Friday, September 21, 2012

Speaking the Truth to the Vatican

http://providencehouse.org/wp-content/themes/providencehouse/i/content/home.jpgAfter years of drug addiction, serial theft and hard prison time, a 54-year-old mother named Renee is entering a revolutionary phase of her life — transition from a rehabilitation sanctuary in Coney Island to the possibility of self-reliance in the outside world.

The sanctuary is one of several outposts of Providence House, a recovery program run by the Sisters of St. Joseph, a society of street-tough, adaptive New York nuns. 

The program has nurtured more than 12,000 women parolees and their children back from the brink.

Renee’s progress is worth celebrating as an example of what nuns actually do day after day, contradicting the Vatican’s sweeping accusations of “serious doctrinal problems” and “radical feminist” tendencies among the nation’s 57,000 Roman Catholic nuns. 

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents most orders of American nuns, properly rebutted the Vatican’s contention as unsubstantiated and flawed.

The nuns of Providence House don’t have time to be distracted by doctrinaire dust-ups as they serve paroled and homeless women. 

The sisters’ first ground-up construction project — a six-story apartment house for 46 troubled and low-income women — should open in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn by the end the year. 

A second is in the planning stages at a time when government support has dried up and the nuns are fiercely begging private donors for charity. 

“The sisters set me along the path,” said Renee. “I forgot nuns ever existed, but they turned out to be people, very helpful people.”

Much of the Roman Catholic laity has registered outrage that the church would make a show of investigating nuns when it should be focused on the priesthood’s pedophilia scandal. Working in hospitals, slums, schools and prisons, nuns serve as a powerful antidote to the church’s tattered reputation. 

In seeking dialogue with their Vatican critics, the nuns’ leaders stressed that they wish to only “speak the truth as we understand it about our lives.”

Overseers investigating the state of the American sisterhood might want to check out the lives of the nuns and parolees at Providence House.