A brief roundup:
Nathaniel Hurd: ‘Perpetual Indulgence’ Versus Religious Conviction
Seeing photos, videos, and stories of the “Sisters” provokes in me a deep sense of sympathy for them. Everyone is made to selflessly love and be loved. Anyone who sexualizes themselves and others as intensely as this group reveals, at least in part, an unmet longing for that kind of love.
Perhaps this is why the group so ferociously fixates on nuns. Two of my dearest friends are religious sisters. They love God by serving people who are poor and sick: changing soiled garments, cleaning sores, and comforting the dying in the middle of the night. Poverty, chastity, obedience, prayer, self-sacrifice and self-denial, and modest dress exemplify their lives. They are joyful and free. All of this confounds the promoters of “perpetual indulgence.”
. . .
America needs religious people to exercise their religious freedom “with malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,” as Abraham Lincoln put it in his second inaugural address. Some witnesses will be more public, like Trevor Williams, Yeshiva University, and the Muslim parents in Maryland. Others will be quieter, more hidden, like the faithful religious sisters whom I am blessed to call friends. All of them must be free to make their distinct contribution to the common good of our society, including those who bear witness to the way the Church’s teachings on marriage and sexuality benefit all of society. Even if one rejects that claim, we should all be able to agree that mocking Catholic nuns who espouse those teachings is harmful to our common life. While allowable in our law, the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” should not be given a place of honor by any culture-shaping organization in America.
Heather King on some of the real nuns of Los Angeles:
Take some of the more than 1,000 real nuns who serve the Greater Los Angeles area: the Little Sisters of the Poor, for example, who from their facility in San Pedro have for decades sheltered, ministered to, fed, and cared for the elderly of slender means.
Take the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, an order founded in 1641 in France to help prostituted women that now serves more than 70 countries. A presence in LA for 120 years, since 1977 Good Shepherd has operated a shelter, school, and garden for female victims of domestic abuse and their children.
Sister Anne Kelley, executive director of the Good Shepherd Shelter for 21 years, observed in a 2015 interview, “The work is really, really dangerous. And the women who come here are really, really brave.”
The Missionaries of Charity at St. Emydius Church in Lynwood care for the homeless, teach catechism, attend to the needs of the infants and pregnant mothers who live with them in the convent, and distribute food to the needy in their neighborhood.
The Servants of Mary live in West Adams and go, upon being asked, into people’s homes as they’re sick or dying to sit vigil with them, pray with them, talk to them, tidy their house, or simply sit.
Bill McGurn in the Wall Street Journal:
Still, for sheer shamelessness no one beats the Dodgers. In response to the uproar it created with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the team miraculously resurrected its Christian Faith and Family Day celebration, which had been dead since 2019.
All have studiously avoided apologizing to the customers they alienated with their promotions. It says something that the only ones to receive a full apology were the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. While the “sisters” have been depicted playfully in the press, Bishop Robert Barron, a former auxiliary bishop of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, says they “can only be described as an anti-Catholic hate group.”
But Bishop Barron and the people he speaks for no longer occupy the commanding heights of culture. These are now controlled by Hollywood, academia and the media. They, not the bishop, decide who’s a hater and who isn’t. That’s why a mom who complains about a male competing on her daughter’s high school or college track or swim team is demonized as a “culture warrior” pushing hate—while the school official who let him into her daughter’s locker room isn’t.
‘We Cannot Stand Idly By as Our Lord Gets Mocked’
A preview of an interview with Washington Nationals player Trevor Williams: