By Hilary White
ANCHORAGE, September 27, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – John Paul II did not like women and spent the entirety of his 26 years as pope working to put them in their “place” according to the new editor of the newspaper for the Catholic diocese of Anchorage, Alaska. On her personal weblog, Maia Nolan published a feminist diatribe replete with accusations that the late Pope was “an unbelievable misogynist.”
Maia Nolan began work on the paper September 8th replacing John Roscoe, the founding editor of the Anchorage Catholic Anchor. The comments have since been removed from the ‘blog, but have been cached by the Google search engine and are making the rounds of the internet, to the embarrassment of the Archdiocese.
At the time of John Paul’s death in April 2005, Nolan wrote, “This pope, this benevolent, everyone’s-best-friend, Karol-from-Poland pope, was an unbelievable misogynist. News flash, kids: JP2 did not like women.”
Writing under the pseudonym, “Myster,” and apparently referring to the late Pope’s reiteration of the Catholic teaching that women cannot be ordained as priests, Nolan wrote that the late Pope “spent the last 26 years working overtime to keep us in our place.”
“When it comes right down to it, all the globetrotting and rift-mending in the world doesn’t quite make up for the fact that Pope John Paul II obviously believed that, on a fundamental level, women are not as good as men: that we can’t hold the same offices or fulfill the same responsibilities, that we are unfit for service at the same level, and that we should generally be subservient in pretty much every way”
Other selections from Nolan’s ‘blog demonstrate a young woman with little grasp of the fundamentals of her religion. Describing herself as a “cafeteria Catholic,” on November 13, 2005, she wrote on the Sacrament of confession that she had done “a number of things that the Catholic church (sic) would technically consider confessable sins, although I don’t necessarily think they’re bad.”
Giving a new twist on the discredited “primacy of conscience” theory popular with liberals in the Church, Nolan writes, “The idea behind Reconciliation is that one should only confess those sins for which one is actually sorry and desires absolution.”
Nolan wrote of her hopes for the next Pope: “It would be nice to think that the next pope might be a little more progressive, a little more pragmatic. Of course, the College of Cardinals is packed with a bunch of old conservative guys who generally share the most recent pope’s reactionary approach to gender politics, so it would also be a foolish thing to think.”
Nolan did not return calls by LifeSiteNews.com deadline, but Mary Gore, assistant to the Anchorage Archbishop Roger L. Schwietz, said the comments were made when Nolan was in college and was the editor of the campus newspaper, long before she was hired by the archdiocese. “I’m not sure what the Archbishop is going to do,” Gore said.
Gore told LifeSiteNews.com that the Archdiocese had received complaints about Nolan’s comments from parishioners. “Bottom line is that it’s an internal policy decision. Right now Archbishop Schwietz is sticking by his editor.”
Catholics commenting at the website of Catholic World News, who broke the story, said that Nolan “must be removed” as editor of the Catholic paper where her opinions and feminist biases will inevitably cloud her editorial judgements.
Contact Archbishop Roger L. Schwietz
225 Cordova St.
Anchorage Alaska 99501Â
(907) 297-7700
See the website of the Catholic Achor
https://www.catholicanchor.org/index.html