Please keep secret

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Jun 23, 2005

The lead story from the BBC news report is a beauty:

A woman has been ordained as a priest in a secret ceremony in central Europe as an act of defiance against the Roman Catholic Church.

No, she wasn't ordained; she was playing pretend. Ordination is a sacrament, not an "act of defiance." And if the ceremony was so "secret," why are we hearing about it on BBC?

Read on, and you learn that it's the identity of the newly ordained "priestess" that is secret. She wants to be a priest; she vows to serve as a priest, but she freely admits that in fact she won't function as a priest, because if she tried, she'd lose her job as-- wait for it-- a religious-education teacher. (Let's pray that her poor students somehow acquire a better understanding of ordination than their instructor is demonstrating.)

As the farce continues, the poor dupe at BBC tells us:

The programme was told the ceremony and the words used were almost identical to those laid down by the Roman Catholic Church, including a number of vows taken by the ordinand, promising to take on the responsibilities of priesthood.

The ceremony was almost identical to a real ordination? Maybe-- in the same sense in which a food fight is almost identical to the Battle of Gettysburg.