Still?
I had to triple check. But yes, the Left is still dragging the Little Sisters of the Poor through court over things like abortion pills. This has been going on for more than fifteen years and has taken them to the Supreme Court multiple times.
And now, despite multiple Supreme Court rulings protecting the rights of the Little Sisters to live out their charism to care for the dying and destitute elderly according to the dictates of their consciences, and new rules issued by the prior Trump administration codifying religious liberty exemptions to rules requiring employers to provide things like abortion pills in their healthcare plans, Democrats just won’t give up.
Specifically, Democrats in the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where state attorneys general are trying their darndest to make the nuns cover contraceptives and abortion pills in their healthcare plans.
It’s…weird? It’s creepy and weird and is also a part of a broader trend of mistreatment of women religious in our post-Christian culture.
Who can ever forget the mockery of nuns at the L.A. Dodgers’ game, which, as a part of a pride night, showcased men dressed in drag who go by the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” and who describe themselves as “an order of queer and trans nuns?”
And on America’s other coast, the state of New York is doubling down on its efforts to require another order of nuns that cares for impoverished cancer patients, the Dominican Sisters of Rosary Hill Home, to comply with a law that requires homes like theirs to allow patients of the opposite sex to use each other’s bathrooms. The nuns belong to an order founded by Rose Hawthorne, daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne and a convert to Catholicism. Of founding her order, she once said, “I set my whole being to endeavor to bring consolation to the cancerous poor.” I wrote about their case here.
But I couldn’t even begin to link to all the articles I’ve written about the harassment of the Little Sisters of the Poor because there are too many—because it has been going on for so incredibly long, even through the four-year tenure of a president who boasted constantly of his Catholic faith, and even through the Me Too movement, which purported to empower women to stand up for themselves against perverse sexual advances by men.
But men like Josh Shapiro, then the attorney general of Pennsylvania and now the governor and potential presidential hopeful, just won’t stop harassing nuns with their bedroom politics. Shapiro, along with another potential presidential candidate, Xavier Becerra, are the two key instigators of this latest round of legal harassment of the sisters. As I wrote in one piece on the case during the height of Me Too:
“Coming out in the midst of this, the Becerra-Shapiro suit to rope nuns into contraception has the same icky feel of men pushing women around. Or as Princeton professor Robert P. George put it: “Can someone tell me why taking a group of elderly nuns to court to force them to implicate themselves in providing contraception is not a form of sexual harassment?”
An attorney for the Little Sisters came on Conversations with Consequences this week to give an update. We went through the legal status of things, but I asked her how the nuns, who are not hardwired to be legal combatants, are holding up after so many years of harassment. Her answer moved me. She said:
“Their life’s work is serving and caring for the meekest of people. They’re not the type that are wanting to go swinging fists into the courts. How has this affected their outlook on things? The sisters’ eyes are on heaven. On truly eternal things. They are walking forward, day by day.
“Their charism is humility. It has been very uncomfortable for them to be in the spotlight at all. We’ll have meetings with them and they’ll be like, ‘Well, we need to get back to the home right now because we need to help feed our residents their lunch.’ Literally, spoon feeding.
“They are caring for people who can’t feed themselves and can’t afford to have other caregivers. ” She pointed out that their foundress, Saint Jeanne Jugan, “had to labor in anonymity” for much of her life’s work, which, too, is a part of their charism.
She continued:
“I think when you’re shaped day in and day out by the practice of being a caregiver—you just have this sense that God is in control and that he cares for the sparrow and that not a hair falls from the head of the residents in their homes. And [they] just keep walking forward with [their] eyes on him. That’s what I see and what I experience when I’m alongside them or visiting their homes.”
Leave the nuns alone and let them serve.
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