Tag: Religious Women

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Lesbian Nuns and gay Priests: From The Late Late Show to Maynooth

By Páraic Kerrigan

A PhD Candidate in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University, suggests the recent Maynooth ‘scandal’ implies that some have not kept pace with changing attitudes to sexuality in wider Irish society.

Maynooth seminary

THE recent Maynooth ‘scandals’, to use the convenient media shorthand, seems to suggest that despite the major progressions surrounding LGBT rights in Ireland some attitudes remain relatively unchanged.

In particular, this remains the case for the more conservative pockets of Irish society and especially the Catholic Church.

Ireland and the Church has been subject to many sex scandals since the early 1990s but it appears that when it comes to members of our clergy and our convents being gay, (or straight for that matter) well, then all hats, or soutanes, are off.

We only have to look to an episode of The Late Late Show from a little over thirty years ago to see the moral panic that can be generated on the acknowledgement that priests and nuns can have a sexuality too.

On the release of their book, Breaking Silence: Lesbian Nuns on Convent Sexuality, Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan appeared on The Late Late Show to promote its release in Ireland.

Both Manahan and Curb were ex-nuns and lesbians who had risen to notoriety following the book’s release in the US.

Controversially, the publication contained within it interviews with women who entered convent life, only to later discover that they were lesbians.

Prior to its launch in Ireland, Nell McCafferty correctly predicted the book was ‘enough to create furore and a minor furore there will no doubt be’.

Immediately upon its release, a text acknowledging that nuns also have sexual inhibitions, and gay ones at that, was considered so heinous that the Irish customs authorities seized 1,500 copies on its arrival to the island.

It wasn’t just the customs authorities that were so scandalised. Middle Ireland wanted to have their say too.

In fact, they were so infuriated by both Curb and Manahan, that they mobilised themselves into a picket and protested outside of the Buswells Hotel on Molesworth Street, where the pair had been staying.

When The Late Late Show announced in the RTÉ Guide that same week that the ex-nuns would be making an appearance on that Saturday’s edition of the show, the telephone switchboards at RTÉ lit up with protest calls.

On the night of the broadcast itself, the shocked and appalled members of conservative Catholic Ireland held a vigil outside of the Montrose studios, where they erected a statue of the Virgin Mary, while being led by a priest through decades of the rosary as he was amplified from an ice-cream van on site.

Despite the furore caused during the week, the interview with the nuns ended up being not all that scandalous.

Despite getting one of the highest audience figures for any Irish TV show during the 1980s, the interview was fairly tame by Late Late standards.

Even Sr. Maura, an Irish nun from the Daughters of Sion who was on the panel that night, made the rather progressive comment reminding the Irish audience that the clergy don’t ‘leave their sexuality at the door’ when they enter religious life.

 

“Strange goings on” and “a quarrelsome” atmosphere led to Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin’s decision.

Perhaps it was this attitude that may have benefitted Archbishop Martin in his recent press statements on ‘the strange goings-ons’ at Maynooth.

Despite major changes to public attitudes since 1985 in wider Irish society, however, homosexuality is still clearly viewed as a problem by the church.

Looking at Late Late incident and the Maynooth story in tandem highlights that the church’s attitude to homosexuality has not changed but at least Ireland’s Catholic elite have not yet descended on St. Patrick’s seminary at Maynooth with an ice-cream van and a statue of the Blessed Virgin.

Complete Article HERE!

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Francis agrees to possibility of setting up commission to study women deacons in early Church

In an audience with female religious superiors, the Pope has agreed to back the establishment of a commission to study women deacons in the early Church. Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini proposed such a move back in the 90’s. The Italian diocese of Padua, began experimenting some time ago

The female diaconate: a possibility for today?
The female diaconate: a possibility for today?

By ANDREA TORNIELLI

Pope Francis has said he wants the study of the female diaconate in the early Church to resume. He talked about this during his audience with the International Union of Superiors General (UISG), whom he received in the Vatican. This is not a new question and was in fact mentioned again recently. After the clear message John Paul II sent out when he reacted to the Anglicans’ open approach by issuing the “Ordinatio Sacerdotalis” letter (1994), categorically rejecting the possibility of ordination for women in the Catholic Church, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini spoke of the possibility of studying the institution of the female diaconate, which is not mentioned in the papal document. The Archbishop of Milan at the time said: “There have been female deacons in the Church in the past, we could consider this possibility.” Some early Church historians pointed out that women were admitted to a specific diaconal service of charity which differs from today’s concept of the diaconate as the first step towards priesthood.

During the question and answer session that took place during the meeting, the Pope was asked, amongst other things, why the Church excludes women from the diaconate. Women religious told the Pope that women served as deacons in the early Church and asked: “Why not construct an official commission that might study the question?” The Pope responded that he had spoken about the matter once some years ago with a “good, wise professor” who had studied the use of female deacons in the early centuries of the Church. Francis said it remained unclear to him what role such deacons had. “It was a bit obscure,” said Francis. “What was the role of the deaconess in that time?” “Constituting an official commission that might study the question?” the pontiff asked aloud. “I believe yes. It would do good for the church to clarify this point. I am in agreement. I will speak to do something like this.”

“I accept,” the pope said later. “It seems useful to me to have a commission that would clarify this well.”

According to an ancient tradition, deacons were in fact ordained “not to the priesthood but to the ministry”. There is some historical evidence of the presence of female deacons both in the western and eastern Church. This evidence relates also to liturgical ordination rites as well. What needs to be looked into further, is what type of ministerial figures they were, what their roles within the community were. The magisterium considers the diaconate as the first step in the ordained ministry and reserves this function as well as that of the presbyterate and the episcopate to men.

By announcing his approval of the setting up of a study commission on the female diaconate in the early Church, Francis intends to verify whether and how this form of service can be brought up to date, believing that the role of the permanent female deacon could be reinstituted in the modern day. In the early days of Christianity females deacons did exist (St. Paul mentions them) and there is documentary evidence showing that in 3rd century Syria, there were female deacons who assisted the priest with female baptisms. This role is also mentioned in apostolic constitutions dating back to the 4th century, which contain references to a specific ordination rite that differed from the ordination rite reserved for male deacons.

Some forms of female diaconal service have been institutionalised for some time now, as is the case with the diocese of Padua, where said forms of service were introduced by the former bishop Antonio Mattiazzo. Although these women do not wear a religious habit, they have taken vows of obedience, poverty and chastity, meaning they have been consecrated as “diocesan apostolic collaborators”. The northern Italian diocese defined the role and tasks of this new form of service as such: “This form of female diaconal service is inspired by the Gospel. For female apostolic collaborators entering the apostolic diaconate is a life choice that is approved and oriented by the bishops”. One of the tasks of female deacons is to proclaim the Gospel message, educate people about the faith, do charity work for the poor, distribute Holy Communion, enliven the liturgy and manage structures such as schools and institutes.

Pope Francis has spoken on many occasions about the need for the Catholic Church to value the role of women. But he has always avoided presenting this as a form of female “clericalisation”. “I don’t know where this idea sprang from. Women in the Church must be valued not ‘clericalised’. Whoever thinks of women as cardinals suffers a bit from clericalism,” Francis said in an interview with Italian newspaper La Stampa in December 2013, in response to a question about whether the Church would have women cardinals in the future.

In September 2001, the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger, along with his “colleagues”, cardinals Medina Estevez (Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship) and Castrillón Hoyos (Congregation for the Clergy), signed a brief letter, approved by John Paul II, which stated that “it is not licit to put in place initiatives which in some way aim to prepare female candidates for diaconal ordination”. The text referred to the diaconate as a sacrament and first step towards priesthood.

New studies on the female diaconate in the early Church, on the duties and responsibilities of female deacons compared to those of their male counterparts and on the types of ordination rite, could open up new possibilities and new forms of consecrated service besides the already existing women’s religious orders.

“The Church needs women to become a part of the decision-making process and for them to head up an office in the Vatican,” Pope Francis said, responding to six questions put to him at a meeting with 900 nuns from across the world. Speaking in the Nervi hall, he explained that “the Church should involve lay and consecrated women in consultations but also in decision-making because it needs to hear their point of view. This growing role women are playing within the Church is not feminism but co-responsibility which is a right of all Christians, men and women alike.” Francis also underlined that “too many consecrated females are mediocre women rather than people who engaged in the ministry of service. Consecrated life,” he added, “is a path of poverty, not suicide”.

Complete Article HERE!

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Fake Nuns Try to Save Spanish Sex Priest

By Barbie Latza Nadeau

sex priest

Two devotees have undergone chastity exams to defend their sect’s ex-Catholic prelate, who stands accused of telling female followers his ‘holy’ semen would purify them.

 
ROME — Some people will do anything for love—even deny it. Or at least that’s what it appears two Spanish pseudo-nuns have done in an attempt to save Feliciano Miguel Rosendo, a priest who has been accused of forcing them to take part in orgies by claiming his semen was holy and represented the “body of Christ” and would “purify” them.

The nuns reportedly agreed to virginity tests in the Spanish town of Tui to prove that they hadn’t had carnal relations with the prelate, despite eyewitness accounts that imply at least some sexual contact.

Rosendo was arrested in December 2014 on charges of sex abuse and tax crimes associated with the Order of Saint Michael Archangel, a Roman Catholic sect whose choir performed for Pope Benedict XVI in 2011 during his apostolic voyage to Madrid. After allegations of sexual escapades and money laundering surfaced, the Vatican relieved Rosendo of his duties—after which the prelate simply changed the name of his sect to the Voice of Serviam and apparently carried on with business as usual, unusual as it might have been.

The prelate remains a Catholic priest, but the Vatican has disassociated itself with the sect. Prior to the 2014 arrest, a number of nuns testified that Rosendo persuaded them to perform sex acts on and with him, proclaiming the purifying properties of his ejaculate. One woman, who eventually left religious life and went on to marry, testified that Rosendo even forced her to have sexual relations the night before she got married and after she had wed. “I married Fernando to stop suffering abuse by Miguel, but I was surprised when, after the wedding, the abuse continued,” she told the court, according to the Spanish edition of The Local news website.

The original case’s court documents show that Rosendo apparently rotated the religious ladies through his bed in the house in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, north of Madrid, that they apparently all shared. According to local press reports, Marta Pax Alonso, a self-declared nun who has never been actually affiliated with any Vatican-recognized Catholic order, was his chief assistant and lover.

Alonso, however, is one of the women who took a virginity test to prove that she had never had vaginal sex. She was also arrested in 2014 for financial crimes. That year, several family members of the nuns in question reportedly pleaded with Pope Francis to persuade the women to leave Rosendo’s alleged sex sect, but the Vatican apparently never responded on behalf of the pope. However, Renzo Fratini, the papal nuncio (or Vatican ambassador) to Spain, is said to have offered his support.

Citing Madrid’s College of Physicians, The Local reports the chastity tests showed the non-nuns were, indeed, virgins, stating that they “have an intact hymen with no signs of having had sexual relations, recent or old. We can rule out that they had sex with vaginal penetration and there has been no deflowering.”

There are, of course, no tests to prove or disprove the act of fellatio or other sexual activities that fall short of intercourse. Rosendo awaits trial for both sexual abuse and financial crimes.

Complete Article HERE!

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Sister Monica’s secret ministry to transgender people

By Renee K. Gadoua

 

Now in her early 70s and semiretired because of health problems, Sister Monica remains committed to her singular calling for the past 16 years: ministering to transgender people and helping them come out of the shadows.

Sister Monica lives alone in a small house at the edge of a Roman Catholic college run by a community of nuns.

She doesn’t want to reveal the name of the town where she lives, the name of her Catholic order, or her real name.

Sister Monica lives in hiding, so that others may live in plain sight.

Now in her early 70s and semiretired because of health problems, she remains committed to her singular calling for the past 16 years: ministering to transgender people and helping them come out of the shadows.

“Many transgender people have been told there’s something wrong with them,” she said. “They have come to believe that they cannot be true to themselves and be true to God. But there is no way we can pray, or be in communion with God, except in the truth of who we are.”

She spends her days shuttling between e-mail and Skype, phone calls and visits. Since 1999, she has ministered to more than 200 people, many of whom have come to rely on her unflinching love and support.

Although the Catholic Church has issued no clear teaching on transgender people, Church teaching that homosexual relations are a sin suggests a similar view of transgender people. A Vatican document in 2000 said gender reassignment surgery does not change a person’s gender in the eyes of the Church. In 2008, Pope Benedict urged Catholics to defend “the nature of man against its manipulation.”

“The church speaks of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this order is respected,” Benedict said.

Though Pope Francis is credited with a more compassionate and pastoral tone to gays, Sister Monica fears that the Catholic hierarchy would punish her or her community if her work with transgender people became public.

Despite this, she is as committed to her calling as when she gave her life to Jesus straight out of high school.

“I have great love and fidelity for my community, my call to religious life, and obedience to my prioress,” she said.

That calling, as she defines it, is working with people on the margins. To her, transgender people are a part of that margin, and therefore part and parcel of her calling.

Sister Monica began working with gay, lesbian, and bisexual people in 1998 after finishing a term as her congregation’s vocations director.

She had long been pained at how her gay friends and relatives had been treated, she said. The call to minister to them came from God, she said.

Early in her ministry, she met a transgender woman, and her work shifted to helping people find peace with bodies that do not match how they see themselves.

“Here’s what they heard from priests: ‘Look between your legs. What you see is who you are. God will tell you who you are. Do you want to be damned to eternal hell?’” she said, her voice rising.

That attitude only reinforces the scorn and rejection many transgender people experience in the Church, she said.

Early on, she fought this emerging calling.

“I told God so many times: You gave this ministry to the wrong person. I’m not the right person to swim upstream and carry the banner for the cause.”

But these days, she is much clearer about her focus.

“She has a wonderful way of pinning you down and looking at you and reminding you … practically channeling her spirituality that you are a child of God and you are authentic and there is nothing wrong with you,” said James Pignatella, an Arizona-based engineer who transitioned from female to male.

Over the years, Sister Monica says she has received “quiet support” from two bishops and several priests. The end of two Vatican investigations that questioned American nuns’ loyalty to church teaching has also relieved some pressure on her ministry secret.

Still, experience tells her she cannot be completely open about what she does.

She has a quick answer to people who say “God made them man and woman,” quoting the Book of Genesis.

“God made day and night. There was also dusk and dawn and twilight. There’s no light switch,” she said. “There are 2,000 kinds of ants and there can’t be more than two kinds of people?”

Stephanie Battaglino, who met Sister Monica at a 2008 conference for transgender people, said the elderly nun helped her during a painful part of her life.

“I sensed a connection right away,” said Battaglino, a corporate vice president at a large financial institution and a consultant on transgender inclusion. “I knew right there she was kind of like my angel.”

The nun remains her spiritual director seven years later.

“She helped me realize I do not walk this journey by myself,” said Battaglino. “God is with me.”

And that is the heart of Sister Monica’s ministry: pushing her friends to be honest about themselves and their relationships.

“We cannot have a relationship with God if we are hiding from ourselves or God,” said the nun.

The irony is not lost on Battaglino. While she has come out of the closet, Sister Monica lives in the shadows.

But that’s a tension the nun said she can live with because participating in her friends’ suffering is its own reward. Indeed, she said, it is “a gift from God.”

“I love well and I am loved well. What they need, more than anything, is to be well-loved.”

 

Complete Article HERE!

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Galway historian reveals truth behind 800 orphans in mass grave

By: Cahir O’Doherty

MI-Children-Galway-1930

There is a growing international scandal around the history of The Home, a grim 1840’s workhouse in Tuam in Galway built on seven acres that was taken over in 1925 by the Bon Secours sisters, who turned it into a Mother and Baby home for “fallen women.”

The long abandoned site made headlines around the world this week when it was revealed that a nearby septic tank contained the bodies of up to eight hundred infants and children, secretly buried without coffins or headstones on unconsecrated ground between 1925 and 1961.

Now a local historian has stepped forward to outline the terrible circumstances around so many lost little lives.

Catherine Corless, the local historian and genealogist, remembers the Home Babies well. “They were always segregated to the side of regular classrooms,” Corless tells IrishCentral. “By doing this the nuns telegraphed the message that they were different and that we should keep away from them.

“They didn’t suggest we be nice to them. In fact if you acted up in class some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies. That was the message we got in our young years,” Corless recalls.

Now a dedicated historian of the site, as a schoolgirl Corless recalls watching an older friend wrap a tiny stone inside a bright candy wrapper and present it as a gift to one of them.

“When the child opened it she saw she’d been fooled,” Corless says. “Of course I copied her later and I tried to play the joke on another little Home girl. I thought it was funny at the time.”

But later – years later – Corless realized that the children she taunted had nobody. “Years after I asked myself what did I do to that poor little girl that never saw a sweet? That has stuck with me all my life. A part of me wants to make up to them.”

Surrounded by an eight-foot high wall, Tuam, County Galway locals say that they saw little to nothing of the daily life of The Home or of the pregnant young mothers who arrived and left it without a word over the decades.

In the few surviving black and white photographs taken at the site no child is smiling. Instead they simply frown at the camera, their blank stares suggesting the terrible conditions.

A local health board inspection report from April 1944 recorded 271 children and 61 single mothers in residence, a total of 333 in a building that had a capacity for 243.

The report described the children as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.” The report noted that 31 children in the “sun room and balcony” were “poor, emaciated and not thriving.” The effects of long term neglect and malnutrition were observed repeatedly.

Children died at The Home at the rate of one a fortnight for almost 40 years, one report claims. Another appears to claim that 300 children died between 1943 and 1946, which would mean two deaths a week in the isolated institution.

In The Home’s 36 years of operation between 1926 and 1961 some locals told the press this week of unforgettable interactions with its emaciated children, who because of their “sinful” origins were considered socially radioactive and treated as such.

One local said: “I remember some of them in class in the Mercy Convent in Tuam – they were treated marginally better than the traveler children. They were known locally as the “Home Babies.” For the most part the children were usually gone by school age – either adopted or dead.”

Because of Corless’ efforts we now know the names and fates of up to 796 forgotten infants and children who died there, thanks to her discovery of their death records when researching The Home’s history.

“First I contacted the Bon Secours sisters at their headquarters in Cork and they replied they no longer had files or information about The Home because they had left Tuam in 1961 and had handed all their records over to the Western Health Board.”

Undaunted, Corless turned to The Western Health Board, who told her there was no general information on the daily running of the place.

“Eventually I had the idea to contact the registry office in Galway. I remembered a law was enacted in 1932 to register every death in the country. My contact said give me a few weeks and I’ll let you know.”

“A week later she got back to me and said do you really want all of these deaths? I said I do. She told me I would be charged for each record. Then she asked me did I realize the enormity of the numbers of deaths there?”

The registrar came back with a list of 796 children. “I could not believe it. I was dumbfounded and deeply upset,” says Corless. “There and then I said this isn’t right. There’s nothing on the ground there to mark the grave, there’s nothing to say it’s a massive children’s graveyard. It’s laid abandoned like that since it was closed in 1961.”

The certificates Corless received record each child’s age, name, date – and in some cases – cause of death. “I have the full list and it’s going up on a plaque for the site, which we’re fundraising for at the moment. We want it to be bronze so that it weathers better. We want to do it in honor of the children who were left there forgotten for all those years. It’s a scandal.”

Corless believes that nothing was said or done to expose the truth because people believed illegitimate children didn’t matter. “That’s what really hurts and moved me to do something,” she explains.

During its years of operation the children of The Home were referred to as “inmates” in the press. It was believed by the clergy that the harsh conditions there were in themselves a form of corrective penance. The state, the church and their families all failed these women, Corless contends.

But even now the unexpected difficulty that the local committee Corless has joined to fundraise for a plaque to remember the dead children suggests that not everyone wants to confront the truth about the building’s tragic past.

“I do blame the Catholic Church,” says Corless. “I blame the families as well but people were afraid of the parish priest. I think they were brainwashed. I suppose the lesson is not to be hiding things. To face up to reality.

“My fear is that if things aren’t faced now it’s very easy to slide back into this kind of cover-up again. I want the truth out there. If you give people too much power it’s dangerous.”

Living and dying in a culture of shame and silence for decades, the Home Babies’ very existence was considered an affront to Ireland and God.

It was a different time, some defenders argued this week, omitting to mention that the stigmatizing silence that surrounded The Home was fostered by clerics. Indeed the religious orders were so successful at silencing their critics that for decades even to speak of The Home was to risk contagion.

And now that terrifying era of shame and silence is finally lifting, we are left to ask what all their lonesome suffering was in aid of, and what did it actually achieve?

To donate to the memorial for the mothers and babies of The Home, contact Catherine Corless at catherinecorless@hotmail.com.

Complete Article HERE!