Posted on 04/26/2005 10:40:51 PM PDT by Cato1
I think it is generally unfair to characterize opposing viewpoints by their most extreme adherents or the most absurd end of their spectrum. Therefore, the following should be read in jest, even though the authors are quite serious.
This is from the "Open Conclave" movement of feminists called Woman Church Convergence
"
Press Release of Women-Church Convergence April 19, 2005
Women-Church Announces Cyberspace Forum on Women’s Equality; Challenges Pope Benedict XVI to Join the Discussion
Contact: Bridget Mary Meehan 703-671-1972 703-283-2929 sofiabmm@aol.com Mary E. Hunt 301-589-2509 240-472-4587 mhunt@hers.com
Women-Church Convergence announces a cyberspace forum for a global conversation on issues, reforms and actions needed to shape the Catholic Church into a “discipleship of equals” in the twenty-first century www.women-churchconvergence.org.
Women-Church co-coordinator Bridget Mary Meehan asserted, “We are providing a forum for feminist voices around the world to join together in the work for Gospel equality and justice in our church and world. Women-Church Convergence invites Pope Benedict XVI to join in this dialogue.” Spurred by the success of the Women-Church on-line “Open Conclave” that facilitated the exchange of opinions among thousands of people while the cardinals sat in a locked room, feminist theologian Mary E. Hunt noted, “The Convergence sees this next step as modeling a new, 21st century way to be church where all are welcome.”
Women-Church Convergence is alarmed at the election of Pope Benedict XVI. We believe that the Spirit of God acts through the people of God and this selection reflects a reactionary-right-wing succession plan, perhaps a coup, by an all-male, patriarchal, clerical church.
As prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger released a letter on July 31, 2004, condemning feminism. As the enforcer of orthodoxy, he forbade the discussion of women-priests. We reject both the substance and the process of such teaching and assure concerned people of good will that such authoritarianism has no place in the Catholic community.
Women-Church Convergence calls on Pope Benedict XVI to distance himself from his former role as the arbiter of doctrine and to take on the mantle of a pastoral listener. Women-Church invites the new pope, whose role is to be a symbol of unity, to join in the dialogue and actions to bring about equality and partnership for women in all aspects of church life, including ordination to a renewed priestly ministry. Instead of condemning feminism, we expect Pope Benedict XVI to affirm the important values that Catholic feminists bring to the table and to recognize our leadership. A first step would be to invite Catholic feminists to fill fifty percent of the leadership roles in all Catholic institutions, beginning with the Curia.
Women-Church Convergence is a coalition of autonomous Catholic-rooted organizations/groups working for the empowerment of women in church and society.
God bless him.
after filling "fifty percent of leadership roles with Catholic feminists" what should they fill the other 50% with?
What is their problem? The Church is a patriarchal institution and shall always be. Jesus picked only men to be his apostles for a good reason.
God grant that I will live to see Pope Benedict cast this Coven out of the Church.
p i n g
One of the great things about the election of Benedict is the pain it is causing these post-modernist/feminist/leftist wing nuts. They are a fundamental part of the Decline of the West, and they richly deserve the weeping and gnashing of teeth they are now experiencing. It pales next to the pain they have caused us over the last 40 years or so.
Can't believe people want to put this out there.
Almost feel sorry for this womanchurch poster. "Bridget" is in for a major clue by four pummeling in the near future
....I predict that the election of Pope Benedict XVI will pour fresh energy into the Roman Catholic church reform movement. Women will be ordained to a renewed priestly ministry by women bishops. Women and men will continue to model partnership and equality in grassroots communities around the world. Feminist theology will flourish. A new egalitarian Catholic church rooted in Jesus' teaching and example will continue to grow. May Pope Benedict XVI experience a change of heart and open the windows of the church, like his predecessor John XXIII, to a more open, equal and just church....
"Coven" --- you've nailed 'em.
Every time I read about these rabid Catholic feministas I get the feeling that they're the heirs apparent to those mean old nuns who used to wield yardsticks like samurai warriors.
DITTO!
You and me both!
A little something from the Woman Church crowd:
While male liberation theologies and the Vatican argue about the suitability of Marxist analysis in a critique of society, and the Vatican and the bishops try to buy off feminists with cosmetic changes, the feminists go right to the heart of the matter in a declared war against God the Father.
The developed state of the case appears in a 1983 work, Sexism and God-Talk by Rosemary Ruether, whom I quote again as a revolutionary always honest about the goals of the revolution and always logical about their consequences. In her view, the priesthood, the classical theology to which it belongs, and the codified traditions of the Catholic religion are based on male, rather than on universal human experience.
The image of a Father God is a product of "the Judeo-Christian formulation of the normative image of transcendent ego in the male God image." The "underside" of this image is the male conquest of nature "imaged as the conquest and transcendence of the Mother."
Patriarchal control over the womb is the first of the sins of patriarchy against the earth and its peoples. Hierarchical stratification with the Divine as apex is nothing more than a patriarchal tool for the control of society. Therefore, "the critique of hierarchy must become explicitly the critique of patriarchy." Feminist theology attempts "to transform the dominant consciousness." "Feminism represent a fundamental shift in the valuation of good and evil."
We must get rid of the parent image of God and become autonomous. Reuther sounds the true note of revolution: "Patriarchal theology uses the parent image for God to prolong spiritual infantilism and to make autonomy and assertion of free will a sin."
Even the attractive human person of Christ will no longer serve as a model of "redemptive personhood" for women because "the Christological symbols have been used to enforce male dominance." "Must we not say that the ver limitations of Chris as a male person must lead to the conclusion that he cannot represent redemptive personhood for them? That they must emancipate themselves from Jesus and seek a new redemptive disclosure of god and of human possibility in female form?" Ruether proposes that we call the divine principle "God/ess."
Feminists insist that, as a means of liberation, the people must reclaim the sacraments into their own administration. "Eucharist is not an objective piece of bread or a cup of wine that is magically transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Rather, it is the people, the ecclesia who are being transformed into the body of the new humanity." At the 1983 WomanChurch conference, Reuther, to ecstatic applause, described the historic church as an "idol of masculinity" and expounded the feminist revolutionary vision of liberation in messianic language:
We are WomanChurch, not in exile, but in exodus. We flee the thundering armies of Pharaoh. We are not waiting for a call to return to the land of slavery and to serve as altar girls in the temples of patriarchy. Our brother Jesus did not come to this earth to manufacture this idol and he is not represented by this idol. We cry out -- horror, blasphemy, deceit, foul deed. We call our brothers [here she named several liberal Bishops who were in her audience] to flee with us from this idol with flashing eyes and smoking nostrils who is about to consume the earth … Together let us break up this great idol and grind it into powder, dismantle the great leviathan of violence and misery …. and transform it back into the means of peace and plenty, so that all the children of the earth can sit together at the banquet of life.
Golly. And these are the women whom the bishops expect to placate by the changing of a few pronouns. Amazing stuff, and I can hear my readers saying, "extremist" and "unrepresentative." Not so. ....
God/ess: Sounding the Note of True Revolution.
Anne Roche Muggeridge | Desolate City: Revolution in the Catholic Church
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
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