By Beth Quinn

Let me begin by saying that nuns are really none of my business.

I know that.

Anything the Catholic Church does is none of my business because I left it years ago. Over a dog, of all things. When I was 12, a Sunday school nun told me my dead dog couldn’t go to heaven. I decided she could take her heaven and shove it where the sun don’t shine.

I didn’t like that particular nun and formed my opinion of them all, and their Church, and their priests (most of whom were drunks, at least in our parish) based on a very few bad apples.

I’m still not too partial to the Catholic Church in general, for reasons that go far beyond canine afterlife. The Church, I am certain, is not too keen about me, either. Even so, as you might have surmised by now in this lengthy introduction, I’m going to say a few words about nuns today.

And my words are those of praise and righteous anger on their behalf.

Why, you may ask?

Because the Vatican is gunning for them. Rome has ordered an investigation of American nuns, many of whom have joined the real world in the past few decades, since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Many nuns stopped wearing religious habits and left the convents to live independently. They went into new lines of work: academia and other professions; social and political advocacy; and grass-roots organizations that serve the poor and promote spirituality.

What gall those nuns have!

In case you missed it, the New York Times carried a story earlier this month about the Vatican undertaking a modern-day inquisition of these wild and crazy nuns. The  intention, it seems, is to reel them in from the real world and force them back into a more cloistered existence.

Full recommendations will be issued in 2011, when the investigation of these terrible Church outlaws is completed. It is expected by many that they will be ordered back into their convents and religious garb so that they may better serve in their historical role as unpaid laborers for the Church’s male hierarchy.

Speaking as a fellow woman (is that a contradiction in terms?), this is both preposterous and counterproductive. The Catholic Church has been hemorrhaging good nuns (and priests, for that matter) over the last several decades. In 1965, there were 180,000 American nuns. Today, there are 60,000.
 
To be honest, my own vision of good nuns is based on Whoopi Goldberg’s “Sister Act” – they are kind, smart, generous, fearless, slightly rebellious women out on the streets in inner-city neighborhoods. They help save people with humor and grace, with hard work and common sense, with love and piety (the good kind of piety, not the kind practiced by the holier-than-thou members of Congress who keep getting caught with their pants down).

They are, in short, of this world and full-fledged participants in the lives of those they labor to educate, serve and save.

My vision of good nuns also comes from those who teach at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh – Sister Catherine, Sister Peggy, Sister Ann, to name but a few. They challenge students to think well and to form their own conclusions. They guide their charges through the terrible confusion of adolescence.

And they teach them the proper use of the apostrophe, by God.

My favorite nuns like dogs, too. Labrador retrievers have been known to

make their home at the sisters’ house on the Mount college campus, where there is a fine choice of  bed linens and couches for napping. Those dogs are already in heaven.

I don’t speak for such nuns – they are all perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, thank you very much – but I will tell you this. Those folks at the Vatican are picking on the wrong crowd.

I’m happy to report that some of the nation’s nuns are fomenting rebellion. They’re urging their sisters not to cooperate with the Vatican inquisition. “The investigators should be treated as uninvited guests who should be received in the parlor, not given the run of the house,” urged Sister Sandra Schneiders, a professor emerita of New Testament and spirituality in Berkeley.

In some cases, nuns are responding by growing more vocal in their call for changes that would help bring the entire Church into the modern world and strengthen its foundation, such as – gasp! – ordaining women and married men as priests.

This ought to be interesting to watch. My money is on the nuns, and I’ll be cheering them on from the sidelines. So will my dogs.

Even though it’s none of our business, of course.

Beth can be reached at beth@zestoforange.com.

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