Jewels of the system

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reflects on the Vatican's current attempts to reign in American nuns. As she describes it, Rome wants them to be more "sepia-toned" and much more like their docile predecessors. She quotes author Kenneth Briggs that nuns who saw Vatican II as a call to reimagine their mission “started to look uppity to an awful lot of bishops and priests and, of course, the Vatican.” The result, however, was for the church to (once again) shoot itself in the foot, as more forceful nuns could well have blown the whistle on many of its current problems, in the opinion of Bob Bennet, lawyer and leader of the lay inquiry into priest pedophilia. “It’s a tragedy because nuns are the jewels of the system.”