Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
What’s So ‘Awesome’ About Those Shareholder Activist Nuns?
What’s So ‘Awesome’ About Those Shareholder Activist Nuns?
Dec 3, 2025 1:03 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
Kuyper on Creation and Stewardship
In Abraham Kuyper’s recently translated sermon, “Rooted & Grounded,” he explains that the church is both “organism” and “institution,” drawing from both nature and the work of human hands. Pointing to Ephesians 3:17, he writes that, “the church of the Lord is one loaf, dough that rise according to its nature but nevertheless kneaded with human hands, and baked like bread.” Yet, as he goes on to note, this two-fold requirement is not limited to the church, but also applies...
Advice for College Graduates on Money, Meaning, and Mission
Yesterday, Jordan Ballor explored the relationship betweenmoney and happiness, referring to money as “a good, but not a terminal good,” and pointing to Jesus’ reminder that “life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” Over at Café Hayek, economist Russ Roberts offers a panion to this, advising college graduates to have a healthy perspective about money and meaning when entering the job market: Don’t take the job that pays the most money. Nothing wrong with money, but it’s the...
Free primary education is a fundamental good. Isn’t it?
Private schools are for the privileged and those willing to pay high costs for education; everyone else attends public school or seeks alternate options: this is the accepted wisdom. In the United States, the vast majority of students at the primary and secondary level attend public school, funded by the government. When considering education in the developing world, we may hold fast to this thinking, believing that for those in severely impoverished areas, private education is an unrealistic and scarce...
What’s a Few Dead Eagles Between Friends?
There are currently two sets of laws in America: laws that apply to everyone and laws that apply to everyone except for friends of the Obama administration. In January I wrote about how the executive branch had argued that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 should be broadly interpreted in order to impose criminal liability for actions that indirectly result in a protected bird’s death. The administration used that reasoning to file criminal charges against three panies. The U.S....
Acton University Evening Speaker: William B. Allen
We are about a month away from Acton University, and another keynote speaker is William B. Allen. He is an expert in the American founding and U.S. Constitution; the American founders; the influence of various political philosophers on the American founding. He is Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science and Emeritus Dean, James Madison College, at Michigan State University. Currently he serves as Visiting Senior Professor in the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study...
Evangelical and Catholic Leaders Claim IRS Harrassment
After the recent admission by the IRS that employees targeted conservative groups, two prominent Christians e forward claiming they too were harassed for their political views. Franklin Graham, son of the famed evangelist, and Dr. Anne Hendershott, a Catholic professor and author, say they were audited by the IRS after making political statements that criticized liberal political groups. Franklin Graham recently sent a letter to President Obama saying that he believes his organization was also unfairly targeted for extra scrutiny...
Money is a Means
Over at Think Christian today, I lend some broader perspective concerning the link between money and happiness occasioned by a piece on The Atlantic on some research that challenged some of the accepted scholarly wisdom on the subject. The Bible is our best resource for getting the connection between material and spiritual goods right. I conclude in the TC piece, “As Jesus put it, ‘life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.'” Or to put it another way, we...
Affirmative Action Limits Opportunities For Asian Americans
One of the realities of using race to socially engineer the racial make-up of college freshman classes by elite decision-makers, is that it does nothing but perpetuate the injustice of institutional and planned discrimination. This is the greatest irony of affirmative action education policy. The attempt to redress past injustices does nothing but set the stage for new forms of injustice against other groups. Today, Asian-American high-school students are faced with the reality that, if they are high achievers, top...
Senator Cornyn Quotes Lord Acton on Abuse of Power
Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) took to the Senate floor yesterday and quoted Lord Acton’s well known dictum, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There’s a partisan bite to his words, but he mostly warns against the grave dangers and tyranny under concentrated and centralized power. Cornyn of course, is addressing the multitude of scandals blowing up in Washington, many of them linked to the White House. He also admits corruption has been a problem under both political...
‘Economic Growth: Unleashing the Potential of Human Flourishing’: Values & Capitalism Publication
Values & Capitalism, a project of the American Enterprise Institute, has published a primer of sorts entitled, Economic Growth: Unleashing the Potential of Human Flourishing. The text is just over 100 pages, and gives the reader a thoughtful, concise and essential source on free market economics and its correlation to human flourishing and economic growth. Authors Edd S. Noell, Stephen L. S. Smith and Bruce G. Webb say this about their work: [T]he core proposition of this book is that...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved