Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
What’s So ‘Awesome’ About Those Shareholder Activist Nuns?
What’s So ‘Awesome’ About Those Shareholder Activist Nuns?
Jan 11, 2026 9:07 PM

For some, the one quality most important for those pursuing a religious vocation is awesomeness. It matters not whether clergy, nuns and other religious adhere to the actual doctrines of their faith, whether they advocate for the poor and powerless and spread the Word of God. Specifically, Jo Piazza, author of the absurdly titled If Nuns Ruled the World, authored an advertisement disguised as a Time opinion piece for her recently released book. The Vatican, according to Piazza, doesn’t fairly recognize the awesomeness of nuns who stray from Roman Catholic doctrine in pursuit of progressive policy goals. And, according to Piazza, that’s bad. Very, very bad indeed. Because, you know, the activist sisters are really pretty darn awesome.

Rather, it’s far better to chase celebrity while sprinkled with the progressive fairy dust of awesome as are so many of the shareholder activist nuns who, in Piazza’s words, “make corporations responsible to the human race.” These selfless and progressive nuns, Piazza gushes, “don’t brag about all of the good that they do or hashtag how awesome they are on Facebook, many people have no idea about the things they plish on a daily basis.”

Here you go, Jo: #awesomeprogressivenun.

Make no mistake, there are many nuns doing the Lord’s work – and recognize it’s the Lord and not themselves and their works that are awesome. As a matter of fact, Piazza lists several of them in her Time article and in her book. This before she jumps the shark by asserting:

Most people don’t know about Sister Nora Nash, a Franciscan Sister who lives just outside of Philadelphia. As her order’s Director of Corporate Social Responsibility, Sister Nora wakes up every single morning determined to make corporations more responsible to the human race. Sister Nora and her assistant director, Tom McCaney have taken to task the grocery store chain Kroger over the rights of farm workers, Hershey’s pany over child labor, McDonald’s over childhood obesity, Walmart on raising their minimum wage and Wells Fargo over predatory lending practices. Nash wakes up every single morning determined to make corporations more responsible to the human race. Then she follows through on it.

For more than four decades Sister Jeannine Gramick has been tireless in her fight for gay rights through her organization New Ways, ing under intense scrutiny from the Vatican.

Get it now? Thwarting Vatican doctrine is awesome! Challenging mission drift of the Leadership Council of Women Religious has even earned a cute descriptor: “The Nunquisition,” e to think of it, also is a clever marketing slogan when one has a new book to sell.

It’s a problem that you haven’t heard about these women. You would think that, during a time when the Church has suffered from great criticism and weathered very public scandals, it would be celebrating these incredible achievements. Think again.

The Vatican doesn’t celebrate these women. In fact, it has done the very opposite. Attacks on American nuns have been happening since 2008, when the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life initiated an “Apostolic Visitation,” a euphemism for investigation, of the nuns.

To put it in perspective, previous “visitations” conducted by the Church were designed to investigate things like the priest sex abuse scandal.

The nuns nicknamed it the Great Nunquisition and in the past eight years e under scrutiny from the church patriarchy.

Everyone knows that the patriarchy is holding nuns back, right? Unless of course your patriarch and sugar daddy is the octogenarian progressive billionaire George Soros (see: Surprise! “Nuns on the Bus” was a Soros-funded publicity stunt). More Piazza:

A 2012 Vatican document highlighted the Church’s problem with the Leadership Council of Women Religious, the largest group of nuns in the United States. The document claimed that the LCWR was “silent on the right to life from conception to natural death” and that Roman Catholic views on the family and human sexuality “are not part of the LCWR agenda in a way that promotes church teachings.”

Today’s nuns are simply too progressive for the Vatican. The Vatican chooses not to celebrate nuns and it chooses not to empower them

So the Vatican “attacks” nuns? That’s a loaded phrase, as is the forced equivalency of Church scandals with nuns working at cross purposes with core doctrine. Piazza continues:

Speaking at the annual LCWR assembly earlier this month, Franciscan Sister Ilia Delio described exactly what it means to be a nun today: “We are about drawing in the poor, the lonely, the marginalized, all those seeking to be part of a whole,” she said. “This is nothing more and nothing less than the most awesome vocation.”

It is awesome. The nuns are awesome. But if the Vatican doesn’t start treating them as such, there is no incentive for more young women to aspire to join their ranks.

And those nuns who perform myriad good deeds every minute of every day are certainly fulfilling the calling of an awesome vocation in the service of an awesome God. But es Piazza who lumps those nuns truly assisting the neediest with those such as Nora Nash who simply advocate for progressive political causes masked as religious in nature.

One more for you, Jo: #progressivefairydust.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
How an Ex-Convict Learned to Worship Through His Work
Alfonso was looking for a “fast life,” and as a result, he got mixed up in illegal drugs and landed in prison. For many, that kind of thingmight signal the beginning of a patternor slowlydefineand distort one’s identity or destiny. But for Alfonso, it was a wake-up call. While in prison, he began to realize who he really was, and more importantly, whose he really was. He began to understand that God created him to be a gift-giver, and that...
Kishore Jayabalan: Will Upcoming Encyclical ‘Squander’ Papal Authority?
In anticipation of the new papal encyclical on the environment (reportedly due out this month, and titledLaudato si’[Praised Be You]), the press is seeking a way to make sense out of information “floating around” concerning the contents of the encyclical. At this point, no one really knows what the encyclical will say, although there are educated guesses. (See Fr. Robert Sirico’s discussion on the encyclical here.) Peter Smith at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette did a “round-up” of various Vatican watchers, officials...
What Would The Founders Do About Welfare?
es to mind when you think of poverty policies prior to FDR’s New Deal? For many people, the idea of pre-1940s welfare is likely to resemble something out of a Charles Dickens’ novel: destitute adults in the poorhouse and hungry children (usually orphans) eating a bowl of gruel. That impression is likely what we have about welfare in America during the era of the Founding Fathers. But is it accurate? “The left often claims the Founders were indifferent to the...
EcoLinks 06.03.15
Podcast: U.N. Secretary General Wants to “Join Forces” With Catholic Church? Chris Manion, Population Research Institute Ban Ki Moon, Secreatary General of the United Nations, wants to “join forces” with the Catholic Church to save the planet. Does Mr. Ban actually believe that Pope Francis will endorse the UN’s forced abortion and sterilization programs around the world? Ban Ki-moon urges governments to invest in low carbon energy Damian Carrington, The Guardian Ban also said, with a papal encyclical on climate...
Are Catholic priests mainly Republicans and Protestant pastors mostly Democrats?
Farmers tend to be conservative—at least until they retire, when the skew liberal. Those who serve in the Marines and Air Force tend to be Republicans while soldiers and sailors lean toward the Democrats. Golfers are the most conservative sports players while poker players at the most liberal. Those are some of the intriguing findings from a series of interactive charts by Verdant Labs that show the average political affiliations of various professions. To determine the political leanings, Verdant used...
Video: Os Guinness On The Power Of The Gospel However Dark The Times
Author and social critic Os Guinness joined us here at the Acton Building on April 28 (an event that had to be rescheduled due to an earlier encounter with the glorious mess that is Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport) to discuss his most recent book, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times. Many Christians today are discouraged by current events, and left wondering if the best days of the Christian faith are behind us. Guinness answers with a...
Christian Stewardship or UN Sustainability?
“’Sustainability’ has e big business, especially at universities,” says Kishore Jayabalan in this week’s Acton Commentary. “If there ever was an elitist/populist wedge issue, this is it, with Pope Francis and the Holy See on the wrong side of it.” So what exactly is meant by “sustainability”? The term originates in 1987 with the World Commission on Environment and Development’s report entitled Our Common Future: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present promising the ability of...
Radio Free Acton: Lela Gilbert on Saturday People, Sunday People, and the Threats They Both Face
On this edition of Radio Free Acton, we talk with Lela Gilbert – author, journalist, and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute – about her book Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel Through The Eyes of a Christian Sojourner, which details her experiences living as a resident in Israel; we also discussed the very real threat posed to both Christians and Jews in the Middle East by radical Islam. The podcast is available via the audio player below. ...
Now Available: ‘The Mosaic Polity’ by Franciscus Junius
CLP Academic has now releasedThe Mosaic Polity, the first-ever English translation of Franciscus Junius’ De Politiae Mosis Observatione, a treatise on Mosaic law and contemporary political application. The release is part of the growing series from Acton:Sources in Early Modern Economics, Ethics, and Law. Junius (1545–1602) was a Reformed scholar and theologian at the Universities of Heidelberg and Leiden, and is known for producing a popular Latin translation of the Bible and De theologia vera, which became “a standard textbook...
EcoLinks 06.02.15
Cardinal Turkson: together for stewardship of creation Cardinal Peter K.A. Turkson, Vatican Radio Despite the generation of great wealth, we find starkly rising disparities – vast numbers of people excluded and discarded, their dignity trampled upon. As global society increasingly defines itself by consumerist and monetary values, the privileged in turn e increasingly numb to the cries of the poor. Pope Francis endorses climate action petition Brian Roewe, National Catholic Reporter “He was very supportive,” Tomás Insua, a Buenos Aires,...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved