When a student wins the Matthew Shepard Scholarship, the bishop steps in -- and everybody loses
By Mary Elizabeth Williams Tuesday, May 8, 2012 03:45 PM CDT
Remember last month, when the Vatican issued a smackdown to American nuns for their “radical feminist themes [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/19/nation/la-na-vatican-nuns-20120420 ],” like not being vocal enough about opposing same-sex marriage? Now, just to really hammer home how divisive the issue has become, a bishop in Davenport, Iowa, has vetoed Catholic school officials and said he would not permit the Eychaner Foundation to present its Matthew Shepard Scholarship to a gay senior at his high school graduation.
Bishop Martin Amos alerted the Prince of Peace school staff last week that “We cannot allow any one or any organization which promotes a position that is contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church to present at a diocesan institution [ http://www.queerty.com/gay-catholic-school-student-not-allowed-to-accept-scholarship-during-graduation-20120508/ ].” The Eychaner Foundation describes itself as “a non-profit organization committed to promoting tolerance and non-discrimination.” Tell us, Bishop Amos, exactly how that conflicts with Christianity?
The $40,000 scholarship to the University of Iowa is named in honor of gay college student Matthew Shepard, who was brutally murdered in 1998. This year’s recipient, Keaton Fuller, will still be acknowledged – by a school staffer – at the ceremony. But it’s a huge dis nonetheless to block the very organization that’s honoring the kid from handing him his prize. And it blatantly pulls of the rug out from under Fuller, after the school board’s president himself says that the presentation had already been discussed at a board meeting with no opposition.
In an open letter to the school [ http://www.eychanerfoundation.org/news/item/keaton-fullers-open-letter-to-prince-of-peace.html ], Fuller says that “Being the lone openly gay student in a small, Catholic school has not always been easy” but that he’s been honored by the “acceptance and respect” he’s received. And he says that the moment he learned he’d won the scholarship was “one of the happiest of my life.” Now, however, he writes, “I have never felt as invalidated and unaccepted as I have upon hearing the news that the scholarship that I have worked so hard for not just in the application process, but also in my deportment and actions over the years, would not be recognized in the way that it should at the graduation ceremony. It is difficult to understand how after I have spent thirteen years at this school and worked hard during all of them, I would be made to feel that my accomplishments are less than everybody else’s. This whole ordeal has been incredibly hurtful, and I am even sadder that this will be one of my last experiences to remember my high school years by.”
It’s an articulate, impassioned plea for support and basic courtesy. Oh, and I have a letter too. It’s from Jesus. It says, Bishop Amos, you’re doing this wrong.
Sure, one could argue that you wouldn’t expect an outpouring of gay pride at a Catholic school. But it’s worth noting that Fuller’s school was supportive of him, and proud of his accomplishment. It’s Bishop Amos who should grok that it’s called Prince of Peace for a reason. The values of tolerance that name represents are the same values that the Matthew Shepherd scholarship represents, a scholarship created in the name of a young man who died horribly simply for being who he was. And it would be a terrible shame if the last thing Fuller learned at his school was that his church is too cowardly to applaud him for being who he is.
THE recent Vatican edict [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/us/vatican-reprimands-us-nuns-group.html (three posts back at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74666983 )] that reproached American nuns for their liberal views on social and political issues has put a spotlight on the practices of these Roman Catholic sisters. While the current debate has focused on the nuns’ progressive stances on birth control, abortion, homosexuality, the all-male priesthood and economic injustice, tension between American nuns and the church’s male hierarchy reaches much further back.
In the 19th century, Catholic nuns literally built the church in the American West, braving hardship and grueling circumstances to establish missions, set up classrooms and lead lives of calm in a chaotic world marked by corruption, criminality and illness. Their determination in the face of a male hierarchy that, then as now, frequently exploited and disdained them was a demonstration of their resilient faith in a church struggling to adapt itself to change.
Like other settlers in the West, Catholic nuns were mostly migrants from Europe or the American East; the church had turned to them to create a Catholic presence across a seemingly limitless frontier. The region’s rocky mining camps, grassy plains and arid deserts did not appeal to many ordained men. As one disenchanted European priest, lamenting the lack of a good cook and the discomfort of frontier travel, grumbled, “I hate the long, dreary winters of Iowa.”
Bishops relentlessly recruited sisters for Western missions, enticing them with images of Christian conversions, helpful local clergymen and charming convent cottages. If the sisters hesitated, the bishops mocked their timidity, scorned their selfishness and threatened heavenly retribution.
The sisters proved them wrong. By steamboat, train, stagecoach and canoe, on foot and on horseback, the nuns answered the call. In the 1840s, a half-dozen sisters from Notre Dame de Namur, a Belgian order, braved stormy seas and dense fog to reach Oregon. In 1852, seven Daughters of Charity struggled on the backs of donkeys across the rain-soaked Isthmus of Panama toward California. In 1884, six Ursuline nuns stepped from a train in Montana, only to be left by the bishop at a raucous public rooming house, its unheated loft furnished only with wind and drifting snow.
These nuns lived in filthy dugouts, barns and stables, hoped for donations of furniture, and survived on a daily ration of one slice of bread or a bowl of onion soup along with a cup of tea. They made their own way, worked endless hours, often walked miles to a Catholic chapel for services, and endured daunting privations in housing and nutrition.
There appeared to be no end to what was expected of the sisters. In 1874, two Sisters of the Holy Cross, at the direction of Edward Sorin, the founder of the University of Notre Dame, opened a Texas school and orphanage in a two-room shack with a leaky dormitory garret that the nuns affectionately labeled “The Ark.” The brother who managed the congregation’s large farm informed the sisters, who were barely able to feed and clothe the 80 boarders, that he could not give the school free produce — though they could buy it at a discount. The sisters also did 18 years of unpaid housekeeping work on a farm run by the men.
Sisters adapted to these physical, spiritual and fiscal exploitations with amazingly good humor. Still, they chafed against their male superiors’ unreasonable restrictions and harsh dictates. When they directly questioned policy, bishops and priests moved to silence them. A single protest could draw draconian reprisals on an entire congregation.
In 1886, four Texas priests demanded that Bishop John C. Néraz replace a superior, Mother St. Andrew Feltin, saying that she had “spread gossip” and warned her sisters “to beware of priests.”
Bishop Néraz threatened the sisterhood with disbandment and removed Mother St. Andrew from office. He hounded her for years, disciplined other nuns she had befriended, suspended her right to the sacraments, warned other bishops not to grant her sanctuary, undercut her efforts to enter a California convent and even urged her deportation to Europe. Finally, Mother St. Andrew laid aside her religious clothing, returned to secular dress and cared for her widowed brother’s children.
Six years after Bishop Néraz died, Mother St. Andrew petitioned her congregation for readmission. Donning her habit, she renewed her vows amid a warm welcome from sisters who understood too well what she had suffered.
Then as now, not all priests and bishops treated sisters badly, though the priests who reached out to nuns in a spirit of appreciation, friendship and equality could not alter the church’s institutional commitment to gender discrimination. And, as now, some bishops, dismissive of the laity, underestimated the loyalty secular Catholics felt for their nuns.
In the case of Mother St. Andrew, tenacity and spirituality triumphed over arrogance and misogyny. The Vatican would do well to bear this history in mind as it thinks through the consequences of its unjust attack on American sisters.
Anne M. Butler, a professor emerita of history at Utah State University, is the author of the forthcoming book “Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920.”
The Vatican is reining in the leadership conference that represents 80 percent of American Catholic nuns, accusing the group of “serious doctrinal problems [ http://www.usccb.org/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&pageid=55544 ]” and promoting “radical feminist themes.” That seems a misreading of the very fine work in schools, charities, prisons and impoverished neighborhoods being done by about 60,000 nuns across the nation.
These nuns and their leaders continued to bolster the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church even as it suffered one of its greatest scandals in the sexual abuse of schoolchildren by rogue priests and the cover-ups by diocesan authorities.
The Vatican has now appointed a bishop to oversee the operations of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — the 1,500 superiors who run the sisters’ communities — citing individual nuns at conference gatherings challenging church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood. The announcement also accused the group’s leaders of focusing too much on poverty and economic injustice while allegedly keeping “silent” on abortion and same-sex marriage.
A crucial focus in the inquiry appears to be the fact that dozens of American nuns involved in the conference and in antipoverty and hospital work provided prominent support to President Obama’s health care reform. Conference leaders said Vatican investigators had pointedly raised the issue and the fact that the conference had split with American bishops, who opposed reform.
The sisters’ leaders said they reaffirmed their opposition to abortion but also claimed the right to speak out on a “moral imperative” like health care, just as the bishops had.
The nuns clearly are caught in a classic crossfire of church doctrine, politics and hierarchical obedience. It would be a tragedy, far beyond the church, if their fine work and their courageous voices were constrained.
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