(RNS) Another day, another scandal. Maybe Catholics should hire a few nuns to investigate the Vatican. It’s about time some women entered church decision-making. Otherwise, this mess is not going to end.

Ours is not the first era when the church has been in a terrible state. The lack of women with personal or professional power over clergy has a lot to do with it, both now and then.

In the early church — say around the fourth century — bishops started arguing for a celibate priesthood because (they said) sexual activity demeaned and dirtied men, whose minds were better turned toward heaven. Some early bishops argued against marriage for anyone — priest or not — until realizing the church itself would disappear under that theory.

Over the centuries, rules for clerical celibacy tightened, even as they were widely ignored. Soon enough, the argument got nasty. In the 11th century, papal confidant and Benedictine monk St. Peter Damian was calling women “appetizing flesh of the devil” and “couches for unclean spirits.” By the time of the Council of Trent — the 16th century extravaganza bent on correcting just about everything — clerical marriage was definitively outlawed in the Western church.

It kind of puts the ban on women clergy in perspective. They kept women far from any power, then and since. It’s a male-run church, now steaming ahead full throttle in legalistic mode.

Shocking headlines pop up daily about what one or another Catholic bishop knew or didn’t know about pederasty in his diocese. From Munich to Milwaukee, across Ireland and into nearly every country in the world, the tales multiply.

What’s not been heard so loudly is the story of diversionary strikes emanating from the Vatican, perhaps aimed at discrediting U.S. nuns who built the charitable and educational infrastructure of the church.

Two separate investigations — one led by the Vatican department charged with overseeing religious institutes worldwide, another led by Pope Benedict’s successor at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — are burrowing into the lives and work of U.S. Catholic sisters.

The Vatican appointed an American sister to lead the larger investigation, but didn’t fund the effort. She’s asking the convents her teams are visiting to pay for the intrusion. Some say that is typical of how bishops treat nuns: ask them to do something, as well as the money to do it.

The other investigation focuses on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group for heads of most women’s religious orders and institutes. American Cardinal William J. Levada is directing a paper chase looking for doctrinal errors. He is the same man who called the (female) process server “a disgrace to the Catholic Church” when he was subpoenaed to testify about priestly pederasty.

Hello? What is going on? In the United States, not one bishop who oversaw pederasty or who used church money to break the minds and hearts of complaining victims has suffered any consequence. As Duquesne law professor Nicholas Cafardi points out in the lay Catholic magazine Commonweal, the only bishop to resign — Cardinal Bernard F. Law of Boston — got promoted to a cushy job in Rome. Law also belongs to the Vatican congregation that nominates bishops.

That’s right. The U.S. bishop who presided over the biggest pederasty scandal in history helps choose new bishops, and can even vote for another pope (at least until he turns 80 in November 2011).

As is clear to just about anyone on the planet, there is a virulent clerical myopia at home and abroad that keeps bishops who protected predatory priests in full regalia even as they spend the church’s money defending lawsuits about the most horrific abuse. The connection to misogyny needs to be investigated along with those claims of clerical abuse.

And, as the Vatican knows only too well, if you want a church operation to start and run smoothly, you better get a couple of nuns on board.

(Phyllis Zagano is visiting professor of theology and religion at St. Leo University in Florida and author of several books in Catholic studies. She also holds a research appointment at Hofstra University in New York.)