Goodbye Old Paint

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(Nuns) were the first feminists, earning Ph.D.’s or working as surgeons long before it was fashionable for women to hold jobs. As managers of hospitals, schools and complex bureaucracies, they were the first female C.E.O.’s.

They are also among the bravest, toughest and most admirable people in the world. In my travels, I’ve seen heroic nuns defy warlords, pimps and bandits. Even as bishops have disgraced the church by covering up the rape of children, nuns have redeemed it with their humble work on behalf of the neediest.

So, Pope Benedict, all I can say is: You are crazy to mess with nuns.

The Vatican issued a stinging reprimand of American nuns this month and ordered a bishop to oversee a makeover of the organization that represents 80 percent of them. In effect, the Vatican accused the nuns of worrying too much about the poor and not enough about abortion and gay marriage.

What Bible did that come from? Jesus in the Gospels repeatedly talks about poverty and social justice, yet never explicitly mentions either abortion or homosexuality. If you look at who has more closely emulated Jesus’s life, Pope Benedict or your average nun, it’s the nun hands down.

Since the papal crackdown on nuns, they have received an outpouring of support. “Nuns were approached by Catholics at Sunday liturgies across the country with a simple question: ‘What can we do to help?’ ” The National Catholic Reporter recounted. It cited one parish where a declaration of support for nuns from the pulpit drew loud applause, and another that was filled with shouts like, “You go, girl!”

At least four petition drives are under way to support the nuns. One on Change.org has gathered 15,000 signatures. The headline for this column comes from an essay by Mary E. Hunt, a Catholic theologian who is developing a proposal for Catholics to redirect some contributions from local parishes to nuns.

“How dare they go after 57,000 dedicated women whose median age is well over 70 and who work tirelessly for a more just world?” Hunt wrote. “How dare the very men who preside over a church in utter disgrace due to sexual misconduct and cover-ups by bishops try to distract from their own problems by creating new ones for women religious?”

Sister Joan Chittister, a prominent Benedictine nun, said she had worried at first that nuns spend so much time with the poor that they would have no allies. She added that the flood of support had left her breathless.

“It’s stunningly wonderful,” she said. “You see generations of laypeople who know where the sisters are — in the streets, in the soup kitchens, anywhere where there’s pain. They’re with the dying, with the sick, and people know it.”

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“for focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping “silent” on abortion and same-sex marriage.”

“Defunding transit is how you smack down urbanites, environmentalists, and people of color, all in one fell swoop. It’s how you telegraph a disdain for all things European. It’s how you show solidarity with swing-state suburbanites who don’t understand why their taxes are going toward subways they don’t even use. And it’s how you subtly reassure your base that you’re not concerned about the very poor.”

“Of course, whenever people discover that other folk are going out of their way to give handouts, some will get lazy and simply try to trade off this goodwill. It’s a telling point, actually, that this was already a danger in the very early church – because you only get that problem arising if the church is being generous. The line between ‘deserving poor’ and ‘undeserving poor’ is very, very hard to draw, and one of the things about poverty, whether one has work or not (some jobs pay so little that the people who do them are still well within the poverty trap), is that it is depressing, and actually saps the energy and nerve and vitality in ways that people like me, who have never been out of work and never been truly poor, can only appreciate by being with and ministering to people who are genuinely and chronically poor. There is a real danger that in a go-getting country like the USA those who have initiative, energy, advantages of birth and education, can easily look down on those who have none of those things. It simply isn’t the case that every human starts at the same level point so that the rich are those who’ve worked for it and the poor are those who couldn’t be bothered. Throughout the Bible God seems to take special note of those trapped in poverty, and we should do the same.”

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Last year, the Coates left Washington, D.C., for a new life in Florida but the jobs dried up. When the savings went, Victoria and D’Angelo learned how to be homeless. They found out there’s a checklist for living in a car. You want security, lighting, a place where you might be welcome or at least a place busy enough to hide in. Walmart lots can be good - it depends on the manager, YMCAs mostly look the other way. D’Angelo settled outside a hospital emergency room.

D’Angelo Coates: And we knew that through bein’ there we could at least brush our teeth in the morning, go to the bathroom if we need to in the middle of the night. And I’m sitting on the cooler in between our vehicle and another vehicle just to make sure they’re okay.

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In rural Africa, I’ve come across women who have never heard of birth control. According to estimates from the Guttmacher Institute, a respected research group, 215 million women want to avoid getting pregnant but have no access to contraception.

What’s needed isn’t just birth-control pills or IUDs. It’s also girls’ education and women’s rights — starting with an end to child marriages — for educated women mostly have fewer children.

“In times past, the biggest barrier to reducing birth rates has been a lack of access to contraceptives,” the Population Institute notes in a new report. “Today, the biggest barrier is gender inequality.”

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