You would think that the Catholic Church would take a lesson from the recent failed GOP game plan and not publicly disparage women or presume that roles for women haven’t moved beyond older, male-centered views that refuse to see women as social equals.
After a 92-year old priest recently allowed a woman to participate by his side in a church liturgy, the Catholic church, that shielded pedophiles for years, acted quickly to strip Father Bill Brennan of his priestly functions because he dared challenge the church dictum that says women cannot participate in any role designated for men only. A ruling that has no basis for continuing in todays modern church.
According to Catholic Ecclesiastical Law, Canon 1024, women are unsuited for the priesthood. They may be suited for many functions within the church but Canon 606 points out that this equality stops at such things as the priesthood because such restrictions are supposedly “evident from the context of the wording or the nature of the matter.” The nature of the matter appears to be the dated view of old men, unlike Father Brennan, who presumed that if women were intended to be priests then Jesus would have selected one or more to be part of his core group of apostles. This follows the degenerative thinking of the hayseeds that believed if man was meant to fly God would have given him wings.
Seriously, a judgment call made by the dominant patriarchal culture of the patristic era of the early church viewing choices made within an even stronger patriarchal society in ancient times are going to hold this as an absolute for males only in the priesthood today? The point of all of this is that times change and so should certain traditions that have no intrinsic value in and of themselves. If institutional Christianity were to develop from some occult out of the mainstream today, as it did over 2000 years ago, women would clearly be on equal footing with men in their clergy selections because that’s how we roll today. (despite the fact that a few neanderthals like Limbaugh and Santorum still remain)
But the institutional church was formed when men were the only gender that counted back then and like all things that survive more than a generation or two, people become set in their ways and their existence becomes formalized in rules, codes and laws that evolve over time. The ecclesiastical laws, the antitheses of Occam’s Razor, are an example of decades and centuries of layer after layer of minutia within traditional organizations that tend to obscure the group’s original purpose and thus its attraction to large numbers of people. The duration of such minutia also tends to give credence to the notion that change is unacceptable and what was originally nothing more than a selective thought of handful of early leaders now becomes so ingrained in its institutional setting that merely willing a change in policy is considered heretical.
Father Brennan’s punishment for trying to bring the church back to its roots and enable it to survive in the 21st century was based on the same premise they claim to judge the offenses of a pedophile.
Pope John Paul II issued a letter in 1994 saying that the church “has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women,” and in 2010 the church included the “attempted ordination of women” among the list of grave crimes against its law, under the same category as the sexual abuse of minors. Grave crimes are punishable by defrocking or excommunication. SOURCE
So “the church” that established the rule in the first place now declares that it “has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women”. Isn’t there some pathological disorder with people who commit harmful behaviors to themselves and others but declare they are unable to control such senseless acts?
Jesus didn’t deliberately exclude women from his close followers. He had several. The church fathers that began to formalize christian teaching however, following Constantine’s acceptance of the once outlawed faith, saw fit to delete certain traditions and views that didn’t adhere to an orthodox agenda.
In her book, The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels illustrates that as persecuted Christians eased into the mainstream, they themselves began to condemn certain practices. The views of more conservative christians began to outnumber less orthodox views and ultimately ostracized the gnostic christians who essentially held that God was both father and mother and “believed that salvation lay not in merely worshipping Christ, but in psychic or pneumatic souls learning to free themselves from the material world via the revelation. According to this tradition, the answers to spiritual questions are to be found within, not without.”
This threatened the church fathers and their hierarchical design which followed the cultural norm of the day that put men at the top of the social pyramid. The women who played a prominent role during the life of Jesus were down-sized to minor roles. Culture and time took care of the rest that allowed the male leadership to justify excluding women. Clearly their control of the message over all this time has allowed this hoax to manifest itself. By wrapping their machinations around church dogma and doctrine any challenge to alter them are confronted with the alleged authority of God himself. What God has wrought let no man … try to make sense of.
If the Church really wanted to validate their claim to male superiority they would have killed off the virgin birth myth long before it became part of new testament canon. Apparently though the humanity of Jesus as the son of God required a human birth which of course requires the presence of a womb.
It seems clear that the new testament allows Jesus to give limited recognition to women but non-canonical sources gave greater latitude to their role and one of the gnostic gospels Pagel’s refers to in her book was the Gospel of Mary. In it, it shows even the apostle Peter looked toward her for words of encouragement shortly after the resurrection of the crucified Jesus.
a dying breed of leaders?
So listen up you silly old men who strut around in your dated robes. It’s the 21st century and the male-dominated precepts that disparaged the female gender all these years are a rotting carcass whose stench needs to be removed by burying it along with laws that force women to carry unwanted pregnancies and forbid them humane forms of contraception.
Human and social experiences evolve over time and try as you may to prevent this change you only diminish your own authority in attempting to do so. Time does indeed give value to things that endure but it also erodes those things that are false and cheaply made. There is no mandate from God that insists women should be excluded from the priesthood just as there is no super-natural authority that insists abortions are likened to murder.
We make the rules. We can change them. We read into ancient texts those things that fit our time/space continuum. Institutionalizing that which is destined to change is simply an admission that we fear the unknown and our own consternation that we can face it with any degree of courage.
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