Késsinnimek - Roots - RacinesReactions from Our Readers
Réactions de nos lecteurs
by/par Norm Léveillée
Réactions de nos lecteurs
by/par Norm Léveillée
Several of our readers reacted to my article about the involvement of women in the Catholic Church's hierarchy. Here are their comments:
From Louise Dubrule:
Cher ami...yes, your proposal is radical, but no more so than our Nigerian chaplain two Sundays ago when he proclaimed the all-male clergy a rule of man, not of God. He went on to say that Christ would still come down to the altar if the celebrant were a woman. You are not alone in your opinion, I assure you. What's more, I'm not opposed to married clergy either. Our son in law (a convert from the Anglican Church by the way) is an ordained deacon in the Catholic Church. If a man is married when he's ordained, he can be a married deacon. But if he's single, he can't marry after ordination. God forbid, our daughter dies, our son-in-law cannot remarry. If he's carried out his duties well as a married man, why should it make any difference if he remarries? Makes no sense. The question: will we see a change in either aspect of priesthood? The answer: Probably not within my lifetime.
From Louise's son-in-law, Deacon David Reed, College Station, Texas
You are correct - the subject is closed. In 1994 Pope John Paul II formally declared that the Church does not have the power to ordain women. He stated, "Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church's judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. 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. Luke 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" (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis 4).As a follow-up, in 1995 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in conjunction with Pope John Paul II, ruled that this teaching (that the Church does not have the authority to ordain women as priests) "requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium (cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium 25:2)" (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - Response of Oct. 25, 1995).
So, as far as the Church is concerned, not only is the subject closed, all in communion with the Church are to understand it to be closed.
So, apart from the matters of Church teaching, why do people think that ordaining female priests be a good thing? Many argue that it would be a way of easing the shortage of priests. Unfortunately, this is a false hope. If we look at the closest analogy in the Protestant denominations that has allowed female clergy (the Anglican/Episcopal tradition), it becomes very easy to see this. The Anglican/Episcopal tradition has a chronic shortage, even worse than ours, and they ordain both women and married priests. I think the declining numbers of female religious in the Church shows that the thought of ordaining female clergy is really a dodge around the real issue: people's lack of understanding of vocation and commitment to it.
What do I mean by this? Particularly in Western Europe and the English-speaking world, we seem to have a cultural mistunderstanding on commitment and fulfillment. Parents discourage their children from religious vocations (priest/sister/brother - deacons are a bit different) for a variety of reasons: the child won't have material wealth (which reflects poorly on the parents), the child will not be able to provide grandchildren, or the mistaken perception that serving God through a religious vocation is not a real or fulfilling job.
In a similar sense, many couples who are getting married do not truly understand the vocation of marriage. Some of this is just the immaturity of young adults in the West these days - we have done such a good job of caring for them that they are really unprepared for life on their own when they leave their parent's house for college (or whatever happens in place of attending college). But a large part of this is a cultural misunderstanding about the nature of marriage - lifelong, committed, sharing, faithful, open to children, without force or fear. As much as people say that they think that marriage is for life, is a relationship of commitment, involves sharing and caring for each other, requires fidelity, must be open to children, and be entered into without outside force or pressure, they know that roughly half of all marriages end in divorce, that many of us have become so self-centered that it is very hard to be sharing and caring of others (and that including children in the mix means even less of the focus on ourselves), and that they are expected (by parents, grandparents, etc.) to get married. I wonder if some marriages that fail are the result of one or both of the members of the couple having failed to follow their true (religious) vocation - whether this is due to their having been pressured to ignore it and get married or their not recognizing it themselves.
Moving back to the main point, I have talked with young men who feel that they might be called to become a priest or religious brother, but have ruled it out because of parental disapproval. I have heard the parents of young people considering religious vocations yelling at priests. The reasons vary from parent to parent, but they boil down to the ones I name above: they are concerned that they will not have grandchildren or that their child will not have the material wealth or job satisfaction that they want them to have.
This problem of perception is not universal, and it is not irreversible - but it does call for a change of heart. Until it changes, we will continue to have a shortage of priests. Bishops deal with this by bringing priests to their diocese from lands where there is not a shortage of priests (Africa, Poland, Mexico). They also get a lot of complaints from parishioners who don't like that their pastors have accents or look different than they do or have different customs than they do. I know that my bishop does. I suspect that many bishops are forced to respond as mine has - by pointing out that if these parishioners had encouraged religious vocations in their children, we wouldn't need priests from other countries.
A note from my sister Rita:
Catholicism is just church laws. Why would they get rid of you, can you imagine how many so called catholics there are?????? Christianity is what it is all about. I like the idea, we need more women in the church doing the same thing as men. You have my blessings
In a recent Providence Visitor, there was an article entitled "Theologians strive to correct myths behind Mary Magdalene". This article was a reaction to all the discussion about Dan Brown's fictional book "The Da Vinci Code". They quoted a Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, a theologian at Fordham University and a Sister of St. Joseph. I am interested in the last two paragraphs of her comments:
Sister Johnson said that when one looks at the Magdalene's biblical role as the one the risen Christ appears to and commissions to announce the Good News to the others ithas many implications for how we tell the story of the origins of the church. There is the typical story of where Jesus chose the Twelve and put Peter in charge and the women, you know, were accessories. When you put Mary Magdalene into the picture, you can't tell the story that way so simply anymore.When asked for her own view of what that should mean for the church today, she said,I would draw the implication that if the risen Christ saw fit to ask a woman to go and preach the Good News of his Resurrection, the church should do no less nowadays.
