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All along, said one woman religious, the challenge has been to respond to the Vatican in a way that breaks a cycle of violence. She said that the women religious communities have attempted to respond by using a language "devoid of the violence" they found in the Vatican questionnaire and within the wider study. She characterized the congregation responses as "creative and affirming," and part of an effort to set a positive example in "nonviolent resistance."

"On the one hand we didn't want to roll over and play dead," she said. "So the question was, "How do you step outside a violent framework and do something new?' That was the challenge that emerged." One congregation, she said, cited a U.S. bishops' statement concerning domestic abuse in its response letter to Millea. "The point is, there have to be more than two choices: Take the abuse and offer it up, or kill the abuser."

Women religious, she said, are asking if there is a "Ghandian or Martin Luther King way" to deal with violence they felt is being done to them.

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Wow, all this talk of violence. All because of a questionnaire? They really sound whacked. No wonder there's an investigation. Nuns gone rogue.

Violence??? Let me show them some real violence and answer the question as to stepping outside the framework and doing something new.

1. Each and every congregation of rebellious nuns should be summarily suppressed by the Vatican permanently. It matters not a whit what their previous state of faithfulness had been 100 years ago. If they have become rotted sepulchres, they should be suppressed sepulchres ASAP.

2. On the quite reasonable theory of law that the property (real estate, money, trust funds, stock portfolios, artworks, or whatever are held by whomever in a "constructive trust" for the purposes of the Roman Catholic Church, B-XVI should openly declare those purposes as a preliminary measure to stripping the orders of property they or their lackeys hold for "the order." Follow up with rebellious male orders (Jesuits, Maryknoll priests and brothers and oh, sooooo many more), "Catholic" health institutions and "educational" institutions such as Notre Shame.

3. Let the Church itself take responsibility for those members of such communities who are medically verified to be too old or too infirm to care for their own basic needs. Laicize the rest and leave them to their own devices. If they love the world so much more than they love God, let them find worldly jobs and support themselves (White House, ecofraud organizations, "peace activism," or maybe some honest work as nurses caring for the AIDS victims, the lepers, the genuinely poor, perhaps in Haiti, the elderly and infirm of their own former congregations, etc.)

4. Allow individuals who had belonged to suppressed orders to APPLY for provisional membership in one new order to be established under strict Vatican rule. They may remain while in good behavior and be ecclesiastically vaporized upon a single instance of bad behavior evidencing reversion to the Marxist model. Each applicant must complete an intimidating personal questionnaire, vow absolute submission to papal authority in all things moral, and take the antiModernist Oath of Pope St. Pius X annually or monthly or weekly or maybe daily.