insidious undermining of civil liberties and the Constitution generally … would be ‘partisan’ and no doubt ‘aggressive’ and ‘dishonest’. And I don’t suppose Al Capone would have said any differently if he had thought to issue a press statement as to his opinion of local and federal cops visiting his stills and delivery trucks with axes and sledgehammers. Joe Kennedy, that sly fox, never let himself get too worked up over it – and proved a faithful and competent supplier of hooch and booze unto the very end, for which, verily, he has had his reward.

So, anyhoo, in a stunningly sexist regression into stereotype, she recommends – wait for it – the silent treatment. “We can receive them politely and kindly, for what they are, uninvited guests who should be received in the parlor, not given the run of the house. When people ask questions they shouldn’t ask, the questions should be answered accordingly.” I sort of imagined the same scenario might play out if Obama sent a ‘visitation’ team from the White House to Guantanamo. But nuns – against the Vatican? Who do they think owns “the house”?

Gone native indeed. The good Sister “teaches” at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley - Berserkistan to borrow a phrase from “Doonesbury”. I hope she’s not teaching real-estate law. Most likely, though, it’s something to do with ‘liberation’. As in – you’re not really liberated until you can do what you frakking feel like doing. That is soooo ‘native’, so ‘American’ nowadays. The Advocacies seek and demand such ‘liberation’ and – as God knoweth full well – Bush actually achieved it in his invasion of Iraq. That worked so well.

She belongs to a religious order entitled “The Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary”. Whatever the ‘servant’ attaches to, it is apparently not the Vatican or the Pope. Regardless of what the paperwork says. And her vow formula. Again, it’s eerily like the Bush era apparatchik bleat: that they took an oath to serve Bush, not to waste time with the Constitution and stuff. (Actually of course, it was immediately after the death of von Hindenburg that Hitler made the armed forces take an oath not to the nation or to the Weimar Constitution, but to him personally – and that was a huge warning flag.)

So the nuns are nuns – and Servants to boot – but just not of the Pope or “the Vatican”. They serve ‘liberation’ … somehow. That’s verrry American. Gone native, indeed.

As is true of the Jesuits, such a winsome vagueness enables them to enjoy all the perks without the messy constrictions of any particular or actual authority to which they might actually have to answer and conform themselves. What’s not to like?

She asserts that “most women’s religious orders have found an entirely new way of living their vocations since Vatican II”. As is true with any Advocacy press release, the simplest and apparently clearest statements contain abysses of hidden meaning. “An entirely new way of living their vocations” makes me think that they’re in there saying Masses for themselves, perhaps ‘ordaining’ one of their more popular sistern to do the ‘male’ chores, and generally living the damp-dream of doing it all without ‘men’ – which may or may not exclude their Jesuit acquaintances. Since “full equality” – that lovely phrase – most likely does not include the need for abortion-on-demand, they have substituted ‘ordination’ as their ticket to the bright sunlit uplands of “full equality”. Maybe they’ve even consecrated themselves a bishop-ess.

For that matter, is it prudent to presume that they still worship a ‘male sky-God’?

Yup – I can see where they are no happier to have inquiring visitors than Cheney when he was Veep.

“So let’s be what we are” she exhorts. I thought that’s what the “Sisters Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary” were all about. Or, given the elasticity of definitions in this Advocacy Age, who knows how she has packed that bag? Servant-hood as not-serving … that has an unmistakable pomo and PC ring to it.

She refuses to take seriously a conference at Stonehill College last year where a Cardinal from Rome opined that “some orders seemed to have ‘simply acquiesced in the disappearance of religious life or at least of their communities'”. She pooh-poohs it: “that conference was just a pep rally for those convinced that they are right and can only be right if people not like them are wrong”. Whew.

So since her way is – ummm – ‘different’, then in the Advocacy Age it must be ‘right’, and anybody who isn’t so sure is a fuddy-duddy and any time those types gather together they’re just having a pep rally. As opposed, of course, to when her pals get together, in which case it is a gathering of the True Remnant and the Children of Prophecy. Yah.

So I’m guessing that the sistern having been living large in a Xena (and Gabby) sorta way, and no Hercules needed, thank yew very much. In fact, the Children of Xena probably don’t need ‘the gods’ either.

I point out that Identity Politics, of which "ideological feminism" (the acute phrase coined by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young in their book "Spreading Misandry") is a prime instance, operates on the same dynamics as 'communism' and has the same effect: it replaces all other possible embodiments of one's 'identity' with the one "Identity" - in communism it was 'the worker' and in "ideological feminism" it is 'the woman'. *

This overriding Identity is corrosive to all other identities - as an individual, as a spouse, as a family member, as a citizen. Worse, being as Flattened and this-worldly as communist materialism, there is no option for the identity of 'spirit', 'soul', or even religion (unless it be the religion based on the Identity itself).

Hence, again so eerily and ominously similar to the Beltway arguments around Scooter Libby and now around the perpetrators of war, torture, and corruption of the Constitution, the sistern consider it an outrage that they be held to any account whatsoever - what right does the 'old' and 'traditional' and 'patriarchal' system have to judge us? Do they know who we are? (The answer to this last question - for both communists and Identistes - is: we are the wave of the inevitable future - and, implicitly - you are not.)

And what are her students graduating with? What sort of knowledge has been crammed into their aspiring brains? I think it’s gone beyond the old fatal flaw of the old Liberal Protestantism: it’s not just a dulling-down of the ‘traditional’ Christian beliefs until they have no edge to cut delicate sensibilities of the Modern Age. No, it’s beyond that now; it’s a replacement of ‘traditional’ Christianity with something else altogether.

Like America without all those icky ‘traditions’ like the Constitution, the private life of individuals, and officials who interpret their own oaths and determine their own ‘responsibility’.

Native, indeed.

NOTES

*As always, when I refer to feminism or to 'the woman' I am not referring to all females or their concerns, but only to the icons and conceptual shibboleths erected by the feminist Advocacy, which - let it be reme4mberd - cannot to be automatically equated with all females or all actual women or with the interests. This is true when I speak of any of the Identities' Advocacies.

**In a now-classic indicator that 'truth' was 'told' when it shouldn't have been, the far Left 'National Catholic Reporter', where the article was originally published, has suddenly taken it down from its site (as of 3/10, anyway). In a 'revolution' or a dictatorship, 'truth' is only what the elite thinks is good for the people to hear - as both Trotsky and Goebbels said. It's odd that Advocacies that claim "merely" to be supporting the actualization of long-standing 'truth' yet oppose 'truth-telling'. In this, the Advocacies showed Reagan the way to proceed, as is reflected in his marvelously revealing statement "Facts are stupid things", a corruption of the original "Facts are stubborn things". Of course, a couple-three decades later the turkeys spawned by such mindless and cocky cackling have now come home to roost.