Ed Peters has updated his canon law blog, where he writes:
While sacrilege is never funny, there is something comical about the recent spate of ladies climbing into river boats and play-acting as bishops and priests. Philippe Cardinal Barbarin however, second youngest elector in the College of Cardinals, was not amused when it occurred in the portion of the Lord’s vineyard entrusted to his care (Lyons, France) and yesterday he excommunicated a woman who was “ordained” a-boating by three other women (two of whom had already been excommunicated in late 2002 by then-Cardinal Ratzinger of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, subsequent to their own “ordinations”—admittedly on a different river). But behind the Lyon and CDF edicts of excommunication, which sensible Catholics are likely to regard as canonical “no-brainers”, there is, I suggest, at least one, perhaps two, aspects of Church law undergoing development here.
I saw this about a week ago. (By the way, if you want all the Pope/RCC news you can handle, and have a My Yahoo page, then add AP: Europe (Associated Press: Europe) headlines to it.)
It’s been a while but I only saw three women in the original Associated Press picture. It looked more like a strange female monk ritual than an ordination. The strange thing–and why it isn’t funny–is that the woman-false-priest is a Catholic theologian. It’s not made clear whether she was ordained by someone with the power to ordain anybody. I’m betting, but not promising, that a Bishop or legitimate clergyman did NOT do the ordaining.
Also, she considers herself fully a Catholic priest. She and her followers, in their own minds, are fully Catholic–just with a woman priest at the head of their “parish”.
It’s not laughable, really. “Those silly feminists!” No, not funny. Souls are at stake here. Again, we appeal to God’s mercy to care for the illegitimate sacraments people under her care will receive.
See, on the surface, people will just see, “They are fully Catholic, they just ordained a woman, and we don’t have problems with a female priest” without understanding how the succession of Peter really takes place.
If you think this is a laughable circus, imagine what it might be like to have a bishop actually [attempt to] ordain a woman. I’m afraid I have reason to fear that it could happen. :-/
If we are to convince people that a woman ordaining herself on a boat is not the way of things, then we have a lot of work to do. We need to educate people about the sacrament of ordination (and why people can’t just ordain themselves) and why women aren’t called to this.
I admit, I draw a blank when asked why women can’t be priests. I know there’s more to it than, “Jesus only picked male apostles”. Can someone give me a clear and concise explanation (or a link to one?)
P.S. As a self-professed Catholic theologian, she’s obviously trying, but is misguided. Let’s pray for this false-priest, and not ridicule her as just another feminist freak show, okay? I have issues with people making fun of others gone astray; it seems to be more of a relief mechanism than actually willing any good out of the situation.
Here a link:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_22051994_ordinatio-sacerdotalis_en.html
Ed Peters writes:
Heh. And presumably to any and all (human) people who might happen to be in places not on earth as well. 🙂
That is, prescinding from the issue raised by now-Benedict XVI as discussed in this subsequent post (as the Holy See’s jurisdiction would seem not to extend to non-human persons of extraterrestrial origin, if any), even if the feminists were to carry their shenanigans into orbit or even further into space, they would continue to be subject to thee jurisdiction of the Holy See.
Thanks John Henry.
But is there someone else who can explain why women are not called to be priests? Any other publications?
This one just seems to say:
* “It’s just tradition”. I know that Jesus asked that we carry on the same traditions, and that that’s the whole reason why the Bible alone is not enough, and why we have our Church. Tradition where it matters is great; I just question a tradition where it might possibly be a meaningless one in God’s eyes.
* “Christ picked men” (sure, men had a clear advantage in those days, they were not encumbered with kids–or if they were, it didn’t seem to matter so much to leave for months on end; they were seen as brave people who were taken seriously to an extent kid-encumbered women just weren’t always, when it came to going forth and changing minds and making a difference). Who in their right mind would pick kid-encumbered women to go out evangelizing in strange lands, and who would listen to them? This is a time when Jewish men took more than one wife, and… women just weren’t being treated as equals–let’s not rewrite history here and say they were, and that Jesus had the pick of the crop from women and just chose not to ordain any.
* “Christ didn’t ordain Mary” (which means nothing; her role is complete as it was),
* and a pat on the head: “You women are irreplacable. You have your own role to play in the Church. See how we revere Mary?” I’m not saying the reverence for Mary is not sincere.
This is all well and fine but I need more detail, not in the spirit of feminism, but in the spirit of, “Are we making a huge mistake?” Jesus didn’t recruit lots of kinds of people to be disciples; the “maleness” of the twelve he chose could be something they happened to have in common, but it could have been a choice made entirely for cultural reasons or chance. How do we know for sure?
Even the Church admits that statistics have outliers, if what we’re going after is certain criteria for what makes a person a good “leader”, or “intellectual”, and so forth.
I seem to have read something more compelling in the past and hope I can find it again, through your link submissions.
I just want to know why they always do these things on boats.
Ed Peters covered that. It seems to be an attempt to evade territorial jurisdiction.
Lurker–
Beyond the standard reasons that can be founded anywhere, I find the following argument extremely useful because it is not technical and forces the real issue to be dealt with, which is the nature of a priest (and am trying to get it propagated):
Women cannot be priests because the word priest is gender specific and limited to males. The generic religious word that is used to refer to women who hold a capacity as a “consecrated mediator before their god(s) on behalf of the people that they represent” is “priestess”. The question is “Why cannot women be priestess?” In order for this question to be answered properly, one must answer, why historically there have never been priestess in the Catholic-Moses-Abraham-Pre-Abraham religious tradition. One cannot answer that with reasoning that suggests that women were second class citizens so God didn’t allow priestess at that time period. All one has to do is to look at the content of the scriptures, both new and old testaments, to see the lofty heights that women were placed to show that the reasoning has nothing to do with sociological issues. The reasoning has to do with the nature and functioning of the activities of a priest as opposed to priestess. In other words, if the activity of a priest and priestess were exactly the same, God must consider the activity of a priest to be superior to the activity of a priestess or He would not have only created priests. The reasoning behind this lies in the fact that Christ is the single and sole high priest of God, to which the priests before His coming were signs, and the priests after His coming were icons.
Therefore, the discussion that should be taking place, and the discussion that those women who are trying to be priests, is why did the Son of God become human and a human male at that?
That discussion, I shall leave to greater minds than I.
Lurker –
Also, there’s:
“Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” – Saint Pope John Paul The Great – Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
He wasn’t defining an infallible judgement, but his language suggests that to continue believing that women may be ordained after this declaration is quite clearly heretical. He clearly felt that the fact that women may not be ordained was infallible and did not need to be redefined by him.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I have submitted my will to the will of Christ’s Church. If His Church says women cannot be ordained why even try to find a reason to ordain women?
Brian
Yes, I ultimately submit to the Church as well. The thing is, sometimes I’d just like to understand the “why”s. Like I said, I think I read something convincing a while back, but can’t remember what it was or exactly what it said. 🙂
+J.M.J+
Here’s an old article arguing why women can’t become priestesses:
Why the Church Can’t Ordain Women?
http://home.nyc.rr.com/mysticalrose/ordain.html
Though some of the arguments may need to be buttressed or retooled slightly with the advent of so-called “gay marriage.”
In Jesu et Maria,
That was a very good link, Rosemarie, thank you very much!
Thanks, Rosemarie, for the link. It’s the first one that recognizes what is IMHO the core question of the whole issue, namely, why is gender fundamentally different from other categories such as race and class which have previously been used to place ceilings on people’s aspirations. One of the biggest changes of the last two centuries has been the abolition of arbitrary ceilings placed upon people’s aspirations by chance circumstances of birth, as opposed to each person’s individual talents and abilities. So any response to women’s desire to aspire to the priesthood must address the question of why gender should be considered a legitimate and immutable categorical disqualification, whereas categories such as race and class are clearly not. Otherwise it ends up looking like the exclusive club protecting its turf for the sake of exclusiveness — and thus inadvertantly making it all the more desirable for being placed out of reach.