In recent weeks, a number of angry voices have been raised to protest the Vatican’s inititative to investigate communities of American nuns. To give just one example, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin strongly critiqued the move, arguing that it represents just another example of an out of touch, patriarchal church persecuting those who refuse to cooperate with it. “These investigations,” Marin argues, “are about dissent in the Catholic church and how to stop it.” And this particular attack, she says, is directed at the very people who, for years, did most of the grunt work of the church, laboring away for slave wages, even as priests lived high on the hog: “While diocesan priests lived in rectories with more rooms than they could use…the sisters lived in tiny cells, did their own scrubbing and potato peeling and provided the church with a dirt-cheap work force.”