Catholic Leadership Shifts Right
npr.org
With the Pope’s efforts to reshape the church further right and bring back the Society of Saint Pius X, aka SSPX, it’s no wonder that the Nuns are being censured.
For more on SSPX, see here, here, and here. There’s a strong historic skein of ties between fundamentalist/traditionalist Catholic religion and descendants of Royalist philosophies who are the new right and new fascists in modern day Europe.
The white supremacists over at Gates of Vienna and other extreme right sites choose pseudonyms of old royals and nobles for a reason, even while some of them don’t realize why it’s stylish in Neo Nazi circles.
The kinship between fundamental religion and the philosophical descendants of feudal tribal supremacists has reshaped itself multiple times through the 19th and 20th century, and now they try to reassert themselves once more as they face a 21st century generation so distant from the war of the red and the black that they only know Hollywood’s version.
“The Fortnight for Freedom is becoming a kind of marker of being a good Catholic,” says David Gibson, a Religion News Service reporter who has written several books about the Catholic Church.
“It’s an effort to kind of rally the troops to recreate this unified Catholic community that’s really disappeared in the last 50 years,” he says.
Gibson and others say, increasingly, the church appears to be enforcing a conservative theology. The Vatican has instituted a more traditional liturgy and has openly criticized or censured several liberal theologians in recent months.
And, Gibson notes, the Vatican made two significant announcements in a single week in April: First, that it wants to reconcile with the ultra-conservative Society of St. Pius the X, and secondly, that it will reorganize the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents 80 percent of Catholic sisters.
As justification for the reorganization, the Vatican accused the group of “radical feminism.” It also accused the nuns of failing to emphasize sexual issues like birth control and same-sex marriage as much as their work on poverty and injustice.
Gibson says those two nearly simultaneous announcements are a telling coincidence.
“Rome is doing everything it can to bring a schismatic right-wing group that rejects the reforms of Vatican II back into the fold,” Gibson says, “while at the same time, it’s censuring nuns and theologians who are actually following the spirit of Vatican II.”