Who's the better Catholic: Paul Ryan or Sister Simone Campbell, who recently led a rollicking group of nuns on a cross-country tour to protest Ryan's budget bill? We think Jesus would choose Sister Simone.
Her platform is simple: unlike Romney and his running mate, nuns know what real-life Americans go through because they actually work with low-income people on a regular basis and run programs that need federal funding to succeed. She told The Daily Beast that it's the economy that's hurting Americans, not a so-called "dependence" on social programs. "The problem is not enough jobs and low wages," she said. "Catholic teaching is based on solidarity. Ryan doesn't understand that all decisions need to be made with the common good in mind." Sister Simone for president in 2016, anyone?
The "Nuns on the Bus" tour, which covered nine states in two weeks, further convinced Sister Simone that Ryan must be stopped. "The more we were on the road, the more impassioned we became," she said. "We saw all these low-income communities, all the people who would be affected. By the end, we were fairly nuts about it."
Sister Simone even invited Ryan and Romney to spend a day with her and the poor; unfortunately, neither man has gotten back to her yet. She did recently hang out with another obnoxious conservative white dude, Bill O'Reilly, and managed to stay calm and hold her own even when he repeatedly suggested that she was a Communist and called her "Sister" in a passive-aggressively patronizing tone. (That's the awesome thing about nuns — even O'Reilly couldn't figure out a way to be aggressively dickish to a Sister of the Church.)
"Tell me what you want, Sister," he asked her a billion times while also talking over her answers throughout the interview. "What I want is money in the pockets of hardworking people who are living below the poverty level," she said. "The Ryan budget gives money to the top, not the bottom." Sing it, Sister!
The Vatican has criticized the sisters for prioritizing the lives of living, breathing humans over fetuses and homophobia, but more and more Catholics are joining the anti-Romney/Ryan ranks: last week, a Catholic newspaper said Obama was more pro-life than Romney, and even important Bishop representatives from the Conference of Catholic Bishops have told Congress that Ryan's budget doesn't protect the poor and is thereby not-so-Catholic.
Will Ryan and/or Romney call Sister Simone back soon? Honestly, we wouldn't if we were them — they wouldn't have a chance in hell of coming out of that showdown on top.
Catholic Nuns Gun for Paul Ryan [The Daily Beast]