Vatican Takes Hard Line on Wayward American Nuns

In the latest play in the Vatican’s strict two-year crackdown on those American rebel brutes known as nuns, the Cardinal Ludwig Müller (who I will just assume vaguely resembles George Mueller, from Boardwalk Empire) has taken a rather frank stance with the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the membership organization for nuns and sisters in the US, deeming them uncooperative and calling into question their very faithfulness to the Church.

In remarks made in a doctrinal assessment of the LCWR on April 30, Cardinal Müller accuses the LCWR of blowing off the standard course of action of having speakers or honorees for their annual conference approved by Archbishop J. Peter Sartain, the Vatican’s woman delegate. He also admonishes them for promoting Conscious Evolution, a concept that Müller feels is “opposed to the Christian Revelation.”

As Dennis Coday writes for the National Catholic Reporter:

His harshest criticism, however, was reserved for the LCWR’s promotion at its assemblies and printed resources of conscious evolution, which Müller compared to gnosticism, a term that describes various sects that arose in the second century that exalted arcane knowledge, mixing Christian belief with pagan speculation and theories. “Gnosis” is the Greek word for knowledge.

“We have seen again and again in the history of the Church the tragic results of partaking of this bitter fruit,” Müller said. “Conscious Evolution does not offer anything which will nourish religious life as a privileged and prophetic witness rooted in Christ revealing divine love to a wounded world.”

Pagan speculation? No wonder nuns are the new witches. In a rather dramatic, “this hurts me more than it hurts you”-style rebuke, the Cardinal lamented that the inclusion of such theories without a proper Catholic counterpoint may indicate that the nuns are unfit:

My concern is whether such an intense focus on new ideas such as Conscious Evolution has robbed religious of the ability truly to sentire cum Ecclesia…

…I am worried that the uncritical acceptance of things such as Conscious Evolution seemingly without any awareness that it offers a vision of God, the cosmos, and the human person divergent from or opposed to Revelation evidences that a de facto movement beyond the Church and sound Christian faith has already occurred.

Müller then instructed the Holy Office to keep a closer eye on those scrappy no good US nuns, what with their witchcraft and their de facto anti-Christian coup being all afoot. For Müller, it’ll be a cold day in hell before these habit-corrupting ruffians have their way with the Catholic establishment. If anyone wants to help me pitch this whole thing as an action movie starring Clive Owen as the cardinal (tentatively titled Old Habits Die Hard), I’m taking suggestions.