It would take too long to point out all that’s wrong with Laurie Goodstein’s New York Times piece, “U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny,” so I’ll cut to the chase. The last sentence of the article reads:
But the investigation of American nuns surprised many because there was no obvious precipitating cause.
The same article reports that vocations in the group in question are down from 180,000 in 1965 to 60,000 today. It also mentions that “In the last four decades since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, many American nuns stopped wearing religious habits, left convents to live independently … . A few nuns have also been active in organizations that advocate changes in the church like ordaining women and married men as priests.”
A spokesperson for opponents of the apostolic visitation of the sisters, Sister Sandra M. Schneiders, said that the Church’s official visitators should be treated as “uninvited guests who should be received in the parlor, not given the run of the house.”
Even if he had no previous knowledge of the situation, the astute reader would find, in Ms. Goodstein’s own article, several obvious precipitating causes.
