Thursday, March 18, 2010

This sister knows best

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, RSM, director of media relations for the USCCB, has posted an excellent piece on the multitude of problems surrounding the push by some other sisters to confuse Catholics and Congress on health care reform.

From the latest post on the USCCB Media Blog:
As someone who taught in Catholic schools, which Washington Post writer EJ Dionne attended, I applaud him for knowing sister is usually right. I can even excuse him for mistakenly accepting as true what a few dozen nuns said in a letter that was sent to Congress by Network, a nun social justice group.

Dionne made his case in a March 18 column titled “Listen to the Nuns” in the Washington Post. However, the signers he listened to were flat out wrong in many instances.

For example, they falsely said “we represent 59,000 Catholic sisters in the United States.” There were 55 names or groups listed as signers to the letter, with one, Sister Marlene Weisenback, signing twice (Does she have Chicago roots?). Sister Weisenbeck leads both the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) as well as her own community and signed for both. However, there are 793 groups of sisters in the USA, so there is no way that the 54/55 signers represent all the American nuns. Continue reading...

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