The Catholic Contraction By Tim Padgett | June 8, 2012 excerpt: Sadly, it's the church that's looking unhinged these days. The Vatican was apparently just warming up in 2010 when it declared, astonishingly, that ordaining females into the all-male Catholic priesthood would be a "grave sin" on par with even pedophilia. Since then, as if scapegoating women for the escalating dissent among Catholics toward its hoary dogma, the church seems to have embarked on a misogynist's crusade. Its legal assault on the Obama Administration's requirement that Catholic institutions like colleges and hospitals make contraception available to female employees as part of their health coverage is, ultimately, less about religious freedom than about women's freedom. Then there's the U.S. bishops' absurd probe of whether the Girl Scouts are selling feminist theology as well as fattening thin mints - and Rome's accusation of "radical feminism" within the Leadership Conference on Women Religious (LCWR), which represents most of the U.S. nuns doing genuinely Christ-inspired work with the poor and the sick.
excerpt: Logic would thus dictate that it's counterproductive for the church to persecute nuns and vilify legitimate and responsible female interests like contraception.
But this is where the Pope and his bishops are especially and stunningly divorced from reality. They're convinced - just as the 17th century church was certain it could make the heliocentric universe go away by threatening to torture Galileo - that by reminding Catholic women that men wear the ecclesiastical pants, they can whip the ladies back in line and stanch Catholicism's female exodus.
