Nuns Blast Bishops

The Washington Blade's Lou Chibbaro, Jr. reports that the National Coalition of American Nuns has compared the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to "blinded Pharisees" for reiterating its opposition to legalizing same-sex marriage at its annual meeting in Baltimore this week while remaining silent on anti-gay bullying and gay teen suicide.

...“More than a month has gone by since the media broke the news about a series of gay suicides,” the nuns’ statement says. “During that time, the U.S. Catholic Bishops failed to make a single statement regarding these tragic, preventable deaths.”

...In a separate statement, the LGBT-supportive group Catholics for Equality expressed concern that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops broke a long-standing tradition this week by not electing its current vice president, Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, Ariz., as the new president.

Kicanas, who Catholics for Equality describes as a “social justice champion,” was bypassed for the president’s position when the Conference of Bishops elected instead Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage equality and LGBT rights, according to Catholics for Equality.

The group noted that the bishops’ conference elected Archbishop Kurtz, the head of the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage, as its new vice president.

“Archbishop Kurtz … has led the Catholic hierarchy’s national campaign to deny marriage and family rights to gay and lesbian citizens,” Catholics for Equality said in a statement released Wednesday.

“That campaign has been financially assisted by the national office of the Knights of Columbus, most recently through the production of videos that demean and discredit gay and lesbian relationship, as well as single parent and extended family households,” the statement said.