Pope Denounces Dissident Priests

(Independent.ie) Pope Benedict XVI has issued a blistering denunciation of priests who have questioned church teaching on celibacy and ordaining women, saying they were being selfish in disobeying his authority.

The Pope made the rare and explicit criticism from the altar of St Peter's Basilica in his homily on Holy Thursday, when priests recall the promises they made when ordained.

In 2006, a group of Austrian priests launched the Pfarrer Initiative, a call to disobedience aimed at abolishing priestly celibacy and opening up the clergy to women to relieve the shortages of priests.

Last June, the group's members essentially threatened a schism, saying the Vatican's refusal to hear their complaints left them no choice but to "follow our conscience and act independently".

They issued a revised call to disobedience in which they said parishes would celebrate Eucharistic services without priests, that they would let women preach, and they pledged to speak out publicly and frequently for a female and a married priesthood.

The group now claims more than 300 Austrian priests and deacons as well as supporters in other countries, and its influence has grown to such an extent that top Austrian bishops met Vatican officials in January to discuss how to handle them, Italian news reports said.

So far, neither the Vatican nor the archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn have publicly imposed any canonical penalties on them.

In his homily, Benedict said the dissidents claim to be motivated by concern for the church. But he suggested that in reality they were just making "a desperate push to do something to change the church in accordance with (their) own preferences and ideas."

"We would like to believe that the authors of this summons are motivated by concern for the church, that they are convinced that the slow pace of institutions has to be overcome by drastic measures, in order to open up new paths and to bring the Church up to date," he said. "But is disobedience really a way to do this?"

www.vatican.va (The Vatican)

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• Pope Denounces Dissident Priests  

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• Cardinal Schonborn Overrules Priest, Allows Partnered Homosexual on Parish Council

Female priests push Catholic boundaries

Minnesota is home to a small movement of women (not) celebrating mass despite Vatican prohibition.

By Rose French

(Star Tribune) Dressed in a priestly white robe and green stole, Monique Venne lifted communion bread before an altar -- defying centuries of Catholic Church law.

Despite promises of excommunication from the Vatican, she and six other women in Minnesota say they are legitimate, ordained Catholic priests, fit to celebrate the mass. They trace their status through a line of ordained women bishops back to anonymous male bishops in Europe.

"We love the church, but we see this great wrong," said Venne, 54, who cofounded Compassion of Christ Church, a Minneapolis congregation that just celebrated its first anniversary. "Not allowing women to be at the altar is a denigration of their dignity. We want the church to be the best it can be. If one leaves, one cannot effect change. So we're pushing boundaries."

Minnesota has emerged as a hotbed for the growing movement to ordain women as priests, with the highest per-capita number of female Catholic priests in the nation, according to the organization Roman Catholic Womenpriests. Women priests are working in the Twin Cities, Red Wing, Winona, Clear Lake and soon St. Cloud. The group claims about 70 women priests in the United States and more than 100 worldwide.

Several Protestant denominations have allowed women to be ordained ministers for decades. But the Catholic Church views an all-male priesthood as unchangeable, "based on the example of Jesus, who, even though he had revered relationships with women who were his disciples, chose only men to be his apostles," said Dennis McGrath, spokesman for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

"Women who claim to have been ordained Catholic priests in fact have no relationship to the Catholic Church because their ordination is not valid," he said.

Dozens of congregations

An increasing number of Catholics disagree with the church on this. In a poll last year by the New York Times and CBS, 59 percent of U.S. Catholics favored letting women become priests, with 33 percent opposed.

That's encouraging news for Roman Catholic Womenpriests, founded nearly nine years ago in Europe. It began after seven women were ordained aboard a ship on the Danube River by three male bishops. The group claims their ordinations are valid because they conform within the bounds of "apostolic succession."
"I do believe we are connecting through the original church, which started with the apostles," said Regina Nicolosi, 69, of Red Wing, who became bishop for Womenpriests' Midwest region in 2009.

Dozens of U.S. congregations are being led by women priests, a movement many Catholics view as a means to solving the church's problem of declining numbers of male priests. Roman Catholic Womenpriests is the first group to claim "apostolic succession," said Marian Ronan, associate professor at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif.

The church sees that as a threat to its authority, Ronan said.

The Vatican issued a pronouncement in 2008 that women who sought ordination and bishops who ordained them would be excommunicated. Last year, the Vatican also labeled female ordination a delictum gravius, or grave crime...

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Catholic Priest Faces Dismissal for Support of Women's Ordination

Warning:  Barf Alert

From change.org:

by Alex DiBranco

Father Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic priest of 39 years, felt obligated to speak his conscience -- and it told him that women should be allowed to be priests too. His outspoken opposition to sexist discrimination could cost him dearly, however, as he now faces dismissal from his position and excommunication.

The Women's Ordination Conference (WOC) has launched a petition on Change.org in support of Fr. Bourgeois and other Catholics who believe that women deserve the same clergy rights as men in the Church. "I cannot possibly speak out about injustice in society and at the same time be silent about this injustice in my church," Bourgeois affirmed. WOC -- along with cosponsors the Association of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, Call To Action, and Roman Catholic Womenpriests-USA -- wants the Vatican to know that a respected priest shouldn't be kicked out for supporting women's ordination when there's no scriptural prohibition for this practice.

"After much reflection, study, and prayer, I believe that our Church's teaching that excludes women from the priesthood defies both faith and reason and cannot stand up to scrutiny," Fr. Bourgeois wrote in response to his threatened removal from office in the Maryknoll Catholic order. 'This teaching has nothing to do with God, but with men, and is rooted in sexism. Sexism, like racism, is a sin. And no matter how hard we may try to justify discrimination against women, in the end, it is not the way of God, but of men who want to hold on to their power."

Bourgeois and his lawyer, Fr. Thomas Doyle, have challenged the dismissal, which came from the Maryknoll leadership under pressure from the Vatican, on the grounds that the ban on women priests is not infallible doctrine. They want theologians to look into the current system and see if it doesn't need an update -- the Roman Catholic Church is now lagging behind other Christian denominations that have welcomed women into the clergy. One woman writes as her reason for signing the petition in support of Fr. Bourgeois: "My mom and my sister are both ordained priests (Anglican), and the world did not end when they celebrated their first masses."

Over the past decade, 120 women priests and 10 female bishops have [not] been ordained by the Roman Catholic Church...

Read More Here

On the impossibility of women's ordination in the Catholic Church

From Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP, Ph.D.:

"Given that a tiny group of ecclesial dinosaurs here in the U.K. are plastering London buses with pro-WO ads, I thought it might be time to revisit the issue in some detail.

Below is a piece I posted back in 2008 at the request of a young Dominican friar who was asked about the Church's teaching on the impossibility of women's ordination to the Catholic priesthood.

It's long, but I promised detail, right?!

________________________________________________________________

First, notice the origin and ground of the objections. All of them are based on one or more of the following mistakes:

a) Priesthood is about power
b) "Access" to the priesthood is about rights and justice
c) The "exclusion" of women from the priesthood denies humanity of women. . .
d) . . .and it denies their proper place as potential "Christs for others"
e) All exercises of Church authority are excluding
f) Tradition is always about male privilege
g) Women would make better priests because of their natural empathy and compassion
h) Jesus' exclusion of women from the priesthood was culturally based and therefore reformable
i) Scripture is silent on the nature of the priesthood b/c it is a third century invention of males
j). Women report feeling called to the ordained priesthood, therefore the Church ought to ordain them.

Let's answer (briefly) each in turn.

Priesthood is about power. No, it's not. Priesthood in the Catholic Church is about service. Do priests often mistake their office of service as a privilege in the use of power? Yup. But that's an abuse of the office and in no way changes the actual nature of the office. Men are ordered to Christ, Head of the Church, to serve his people as he did: sacrificially in leadership. When supporters of women's ordination (WO) claim that women must be allowed to share in the governance of the Church as priests, they mistake the office for a political one.

"Access" to the priesthood is about rights and justice. Wrong again. The only right a Catholic has as a Catholic in the Church is the right and duty to serve others. Justice is getting what one deserves. No one--not even men--"deserve" to be ordained, to serve as ordained priests. To claim that ordination is a right is bizarre given that men are called by God and confirmed by the Church to be priests. This use of democratic rhetoric is attractive but misplaced. You cannot be the subject of an injustice if you have no right to that which you have been denied. I am not being treated unjustly b/c I cannot vote for the next Italian presidential election..."

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• On the impossibility of women's ordination in the RCC

h/t to tantamergo
song: I am Woman, with John Edwards

Bishop Amos issues statement on ‘ordination’ of women

 

Wednesday, May 26, 2010 11:28 AM CDT

(Bishop Martin Amos issued the following statement May 25:)

 It has come to my attention that the issue of the “ordination” of women to Holy Orders has been raised in the Diocese of Davenport. With the following statement it is hoped that the position of the Roman Catholic Church is made clear.

The role of women has been held in high regard by the Church for centuries. As one example, the late Holy Father, John Paul II wrote in his 1988 apostolic letter to women entitled, “The Dignity and the Vocation of Women” (Mulieris Dignitatem): “the Church desires to give thanks to the Most Holy Trinity for the ‘mystery of woman’ and for every woman — for all that constitutes the eternal measure of her feminine dignity, for the ‘great works of God,’ which throughout human history have been accomplished in and through her” (No. 31, www.vatican.va). The absolutely vital role of women in the Church extends to all women through the example of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ.

The need for the Church to respond to the “ordination” of women was addressed in an apostolic letter from Pope John Paul II dated May 22, 1994, “On Ordination to the Priesthood” (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis). Quoting Pope John Paul: “[4.] 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. Gospel of 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.” (www.vatican.va)

The current decree regarding the “ordination” of women

On May 29, 2008, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a department of the Vatican, published a decree in order to protect true doctrine, to safeguard the communion and unity of the Church and to guide the consciences of the faithful regarding the “ordination” of women. The decree stated that those who attempt to confer Holy Orders on women are excommunicated, as are the women who attempt to receive Holy Orders. This includes the attempted “ordination” for a deacon, priest or bishop.

“The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in virtue of the special faculty granted to it by the Supreme Authority of the Church (cf. Can. 30, Code of Canon Law; www.vatican.va), in order to safeguard the nature and validity of the sacrament of Holy Orders, decreed, in the Ordinary Session of Dec. 19, 2007:

In accordance with what is disposed by Can. 1378 of the Code of Canon Law, (www.vatican.va) he who shall have attempted to confer holy orders on a woman, as well as the woman who may have attempted to receive Holy Orders, incurs a latae sententiae excommunication, reserved to the Apostolic See.”

The phrase, “latae sententiae excommunication” means excommunication is incurred as soon as the offence is committed and by reason of the offence itself.

Purpose of Excommunication

The purpose of excommunication is always to bring the person back into communion with the Church. It is hoped that, “sustained by the grace of the Holy Spirit, those who are excommunicated discover the path to conversion and return to the unity of faith and to communion with the Church, a communion broken by their action.”

By their choice to be excommunicated, that is, to be separated from the Roman Catholic Church, they are forbidden to celebrate sacraments or sacramentals, to receive the sacraments and to exercise any function in an ecclesiastical (church) office, ministry or assignment (cf. can. 1331 §1 CIC)

How does someone who is excommunicated return to the Church?

In this case, the Holy Father reserves to himself the ability to return the person who is excommunicated back to communion with the Church.

I ask that all the people of the Diocese of Davenport prayerfully reconsider any participation in the process or advocacy of ordaining women to Holy Orders. Such participation does not foster unity in the Church and jeopardizes the communion of the faithful with each other and with God. On my part, I will continue to pray for unity throughout the Church and for those people who struggle with this issue.

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