Lumping nuns in with the x-rated clerics is insulting
DIDN’T the nuns have a great treat on telly this week? There must not have been a prayer said after 10pm on Monday when My Massive C*** went out on Channel 4, all about the hellish reality of being saddled with an extra-large penis. Not that the nuns need any instruction in that department, you understand. According to Pope Francis, when they are not toiling in their convents or engaged in good works in their community, they are scrolling their iPhones on Pornhub.com and salivating over OnlyFans.
Oh okay, the Pope wasn’t that specific about the nuns’ choice of X-rated material. He just admonished them for giving in to their baser instincts, saying that priests and nuns, like men and women watch online pornography and that ‘the devil enters from there’.
Well, thanks for that, Pope Francis. For more than 2,000 years the Church has subjugated women, treated them as vessels of demonic, lustful temptation, either virgins or whores to be kept strictly apart from the hierarchy.
Nuns with next to no power and authority were only admitted to Church circles as handmaidens to cardinals and bishops, to cook and clean for next to no pay, rarely invited to sit at the tables they serve.
Yet for all the Church’s history of practising second-class citizenship, the first time the Bishop of Rome endorses equal opportunities is to lump nuns in with priests as equal consumers of porn. How insulting.
THE last time I looked, porn was still much like the Catholic Church, very much a male-dominated racket, whereby women were exploited and subjected to the ‘male gaze’ in exchange for an income. Most studies show that the ‘porn gap’ where men are more likely than women to view pornography on a daily or weekly basis is still set in stone. This appears to be the case despite the new legitimacy ‘sex work’ has acquired among libertarian feminists and the move to ‘ethical’ porn.
Who knows? Pope Francis may be familiar with a few nuns who regularly use porn as an outlet for sexual frustration, but they are a tiny minority compared to the numbers of clergy who indulge.
Not to conflate child sex abuse with pornography, but the former was the work of perverted clerics and their superiors who, in
seeking to cover up the scandal, subjected more children to potential abuse.
Whatever about the physical and emotional abuse of children and impoverished single mothers, nuns don’t have the stain of sex
abuse on their hands. It is not the female sexual urge but the male one that has heaped disgrace on the Catholic Church and led to calls for abandoning the vows of chastity and celibacy as the great panacea.
IT’S a pity that when Pope Francis thinks of advancement opportunities in his institution that women don’t spring as readily to mind as when he contemplates the great vices, like porn. True, the Pope appointed three women, two of them nuns, to the previously all-male committee
that advises him on selecting bishops, saying that he wanted to give women more influential positions in the Holy See.
He has permitted women to take on more tasks at Mass, allowing them serve at the altar and read scripture.
Although a cynic might say that many of his reforms are driven by pragmatic reasons like the shortage of priests, it often appears as if, short of female ordination, Pope Francis will do anything to keep his female flock onside.
In that sense his pointing the finger of blame at nuns for watching porn may be a rare misstep. It might spark an outpouring of righteous anger from our brides of Christ at the injustice of their being kept out of the priesthood, despite overwhelming support for female ordination from synods and public consultations.