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The Catholic Church's Treatment of Nuns Is Polarizing and Alienating

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It sounds like you and your Priest need to read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it is free on line. I am completing my ninth year teaching high school confirmation and an articulate and correct explanation of why woman or not ordained might come up once a year and not again.
Read Study Propagate.
And for those that think Priest should be married, I am uniquely qualified to answer this question, my father is a Catholic Deacon and my brother is a Catholic Priest. The sacrifice a Deacon must accept is extremely hard on a family. A Priest must give so much more and the sacrifice is much greater and there is not an understanding wife willing to let her husband leave the Christmas dinner because of a death in the parish. I have missed my brother on Christmas because of a death in his parish. The Priest is a servant of God, and they truly do not have time to raise a family, it would be an unjust to a spouse to the children and to the Priest himself. I have witnessed my brother administer anointing of the sick to someone in the last living breath of the dying person; a Priest should not be distracted with the responsibilities of a married man.
And here is an example that no one thinks of, (there are many), if Priest were married what should a parish do if the Priest were to die, should they just kick the wife and kids out of the rectory? Or how about this one, Priest are moved every 6 to 12 years in our Diocese how about that for family upheaval.

Gerald Partida of CA 8:00PM May 14, 2012

Jesus ordained the male leadership of the Church, the first bishops, and the priesthood. If the 5th graders have a problem with that, they should take it up with Christ. I'm sure you can understand Catholics for siding with God on this one.
Asking Catholics to be Catholic might be "polarizing" but it's better than denying, changing, or "evolving" the Truth.

john1513 of TX 11:20AM May 14, 2012

Allow priests to marry. Problem solved.

richard dunnell of FL 7:01PM May 13, 2012

Annie of VA
GET OUT. THAT CHURCH IS NOT FOR YOU.
FRANKLY, DON'T believe a word you wrote. You leave if your beliefs differ THAT MUCH. THINK you are full of BULL...

Bill Hedges of MO 4:51PM May 13, 2012

Mary Kate, thank you for writing this. I feel sorry for the people castigating you below and hope you are not taking it to heart.
It took a long time for me to reconcile the Catholic church's treatment of women - in that women could not be ordained - with my personal views that one's genitalia should be irrelevant to being a priest. But it's been that way for a long time, and as your priest mentioned, i sort of believed that EVENTUALLY it would change. Things change very slowly in the Catholic church. And I figured I'd just tell my daughter, when she asked why there were no women priests, that the church was wrong and eventually they'd figure that out and there would be women priests. And then, when all the evidence about molestation came out, I was really disturbed, but chalked it up to some bad apples and bad leadership.
But the attack on the Girl Scouts and the attack on nuns who minister to the poor and sick are making me extremely upset. I believe the Catholic church leadership has gotten so fixated on abortion and birth control and related politics that it has completely lost sight of its original mission of social justice and ministering to those in need.
I have been a Catholic all my life, but I'm not sure how much longer I can hang in there.

Annie of VA 2:00PM May 13, 2012

Heaven help us if folks like Mary Cate are teaching CCD! It is no wonder that at least "two generations have been lost to poor catechesis" as the late Cardinal Avery Dulles once observed. She wants the Church of Christ, but on her own terms. But that won't work. That has already been tried and found wanting. It is known as Protestantism.
Her problem is not so much with the hierarchical Church which Christ created, but with Christ Himself. He created the sacrament of Holy Orders as limited to men. He did have to do it that way, but that is what He did.
Mary Cate should take a gander at the work of Catholic theologian Sister Sara Butler, MSTBS, who used to suffer from the same confusion as Mary Cate, until she completed her scholarly reasearch on the matter. The liberal media who previously supported her when she began the research would not publish her conclusion that Christ established the sacamental priesthood solely for men; though the equality of men and women has always existed.
So she published her own booh. See, catholic.net/index.php?option=dedestaca&id=159. Perhaps Mary Cate will have her own epiphany when she reads it, and spread the word.

Raymond W. Belair, D. Min. of NY 11:07AM May 13, 2012

The sisters/nuns in the picture are not members of the LCWR, the umbrella group cited by the Vatican report. Sisters in the LCWR, as a general rule, do not wear habits and many do not live in communities with other sisters. The LCWR's web address is: https://lcwr.org/. While the LCWR does lots of good work, most Catholic young women considering a vocation do not consider congregations in the LCWR. If I recall correctly, the average of sisters in the LCWR is around seventy.
If the sisters in the picture are American sisters, as suggested by their habits, they are likely members of the CMSWR, an organization likely to be highly supportive of the Vatican's supervison of the LCWR. A number of LCWR congregations left the LCWR years ago over concerns about the LCWR's continued belief in the Catholic faith. These sisters requested the Vatican to approve their new organization, the CMSWR as an alternative to the LCWR. The Vatican granted their request. http://www.cmswr.org/
Most Catholic women considering a vocation join Congregations in the CMSWR, some of which are America's oldest congregations of sisters. The CMSWR member Congregations are growing exponentially and their average age is in their 30's.
The LA Times has similarly criticized the Vatican in articles accompanied by pictures of sisters who support the Vatican's actions.
The implication of the articles accompanied by the pictures is that the Vatican is being unfair to sisters in the picture, but if the sisters in the picture were interviewed, they would probably ask why the Vatican did not exercise its supervisory responsibilities over the LCWR before they were forced to leave in order to continue practicing the Catholic faith.
It seems interesting that the news media has consistently presented pictures of Congregations from the CMSWR when criticizing the Vatican's report on the LCWR. It seems to suggest that in the popular American imagination, the sisters in the CMSWR are what Catholic sisters should look like. I'm not taking a position on this, but just suggesting that it's not just a coincidence that two major publications have gotten the organizations mixed up.

John of VA 3:57AM May 13, 2012

Interesting read! But I'd like to point out an error in your article.
"The Vatican is criticizing its dedicated female servants when it should be giving them a larger role in the church"
This should be;
"The Vatican is investigating a smaller offshoot organization of radical leftist nuns (which it funds) for diverting from Catholic teaching, while I personally try to divert this into a gender issue."

Juan of ND 3:16AM May 13, 2012

This opinion article is so full of errors of reasoning and deliberate misrepresentations that it's hard to know where to start one's objections. Instead, let me tell the story that writer ignores. The two nuns in Mary Kate Cary's family probably ARE living saints and probably ARE NOT radical feminists. Nobody anywhere, least of all the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is even remotely claiming that all American nuns are radical feminists. Nor is the Vatican out to get American nuns. Most American nuns are indeed "selfless, kind, wise, courageous, funny, and hardworking." But the LCWR is not most American nuns. It's not even the only conference of major superiors of women religious. Nonetheless, it is an organization that has resolutely opposed the sacred and certain doctrine of the Church on a wide range of issues and thus has ill-served both American nuns and the American faithful. Moreover, the ideologies embraced with such gusto by the LCWR have devastated the authenticity of community life and the religious identity of its constituent congregations. As a consequence, the lack of vocations to the communities that truly are characterized by radical feminism and opposition to the traditional faith of Church has made them stagnant at best, entirely moribund in all too many instances. The politically savvy thing for the Vatican to do would be simply to ignore the LCWR, as they are rapidly dying of their own self-inflicting wounds. But the intervention of the Church is not an attempt to act shrewdly. It is an act of charity directed toward the salvation of souls in grave danger of schism, heresy or apostasy.
Here's the most egregious misdirection of the article - though not the writer's fault, but the editor's. The photo that accompanies the article shows nuns wearing habits and praying in common! This it not representative of the LCWR, but rather of those American nuns who have embraced traditional forms of religious life, who are obedient to the magisterium of the Church and who are growing because an authentic religious identity attracts vocations.

Alex Gorodetsky of NV 4:18PM May 12, 2012

Ah yes, the "magisterium of nuns". Those who are faithful brides of Christ are in full communion with our Holy church. But those like sister Sheehan who ignore and break with the Bishops regarding the contraception mandate and have allowed themselves to be sold as political fodder--------it is they that no longer follow the gospel or the work of Christ. They have embraced the radical feminist agenda and can no longer call themselves obedient Catholics.

S westberg of ND 12:30PM May 12, 2012