Catholic Girls Gone Bad

Two women on the road to sainthood and the future of the church.

Back in 2005 I was up for a Vatican gig, and I became a passionate Pope-watcher. It amazed me how many intrigues and internecine squabbles still gripped the Little City. Very interesting stuff. There is a Gossip Girls-type spinoff to be set there. Or maybe the last gasp of the reality show moment. Tons of bitchy dudes in skirts - what's not to love?

In any case, this week was a good week to speculate what's going on behind the gilt gates.

To catch you up: The numbers of Catholics are flagging, clearly, even dramatically in the western and developed world. The developing world are increasingly comprising an important faction, but are underrepresented in the halls of power. In the West, which Rome would like to keep, the church is facing a radical shortage of clergy, and the perennial issue of admitting women and married men has been on the front burner.

You can often trend-watch Catholicism by watching the saint machine (or the Offices of the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints). The two big names to come out in the heart of Advent this year seem to say a lot about Rome's evolving relationship with women... and troublemakers.

Mary Ward was a Yorkshire nun who founded what became the Congregation of Jesus and Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a radically liberated order for Catholic women for the 17th century. They attempted to buck the traditions of enclosure and cumbersome habits, wanted to educate young women, and in short tried to follow the extremely successful model of the Jesuits on the other side of the gender aisle. She was brought up for charges of heresy during her lifetime, and her order wasn't given the full go-ahead for a few hundred years.

Mary MacKillop followed a similar path in 19th century Australia, founding the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart. She was actually full-on excommunicated, owing to the rule of life she devised for her order. (The excommunication was later lifted.)

Both women just had miracles approved in the past few days (#1 Ward and #2 for MacKillop). This paves the road for Ward to be beatified and MacKillop to become a saint - the first who was ever excommunicated during her lifetime.

Is the Holy See signaling a climate change for women in the church? Or is this a bone for restless nuns under the papacy of the conservative Pope Benedict XVI? Tune in next week.

Also - some of you know I'm working on a project about miracles. (A puppet show about miracles to be specific.) As I've mentioned to some of you, the Catholic Church maintains that we continue to live in a miraculous age. This was some of the reason behind JPII ramping up the saint machine to unprecedented levels - to say that we live in a time of holy people and miraculous acts.

For those of you curious about what these miracles entail nowadays, they're not all grilled-cheese Jesuses. Both Ward and MacKillop were credited with medical miracles (healing tumors and the like), far and away the most common kind to pass the rigorous testing of the Vatican's miracle office.

Re: the time lag. Sorry for the hiatus, readers. When I first started this blog, I was trying to pitch it to Time Inc, who was losing the religion blog war to the vastly superior Newsweek/WaPo "On Faith" nexus. Now, alas, souped up religion coverage seems a relic of the early post-9/11 years. So, I decided to revive this as a more personal forum. Hope you enjoy.