09/21/2010
09/20/10 — A Reader Says Sensitivity Training Will Be Provided
From: An Anonymous Pre-Vatican II Irish Catholic
Re: James Fulford’s blog item: When Nuns Decry
Please note that I write as a fan. (Well, that’s out of the way.)
I am prepared to stipulate that, yes, the politicized statement of Sister Glenna Smith is lamentable. It is, however, no more and no less than the precise response one would expect from the spokeswoman of a post-Vatican II order of lay sisters. As any Catholic my age (old, alas) or older still would be happy to inform you, before the Vatican II crowd transformed the church into a secularly correct institution, religious orders didn’t have spokesmen and spokeswomen. God willing, before many more decades pass, the time will come when they again won’t.
The foregoing notwithstanding, I respectfully suggest that you might consider whether your disgust and disapprobation would not better be assigned to Ms. Michelle Boorstein [email here] and her MSM employer, the Washington Post. It is she, not the sisters, who has chosen to spin this story in the direction of a Love the Immigrant, Hate the Immigration Skeptic screed.[ Nuns decry focus on immigration status of driver in fatal Va. crash, By Michelle Boorstein, Washington Post ,August 3, 2010]
She alone has cherry-picked the quotes and sorted the "good" facts from the "bad" ones. Boorstein’s interest — evidently also the Post's — is to flog you, me, and everyone else who doesn’t applaud the destruction of the historic American population base with any implement that comes to hand. This story will serve that purpose as well as many another.
It’s also not to be gainsaid that, despite the lamentable rhetoric of Sister Smith’s statement, the proper mission of the Benedictines and indeed of all religious orders and of all lay or ordained religious is to pray for sinners and to forgive wrongs done them, precisely as their Master forgave those who wronged Him. What I myself find distasteful about the statement and the woman making it is the fact that she is shooting her damn mouth off to the press and the world at large, especially in so self-congratulatory a manner, instead of getting to the house’s chapel and falling to her knees in prayer.
Alas, despite Sister Smith’s protestations, I deem it highly unlikely that the sisters of this Benedictine house (which the illiterate Boorstein calls a monastery) will be spending much time praying for Carlos Montano [VDARE.COM note: The Bolivian illegal alien charged with killing Sister Denise Mosier while drunk.] The new, improved Benedictines of the past half-century no longer regard the Rule of their sainted namesake as binding upon them. Its accurate summation of the specifics of their calling in the motto Laborare et Orare [to work and to pray] hardly seems appropriate to people who spend as much time or more in political and social activism, let alone gadding about and socializing, as in prayer and work.
"Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading" (Rule of Saint Benedict, chapter 48, § 1).
It’s bad enough that Ms. Boorstein would find these words risible; that Sister Smith also would — at least when she’s away from the microphones and the cameras — is part of the disaster of modernity, not simply that of unchecked Europhobic and Christophobic immigration.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.