It's Sunday

The Clan of the Red Beanie, American Division, is in the second day of its annual shindig down in Atlanta, and it seems to have dawned on the bishops that they have something of a public-relations problem. And, stepping up to meet it head on is our own Sean Cardinal O'Malley, Archbishop of Boston, who ascended to his current position when Bernard Cardinal Law was transferred to a post at the Basilica Of Our Lady Of The Clean Getaway in Rome....

The recent Vatican crackdown on the largest organization of U.S. nuns turned into a public relations "debacle" for the bishops, said Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston. He complained that the Vatican's decision to put bishops in charge of rooting out "radical feminist" elements within the nuns' group was linked in the secular media to unrelated events, such as the bishops' investigation of the Girl Scouts, with negative consequences for the church's image. The bishops are looking into concerns that the Girl Scouts sometimes work with groups that promote access to contraception.  The U.S. church's image also has been hurt sex abuse scandals.

What was your first clue on that last part, Sherlock?

[...]

You don't need better flacks, Sean. You need better Christians. Ask the nuns. They'll show you how it's done.

[...]

The problem is not that the institutional Church has an image problem. The problem is that the institutional Church is openly insane right now, and everybody can see it. The institutional Church, desperately attempting to reassert the authority it squandered during its days as an international conspiracy to obstruct justice, is barging around the landscape, reeling like a crazy person drunk on absinthe, doubling down on policies concerning human sexuality that people stopped following in 1965, and making life difficult for the fking Girl Scouts. This is behavior unsuitable for an authoritarian middle-school principal in Donkey's Balls, Texas, let alone the Church of the Gospels.

  Charlie Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.