CV NEWS FEED // The left-wing National Catholic Reporter (NCR) celebrated pro-LGBTQ nun Sister Jeannine Gramick as “News-Maker of the Year” this week. Earlier this year, Gramick publicly defended the Los Angeles Dodgers’ decision to honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI), an anti-Catholic drag troupe that mocks nuns.
“Congrats to [Gramick] on being named [NCR]’s newsmaker of the year,” NCR Senior Correspondent Heidi Schlumpf wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) Thursday morning.
Schlumpf called Gramick a “tireless advocate for LGBT Catholics and all-around nice person!”
“I support your honoring the [SPI],” Gramick wrote in a May letter to the Dodgers.
“While I am uncomfortable with the [SPI] using the nuns’ old garb to draw attention to bigotry, whether Catholic or not, there is a hierarchy of values in this situation,” she continued:
The choice of clothing, even if offensive to some, can never trump the works of mercy.
Just as I have great respect for Catholic nuns because of their compassion and good works over the centuries, I applaud the [SPI] for their financial assistance to those in need. I support them because of all their good works. I believe that any group that serves the community, especially those who are less fortunate or on the margins of society, should be honored.
That same month, CatholicVote reported extensively on the pervasive anti-Catholic bigotry of the SPI. In addition to mocking nuns, the troupe also has routinely and lewdly mocked the Holy Mass, Jesus on the Cross, and the Blessed Mother.
In September, an SPI member was arrested after he reportedly publicly masturbated in his car within sight of a family-friendly park.
“NCR continues its rapid decline into irrelevancy,” said CatholicVote President Brian Burch.
“It’s become clear the more heretical and aggressively supportive of the gay revolution a person is, the more NCR is enamored of them,” he added. “Makes you wonder.”
Burch further noted that “reasonable people can disagree on which is more of a mockery of the Catholic faith: the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence or the National Catholic Reporter.”
“To be fair, at least the ‘Sisters’ have the integrity to put on clown makeup,” he said.
The left-wing media outlet was founded in 1964. In the many years since, there have been multiple calls for NCR to drop the word “Catholic” from its name.
One of the most prominent instances came in 1968 when then-Kansas City Bishop Charles Herman Helmsing issued a statement condemning NCR.
“I send this communication to my brother bishops, and make known to the priests, religious and laity of the nation my views on the poisonous character of this publication,” he wrote:
[NCR] does not reflect the teaching of the Church, but on the contrary, has openly and deliberately opposed this teaching.
I ask the editors in all honesty to drop the term “Catholic” from their masthead. By retaining it they deceive their Catholic readers and do a great disservice to ecumenism by being responsible for the false irenicism of watering down Catholic teachings.
I further ask the editors and the board of directors, for the love of God and their fellow men, to change their misguided and evil policy; for it is evident to me that they have already caused untold harm to the faith and morals not only of our laity, but of too many of our priests and religious.
Sister Jeannine Gramick, 81, is the co-foundress of New Ways Ministry, an LGBTQ activist group that calls itself Catholic. Gramick and a priest jointly created the organization in the 1970s.
The Philadelphia-born Gramick is a member of the Kentucky-based Sisters of Loretto and has described herself as a nun for the last six decades.
