This detail turned up in an early draft of this report on the “order” by OSV News:
Dodgers starting pitcher Clayton Kershaw called for the relaunch of the club’s annual Christian event, which had been on pause since the COVID pandemic, after the team said it would proceed with feting the LA Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence during a June 16 Pride Night game. The invitation had been briefly withdrawn after protests, but reinstated with a public apology to the group from the Dodgers.
According to its website, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence – founded 1979 in San Francisco, are a decentralized organization counting an estimated 1,000 members globally – that uses “humor and irreverent wit,” often sexual in nature, “to promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt.” Members don drag-style makeup, religious habits and names such as “Sister Jezabelle” and “Pope Dementia the Last.”
In April, the San Francisco Sisters group held its annual Easter Sunday party at a San Francisco park, featuring a “Foxy Mary and Hunky Jesus” contest, with costumed participants parodying the events of Holy Week and the Triduum to a laughing crowd.
The LA Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence – a separate, self-described “house” of the broader organization and the one at the heart of the Dodgers’ controversy – began in 1995 and was set to receive the Dodgers’ Community Hero Award for charity work.
In an email to OSV News, a member who goes by the name Sister Unity said that “a number” of the LA Sisters “are practicing Catholics,” with one in Los Angeles “a deacon (who) helps families bereaving the loss of a family member.”
That last piece of information turns out to be inaccurate. OSV News sought clarification after the report was published, and later added this paragraph:
However in a follow-up by OSV News June 2, Sister Unity admitted to having potentially “misunderstood the (church’s) nomenclature” and clarified the member was not an ordained deacon, but was allegedly a bereavement minister certified by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
The LA branch has this to say on its website:
We are an Order of 30th Century Nuns dedicated to the promulgation of universal joy and the expiation of stigmatic guilt. Our ministry is one of public manifestation and habitual perpetration.
More simply put: we make people happy, stamp out guilt brought on by a judgmental society and help various organizations and charities.
The Sisters were founded to bring flamboyant hilarity to serious causes and to amplify voices needing a power lift. To that end, we manifest, womynifest, and nonbinarifest at public & private events as activists, as performers, and as fundraisers. We accommodate requests from organizations to do unspeakable things at their events to uplift souls and boost the experience of Queer identity. Feel free to reach out to us if you have such an event which we might ruin… er… enhance.
