Sister Arlene Welding: Off the Poor

Sister Arlene Welding: Off the Poor

December 5, 2008, 7:48 pm
Filed under: abortion, Nobama | Tags: abortion, Arlene Welder, Arlene Welding, Arline Welder, Arline Welding, disobedience, God is pro-choice, liberal Catholicism, liberalism, modern fascism, Obama, poverty, School Sisters of St. Francis

Arlene Welding is a School Sister of St. Francis, the Milwaukee motherhouse. Sister Arlene will just love you to death. No, seriously!

Arlene, identified incorrectly as Arline in an article in Cathnews USA, December 2, specializes in writing letters to the editor.  Somebody thinks she’s good at it, for in 2005 her order awarded her their Peacemaker certificate for “her letters on the sanctuary movement, HIV/AIDS, war, global hunger, the tax system, welfare reform, abortion and racism” which their website brags  “have reached countless politicians, editors and readers.”

Let’s hope not. Let us pray that readers snooze reading her ramblings. Let us pray that editors run them only because she is a sister, a dear School Sister, the respected voice of a Catholic nun, and fail to read between the lines. Sister Arlene is about as Catholic as a black widow spider.

Because Arlene Welding is a killer.

But only, of course, for the best of reasons. Only for a real good cause.

Here is a slice of one of Arlene’s recent letters. This one was printed, according to Cathnews USA in the Milwaukee Catholic Herald. After maintaining first that God, like our new president-elect, is pro-choice and that the bishops better ‘wake up and realize that 54% of Catholics who voted for Barack Obama do not agree with the bishops telling people how to vote,’ Arlene wrote,

“Yes, abortion is the killing of an innocent life. So is war and violent killing on the street. I have often seen many starving babies in hospitals in Honduras and witnessed their pain. In these cases, abortion might have been the lesser of two evils, and even the most merciful alternative.”

Oh, really now, Arlene? In ‘these cases’?  There are any number of poor little Hondurans who would just beg to differ. And Sudanese. And Americans. And didn’t some awfully poor little slumdogs just win an oscar for their cheerful zest for life in spite of poverty?

On the other hand, there are a great number of similar mercy-killers who agree. They are hoping Sister Arlene convinces the entire Catholic world that suffering is unspeakable, and the first guy with suffering in his agenda who should have been aborted was Jesus Christ. You know, that guy who taught us how to bear suffering and even to welcome suffering as a great privilege?  Born in a poor stable to boot!  How unspeakable!  Off with his little head! (And his arms! And his legs!)

What an economic, what a graceful solution to poverty: let’s off them! (But only when they can’t fight back. Only when they’re very small.)

I was a poor child.  Before my mother remarried and came back from wherever she’d been, I lived in the rolling hills of rural southern Illinois with my grandmother.  My grandmother’d married a good-looking Cherokee Indian, who liked his liquor straight up until it stopped his heart. Now she was left with my fatherless and apparently motherless brother and me and a tiny widow’s pension and what was left of his indian patrimony, all the rolling acres he hadn’t had time to drink, maybe a hundred.  She hadn’t a dime for seed.

We were hungry, sometimes. My mother hadn’t sent any money, then, from wherever she’d run to.  We ate dough in tomato sauce a lot. It was just after World War II, and lots of  dads were killed in it, including mine. In the summer we kids ran around in our underwear, because we didn’t have anything else.  In the winter we sometimes stayed in bed all day, for lack of stove coal.  Our lives, to Sister Welding, might have seemed—diminished, so diminished that Arlene would be downright kind to kill us. So she would like to think.

On the contrary, our lives were wonderful and full of God!  McLeansboro, Illinois, has a public library on the town square that my grandmother took us and visited regularly, and she  read to us every night by kerosene lantern, after we said our prayers. The well water was cold and sweet, and mint grew wild all the way to the outhouse, and I really liked dough in tomato sauce. My fat jolly indian-looking little Aunt Betty told us we were playing Three Old Bums in the Woods when we stayed in bed from the cold, and all the way under the covers she told us scary stories better than movies. If we had a quarter extra, we’d go for ice cream. No one was sad, well a little my grandmother sometimes, because she loved and missed her drunken indian husband. But she was the first to say, ice cream! And she won the zenia contest every single year! And sang in the church choir. Even her sadness was rich, because it came from love. Our lives were wonderful and full of God!

It is the most profound disrespect of the poor, the most profound misunderstanding of the poor, to assume they are unhappy. (It is profound disrespect of the rich to assume they are happy.) It is not the world’s goods, it is not even food, that makes happiness. It is love, love of God, love of family, love of community, that makes happiness. If Arlene had left the middle class shelter of her Honduran hospital (where I doubt babies were actually starving, since they so rarely do in hospitals, as in fact they rarely do in slums, but let us allow her at least a few clichés in her tired defense of abortion), if she had gone quietly and often into those slums and spent regular face time in the meanest tin-roofed shanties, she would have seen a much more complicated truth: that some people there were happy, and some people were sad, and some people were joyous beyond her wildest dreams.  To think otherwise is racist,  it is fascist, it is anything but Catholic. Let me add some more, just for the sake of my blood pressure: to think otherwise is stupid, white, petit-bourgeois, liberal, left-wing, infantile, disordered, radical, ignorant , and downright blindingly dumb. . . even the communists despised such. Faugh!

Arlene has simply no clue.  Suffering is redemptive.  No, really, Arlene! That is our Catholic secret. (Thank God I had real nuns who loved the poor and taught us that secret instead of killed us.)

I am going to write some letters myself. I urge you to do so as well.

Write the motherhouse. Snail mail: School Sisters of Saint Francis, 1515 S. Layton Blvd., Milwaukee WI 53215; email, generalate@sssf.org

Write the Milwaukee Catholic Herald.

Brian T. Olszewski, editor
The Catholic Herald
3501 S. Lake Dr.
Milwaukee, WI 53235-0913
The phone number is (414) 769-3466
Mr. Olszewski’s e-mail address is olszewskib@archmil.org

Write her bishop, William Patrick Callahan (he recently took over from former bishop Weakland) using the contact form at the diocesan website, http://www.archmil.org/contactus/email.asp

Write the archbishop:

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
3501 S. Lake Dr.
P.O. Box 070912
Milwaukee, WI 53207-0912
Phone: (414) 769-3497
Email: archbishopdolan@archmil.org

Write the head of the US’s Committee on Clergy, Consecrated Life, and Vocations, The Most Reverend Sean Patrick O’Malley, OSF, Archbishop of Boston, 2121 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02135-3192, or give him a call at 617 782 2544. I plan to ask him what he thinks St. Francis would have thought of using holy poverty as an excuse to kill the poor unborn.

Write the Vatican’s Congregation for Religious, Prefect civesva.pref@ccsrlife.va

or Secretary civcsva.segr@ccscrlife.va

Maybe one of them will take “Sister” Arlene Welding, School Sister of St. Francis, to (Catholic) school.

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