Baldrick: My father was a nun.
Blackadder: No, he wasn't.
Baldrick: Yes, he was. Whenever he was up in court, the magistrate would say "Occupation?", and he would reply, "Nun."
From memory, I admit.
Far from having won, the ageing, dying, dissident American nuns have been told, by a Pope of their own generation and who is a Jesuit, to go back to what they were doing in the 1950s. They are reduced to pretending that that has been what they have always wanted to do.
If a dwindling band of women in their seventies and upwards, with the perfectly preserved 1960s attitudes and outfits to match, really were the Church's frontline, then the Church would be finished. But it is not, so She is not.
Beyond a very bald Deism, if that, at least 50 per cent of them do not believe one word of the Creed. Therefore, the only explanation for the Holy Father's indulgence of them is that no one cares what they think. It is not what they are for. They can now expect their every effusion to be greeted in like manner.
Practically all of them seem to want to be priests, which, while of course it will always be impossible, is nevertheless an irritant. Or it would be, if anyone were paying any attention. Certain congregations seem never to have existed as anything other than places to put women who thought that they ought to be priests. Ought the Church to have such things at all?
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