Women Aren't The Problem

Thomas C. Fox, editor of the National Catholic Reporter, is bemused as the Vatican announces that it will study women religious (that is, nuns) in the U.S. with an eye to understanding why their numbers are dwindling. In his Feb. 20 Editor's Note, he writes that when the Roman Catholic church mounted an effort in the late 1980s to understand more about the role of women in the church, Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister said:

Women aren't the problem...patriarchy is the problem, sexism is the problem, male chauvinism is the problem, a skewed, distorted and enslaved theology of God is the problem. Write papers about those, indeed, but don't write one about women.