HuffPo, The View Blame Sexism, Politics for Vatican Denunciation of Nun’s Book

American liberals continue to be clueless (willfully or otherwise) as to the nature and purpose of the Catholic Church and its relationship to its members. The latest proof comes in the case of the Vatican’s condemnation of left-wing nun Margaret Farley’s book, “Just Love, A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” which advocates gay sex and marriage, divorce, and female masturbation. These practices are contrary to Catholic theology as practiced since the beginning of Catholicism. 

But the Church’s reaction to the book is, to liberals, another example of the Vatican stufling women. Here’s how one Sarah O’Leary described it in the Huffington Post: “Sister Margaret A. Farley, a scholarly woman of faith who taught Christian Ethics at Yale University and served as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, is being brought to the woodshed by Rome for penning "Just Love.” How dare she use her God given gifts of cognition to share her educated point of view with the world!” 

O’Leary complained that the Vatican’s “holier than all of us ‘Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith’” didn’t waste its time explaining why Farley’s book is counter to authentic Catholic teaching. “As a free range Catholic,” O’Leary wrote, “I would like to be told why the Church thinks the Sister was off her nut, not simply that she was.” 

Whatever kind of Catholic O’Leary claims to be, she need only open her copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church or numerous other Vatican documents dealing with human sexuality to find out. (But maybe “free-range” Catholics can’t be bothered learning about the orthodoxy they so disdain.) 

O’Leary believes the Church is inherently sexist. “As a Catholic woman, I am keenly interested in what nuns in particular have to say. Their tireless commitment to quiet service in the face of inequality within the Church is an amazement to me and to millions of others whom they have served in the past 2000 or so years.” 

Take O’Leary’s ignorance, arrogance and agenda, multiply it by three and put it on TV, and you get the discussion of Farley’s book on ABC’s June 5 broadcast of “The View.”

Barbara Walters confused Farley’s anti-doctrinal views with an attack on all nuns, complaining: “Why they [the Vatican] seem to be against nuns or criticize them?” Joy Behar gave the predictable liberal answer of sexism, saying, “Because the nuns are acting up, and it's basically a hierarchy of males, and the men are in charge of the church.”

Walters couldn’t imagine anyone finding fault with liberalism. “So if the nun seems more liberal, then that's to be criticized?” 

Co-host Sherri Shepherd offered a tepid defense of the Vatican, explained that opposing an organization one is part of is “dangerous.” But Whoopi Goldberg closed the discussion on a predictably feminist note, saying that women are “Not somebody you own anymore.” 

The media’s defense of nuns who floutthe teachings of the Church by playing the sexism card is nothing new. Previously, the Washington Post turned heresy into a “crackdown on nuns” by a power-hungry Catholic hierarchy, Reuters distorted the Vatican’s treatment of dissenting nuns by ignoring the Vatican’s praise for their social work, and CNN promoted a left-wing nun’s fight against the Vatican but aired no guests from the other side.

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