Today's issue of the New York Times (Sunday 25 October 2009) includes an editorial column from Maureen Dowd in which she comments on the role of women religious in the Catholic Church. She smoothly starts with a personal account from her childhood in which nuns are portrayed as overbearing and mean spirited. Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda. Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom. Sister Hiltruda looked ready to pop, but she couldn’t say a word to me, then or ever. There was no more unassailable patriarchy than the Catholic Church. Then she smoothly transitions into a full out slander job on the Church as a patriarchal institution , with particular bile offered for our current Pope. In 2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican doc...