11A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.
Posted on 04/12/2005 1:48:41 PM PDT by anniegetyourgun
Of course. That started the night JPII died.
Well, actually, it started when he was on his deathbed and before.
Don't worry. Us Catholics have been doing just fine since the day Christ founded our Church (see: Matthew, Gospel of) in interpreting and examining the Scriptures. It's the Johnny Come Lately Protestants who decided to start mucking about and creating their own new traditions (is the validity of a tradition judged solely by its age or its grounding in spiritual truth combined with logic?) such as women priests, gay priests, and a whole mess of other theological garbage.
11A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.
Why is that?
Again, a case that if people do not like the Catholic Church and its' regulations they are free to join other groups or form their own group that meets their needs. Women's ordination is not in the package...
In the first place, in the Catholic Church, the pope is the only legal theologian in the Church. It means that the pope is the only one who can rule on matter of faith and morals. Protestants called this legal dictatorship and cited many passages in the Bible that indicates that the practice goes contrary to the Bible.
In actual reality, the pope has used this dictatorial powers rather very sparingly. For one thing, it is a practice among popes to veer away from controversial doctrines even though the pope is acknowledged as the sole theologian in the Church as a custom.
Actually, the pope is nothing but a paper tiger when it comes into administration of Church matters. Although it controls the appointment of bishops, it has nothing to do with the finances of the Church. Each religious corporation organized under the Catholic Church is virtually independent from each other with no central authority governing their actions. The pope seldom removed erring bishops from office knowing that the practice could encourage schisms within the Church.
Although the recent popes have talked about ordaining married priests into the priesthood in their encyclicals, it will take a long time before we see married priests in the Church. It would take just about that length of time to see women priest also in the Church.
Of which there are none, so cover your heads and sit down and shut up ladies. (Speaking to the WOC...not you Annie)
Jesus is every bit as much God as the Father or the Holy Spirit.
AGREE
He always happens to be every bit as much a man as I.
AGREE
The Father != The Son The Father != The Holy Spirit The Son != The Holy spirit
The Athanasian Creed states: "But the deity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one, equal in glory, coeternal in majesty".
It also says:
21. The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten.
22. The Son is of the Father alone; not made nor created, but begotten.
23. The Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.
24. So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Spirit, not three Holy Spirits.
In a word: NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
And I'm a woman and I don't want to ever see a woman Priest in a Catholic Church. If a woman feels called to be a priest, she can be one in the Episcopal Church, but I hope to G*d NEVER in the Catholic Church.
What's the matter? A woman can become a Religious (aka Nun, Sister).
Jesus chose 12 disciples. All men. Yes, the women had a very integral part to play in His life and passion.
For instance: When Jesus send the disciples on ahead to find a place for the Passover (last supper), he tells them to go looking for some donkeys tied up and ask the men there where the place is prepared for Jesus. Now did you ever think, hmmmm. How'd the men with the donkeys know where to send the disciples to find the room already prepared?? Well, Mary (His Mother) and the other women had prepared the room and she let the men with the donkeys know that someone would be coming to ask about a room for the Passover. She told them to send them up to the room that she and the women had prepared for her Son and his disciples. The women were already in the room when Jesus arrived.
Women have an integral part to play in the life of the Church and the life of their family. THAT's part of the reason that G*d instituted marriage between a MAN and a WOman. Each has a part to play to create the whole.
Something would be missing if there were no women assisting in the Church. But they were not commissioned to spread the news that the kingdom of heaven is at hand when Jesus sent out the men in two by twos. The men were. They were not seated at the Last Supper Table. The men were. Yet, it was the women who went early to the tomb to finish the task of embalming Jesus. It was a woman and a Samaritan at that, who "preached" or witnessed to her entire town and brought them to Jesus.
Each person and each gender (of which there are only two) has a place and a reason for being on this earth.
And even though Protestants allow women to be priests or ministers, it is my fervent prayer that the Catholic Church never ever permits women to become priests.
Not that I'm Highly Opinionated or anything.
WOC promotes women priests ("priestesses"). WOC is characterized by strong language denouncing "the patriarchal church" and the papacy of John Paul II. WOC leaders have suggested "new" sacraments that mark stages in a woman's life. Example: "Sacrament of Croning" at age fifty to herald the coming of "Wisdom." A recent WOC conference claimed ordination meant subordination; consequently, ordination needs to be Reconstructed. It is not unusual for WOC meetings to begin with an invocation to a pagan goddess, and may feature a pagan ritual meal. Member of Catholic Organizations for Renewal.
For a woman to preside at the Sacrifice changes the nature of what's happening on the altar, since she is standing in as Christ, the Bridegroom of the Church. Since she is willing to take that role, she clearly doesn't understand the meaning of what she's doing from a Catholic point of view. (Some Episcopalians take the Anglo-Catholic viewpoint, I always did, that's why I'm Catholic today. Others are more Protestant and don't believe in the Real Presence. I guess for them, it's no problem. But what we're talking about here is Catholic priests - who DO believe in the Real Presence.)
The other thing I noticed is that women don't function well as the head of a parish. Again, with the one exception (she now is rector of her own parish and last I heard was doing well) they couldn't do the administrative stuff either. You can talk and talk and talk (the usual female response to stuff) but eventually you have to make a decision and give some orders. These female priests either never made a decision and nothing got done, or they made a decision but couldn't delegate so wound up working themselves into exhaustion.
I think that only a certain type of woman tries to be an Episcopal priest - there are plenty of women in other fields that seem to be capable of decision making and delegation.
I have a friend who's a Cohen - participated in that genetic testing awhile back (and sure enough, the Cohanim all share some identifiable common DNA back through the female line . . . guess the Jewish tradition of descent through the mother has a basis in scientific fact . . . )
C.S. Lewis said it would be fun to REALLY go back to paganism, if only to see a Minister of Transport or some such in his bowler and good suit trying to sacrifice a white bull . . . same goes for the Restoration of the Temple I guess. ;-)
To be a good priest one must first be a good CATHOLIC. Women who continually reject the teaching of the Church on this, disqualify themselves as "faithful Catholics" in that they exhibit a tremendous lack of humility and obedience to the Pope (who speaks infallibly on this issue).
I HOPE it never happens.
I wonder if they can name one.
The PBC has no authority to issue binding doctrinal statements. It has issued some helpful statements on some issues but has been something of a loose cannon in general. It overvalues the historical-critical method and undervalues the classic, patristic spiritual sense of Scripture method. To cite it as if it were speaking for the papacy is disingenuous and dishonest.
The Catholic Theological Society of America issued a statement carefully avoiding actually supporting the ordination of women but trotting out some of the same "biblical and historical" arguments supposedly casting doubt on the refusal to ordain women priests. Anyone interested in a lengthy refutation of the CTSA "biblical and historical" arguments can contact me off-list.
Griffin: "Were the women at the tomb teaching?"
Raises a good point. They were witnesses, bore testimony: martyrdom is a ministry available (and required of) all Christians, men or women. It is a very, very important ministry--it was back at the empty tomb and remains so today.
For those Christians who believe in a sacramental priesthood (Orthodox, Catholics), every other ministry is open to women except episcopacy/priesthood/d[eacon]. There's "teaching" and then there's "teaching"--for those with an apostolic succession understanding of the bishop, formal, authoritative, binding teaching belongs only to the bishop and those to whom he delegates it (which has included priests since about the 1000s or 1100s). Priests are derived from bishops, perhaps from the elders who initially were a sort of council of advisors but who had delegated to them various sacramental roles as the churches in various cities became too large for the bishop to handle all the sacramental roles all the time. Teaching was delegated to priests long after the sacramental roles were.
But then there's more general instruction in the faith given by parents to their children, schoolteachers etc. It's not part of the Church's office of teaching but is a valuable, indispensable ministry. Both men and women do this, nuns, parents etc.
One of the reasons that Evangelical Protestants have a particular struggle over the question of women ministers is that they (and mainline Protestants) rejected the claim that ordination is a sacrament that links the priest and bishop to the apostles with their authoritative teaching office. The authoritative teaching office for the Reformers rested on the pastor's knowledge of Greek and Hebrew and unction from the Holy Spirit. The Biblical injunctions against women teaching could probably be transferred to such trained clergy but would not apply to women teaching their children or in schools etc. But Evangelicals were suspicious of this emphasis on a learned, university trained clergy when the universities secularized and biblical scholarship became unbelieving. So Evangelicals have had an ambiguous, conflicted view of learned ministry, which then blurs the lines between trained pastor and every other lay member of the congregation. This has lead to forbidding women to teach in the Church in any way at all, which Catholics and Orthodox do not have to do because they have clearer lines between binding, authoritative Magisterium-teaching (reserved to bishops in apostolic succession) and its non-magisterial extension by delegation in the priest's Sunday homily, on the one hand, and all other forms of teaching ministries, on the other hand. The latter are open to women, as are all other ministeries, including "testimony," bearing witness. These very distinctions between clergy and laity (and nuns and monks are part of the laity, not the clergy) are blurred by those who want to eliminate the very idea of clergy. If they did, there'd be no problem with women priests in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, but then, again, there'd be no priests at all!
It all depends on what one means by "to teach."
This was an urban legend invented in the late Middle Ages or early modern era, I don't know the exact dates. Alain Boureau wrote a book (The Myth of Pope Joan [U. of Chicago Press, 2001; originally La Papesse Jeanne, 1988) refuting the legend and showing exactly how it originated. He is a respected secular French historian, not a defensive Catholic apologist. I have not read the book but the legend is nothing more than typical anti-Catholic garbage like Dan Brown's novels.
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