Nurses lead largest protest during bishops' fall meeting in Baltimore

"Bishops, please use your voices to call upon Ascension to do the right thing and bring a real respectable proposal to the bargaining table so that these caretakers can work in the safest and most well-staffed Catholic facility in this community," Kittelson said. "The nurses and community need your support."

It was hard to tell whether any bishops heard the group outside the hotel where their gathering was taking place, but other Catholics showed up to support them.

"It's a Catholic hospital and it should follow Catholic social teaching," said Maureen Daly, of the Maryland Catholic Labor Network. "You have friends in the church and nationwide and right here in Maryland … when we see Catholic organizations betraying the principles of Catholic social teaching, we are scandalized. It gives scandal to the faithful."

Fr. Ty Hullinger, pastor of Transfiguration Catholic Community in Baltimore, also stopped by to pray and show support for the nurses.

"What you are doing is powerful. It feels new. It's also unsettling in the best of all ways because you're shaking up what should have been shaken up a long time ago and what was tried a long time ago," Hullinger said. "Hold on to one another and the collective power and strength and unity you have. You are showing other workers across Baltimore in other hospitals, other care centers, all kinds of workplaces across Baltimore, that when workers come together to unite, they will win every time. Fight for your rights, for the rights of those you care for."

Lisa Watson, of Ascension St. Francis Hospital in Wichita, Kansas, said staffing at hospitals is at the heart of what's important in Catholicism: life. Yet it's what's greatly lacking, she said.

"Appropriate staffing is the difference between life and death," she said. "As a Catholic, I pray that the community, the bishops and the entire Catholic Church will join together and fight this Goliath with us. Our patients deserve better and our nurses deserve better."

The nurses' rally was the largest of the gatherings outside the US bishops' meeting this year, which in the past has seen large crowds gather to call out bishops on their handing of sexual abuse or fringe groups voicing disagreement with Pope Francis.

This year, Robert Hoatson, of the group Road to Recovery, was the sole protester of clergy sexual abuse. Sitting in a lawn chair outside the meeting hotel of the bishops' conference, he held a bright pink sign directed at bishops that said: "Join Welby & Resign," referring to the archbishop of Canterbury who resigned Nov. 12 following allegations that he covered up abuse. 

"A courageous man in Great Britain yesterday, a clergyman, of the hierarchy, he resigned, appropriately," he told National Catholic Reporter Nov. 13. 

"It's what our bishops should have done decades ago," he said, after the discovery of decades of cover-ups.

Hoatson said he didn’t think the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, which the bishops instituted in 2002 to deal with abuse cases, was of consequence.

"All of the stuff that the church has done is cosmetic," he said. "All of these committees, they haven't done anything yet, if you notice. They keep saying, 'Well, we are vetting all the people who work in parishes and vetting all the people.' That's not who we have to vet. We have to vet the guys that covered up the priests and the other personnel, because we're not going to get anywhere."

Bishop Joseph Strickland, formerly of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, and removed from his post by Pope Francis a year ago after an investigation into his governance, also made an appearance Nov. 13 along with a group of supporters.

Strickland, a fierce critic of Pope Francis, said that while some of the bishops at the meeting were men of substance, he tagged them as "silent shepherds" and said church forces "have attempted to silence me."