Whatever LA Dodgers decide, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence need a change of habit | Opinion

This year’s Pride Night for the Los Angeles Dodgers is not until June 16th, so the team has time to invite and uninvite the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence a few more times before then. But wherever they’ve landed when the first pitch is thrown, they will have succeeded in agitating both many Catholics and those who see nothing wrong with attacking them just for being who they are and believing what they believe.

What I’m about to say is not going to please either the Catholic League or the defenders of the “sisters,” either, though not because I’m pulling a muscle trying to please everyone.

First, I’ve been aware of the group of gay and trans men dressed as nuns almost as long as they’ve been in existence. When I moved to San Francisco right after college in 1980, they were already a big deal in the Castro, which I walked through every day on my way to and from my job in the Mission District, where I worked with some actual sisters in the center they’d founded for women leaving violent relationships.

As a young woman, this daily trek through the gay mecca could not have felt safer, and the “sisters” were far from the wildest act in that pre-AIDS boys’ town of refugees from someplace less accepting. Then as now, drag performers posed no threat to me, though I later did wonder why Rudy Giuliani never seemed to pass up a chance to put on a dress and full makeup.

So I doubt that I ever thought to mention the faux nuns, who went by names like Sister Hysterectoria and Sister Missionary Position, to the real ones. I don’t recall Rebecca Rodriguez, of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, or Catherine Donnelly, of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, ever bringing up their imitators, either; as Tina Fey said in her SNL skit in praise of sisters and other b-word badasses, Rebecca and Catherine were busy getting stuff done. They served mostly Latinas from the neighborhood, along with some sex-trafficked and homeless women from the Tenderloin, giving them job training and then employment. (Also, love.)

Every day, I saw women who’d come to us in terrible shape holding their heads up again, which is how I know that’s not just an expression. Sometimes, this new confidence made them all but unrecognizable, and the whole thing was gorgeous to witness, right up until the day the Reagan administration killed the Quest Center, along with other federally subsidized job training programs.

All that, of course, was a lifetime ago. But everything that’s happened between then and now for real sisters like my first boss Rebecca, who died five years ago, makes me wish that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence would rethink satirizing some of the best allies the LGBTQ+ community ever had.

When no one else would care for indigent AIDS patients, who did? The Sisters of Charity of New York, at their now defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan.

That order, like others, recently announced that their ranks have so thinned that they’re nearing “completion.” In secular terms, they are going out of business.

Sisters of Mercy left Kansas City

Two years ago, I wrote about the last Sister of Mercy, from an order that had served here for 134 years, leaving Kansas City. On her way out of town, Sister Jeanne Christensen, who spent most of her career in affordable housing and still works to combat human trafficking, “liberated” the statue of the Virgin Mary from the group’s abandoned original convent, and took it with her back to Omaha. Should her order’s always progressive service to the powerless be belittled?

I’m with Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw, who said his problem with his team honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence “has nothing to do with the LGBTQ community or Pride,” which caused no controversy the last nine years, “or anything like that. This is simply a group that was making fun of a religion,” and that’s something, he said, that “I don’t agree with.”

Would you be all for honoring a group derisively dressed up like rabbis or imams? No, surely. And that the target is not the powerful but those who have stood with the community in the margins make the slap even less defensible.

These are women who not only took a vow of poverty but in many cases never drew a salary, which is why so many are now indigent themselves. Women who taught and nursed and fed and clothed the poor never deserved this group’s “satire,” though I’d call it by a different name.

And now that the sisters and their orders, too, are the ones who are dying, the dismissal of all they are and have done is less amusing than ever.

The website for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence describes the group as “a leading-edge Order of queer and trans nuns” who “believe all people have a right to express their unique joy and beauty. Since our first appearance in San Francisco on Easter Sunday, 1979, the Sisters have devoted ourselves to community service, ministry and outreach to those on the edges, and to promoting human rights, respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment. We use humor and irreverent wit to expose the forces of bigotry, complacency and guilt that chain the human spirit.”

Their site also says that “since our founding in 1979, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have raised and distributed over one million dollars to non-profit organizations that serve needy communities. Each year, we raise thousands more.” Giving away thousands of dollars a year is all to the good, even if their defenders have been making them sound like a gay United Way. They without any question deserve all kinds of credit for throwing the world’s first benefit for an AIDS organization. And in the early years in particular, their service in educating their community about safe sex no doubt saved many lives.

But as Sister Luisa Derouen, a Dominican Sister of Peace who has ministered in the trans community since 1999, asked in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter, why did they and do they have to demean her in the process?

“Women religious have been, and continue to be, (their) best allies in the Catholic Church,” Derouen said. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence do “marvelous work. I don’t deny that at all,” she said. Then her voice cracked as she asked, “But why do they do it at our expense? Why do they have to degrade my life to do it? To me, it feels like dragging my life in the mud. We don’t deserve that.”

No, they don’t.

Using bigotry to protest bigotry

Several other sisters who minister to the LGBTQ+ community told NCR they were not offended. One of them, Loretto Sr. Jeannine Gramick, said that’s in part because so many members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have been wounded by the institutional church — told they were going to hell, thrown out of the confessional and more. “This is their way of expressing their hurt,” she said. “My discomfort” over their appropriation of the wimple and scapular is real, but “nothing compared to what some of these individuals have suffered.”

Only, they haven’t been made to suffer by these women, who in not a few cases have been as mistreated by the church they’ve served as anyone.

Making women religious an object of derision over the sins of some of the same men who have also marginalized and investigated and ignored and exploited real sisters is neither fitting nor fair, and it’s certainly not using “wit to expose the forces of bigotry.” Instead, it is bigotry.

There are a few bishops I can think of, like the one in Fort Worth, Texas, who is being sued by some cloistered Carmelite nuns over his alleged pressure campaign to get a sister so ill she’s on a feeding tube to confirm a report that she’d broken her vow of chastity at some point — an accusation she absolutely denies — who would at least make more deserving targets.

They wouldn’t have to change their look too drastically, and even the pope has suggested that some of those in the clerical club have become vain about their lace cuffs and jaunty hats.

But no, that would still be mocking people for their religion, which is no more OK than deriding them for their orientation or identity. And whatever the Dodgers do, the “sisters” will still owe the sisters the same respect they claim to want for everyone.