The ongoing absurdity of WomanPriests
By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | May 14, 2014
A CBS report on Roman Catholic Womanpriests in Los Angeles avoids some of the usual pitfalls, acknowledging at the outset that the Catholic Church does not recognize the women as priests. Still the report only runs a few paragraphs before tumbling into absurdity:
These devout Catholics, who preach teachings and rituals of their faith, were excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church because, they say, they are women.
I guess it’s possible to “preach teachings,” but how does one preach rituals? And if they do preach the teachings of the Church, what about the teaching that women cannot be ordained? But never mind that. Look carefully at the rest of the sentence.
Is the Vatican excommunicating people now for the offense of being female? That would be a big story. And yet I know some Catholic women who have not been excommunicated. How do you suppose they avoided that punishment? There must be something more to the story.
Phil Lawler has been a Catholic journalist for more than 30 years. He has edited several Catholic magazines and written eight books. Founder of Catholic World News, he is the news director and lead analyst at CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.
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Posted by: jg23753479 -
May. 14, 2014 7:11 PM ET USA
Shrink and Elizabeth: And of course everything depends -- to paraphrase another high priest of the New Logic -- on the meaning of "is" and "be"!
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Posted by: ElizabethD -
May. 14, 2014 3:13 PM ET USA
Who is more self evidently not a devout Catholic than someone who separates themself from the communion of the Church in this way? That is inherently the effect of "women priests", breaking the communion of the Church. If you look at their beliefs, they really hold quite different beliefs about the whole nature of ordination, its necessity for consecrating the Eucharist, and indeed different beliefs about what the Eucharist is. It is a different belief system altogether from Catholicism.
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Posted by: shrink -
May. 14, 2014 2:06 PM ET USA
Phil, there is so much more to grasp! Obviously you do not understand the nuances of Episcopalian epistemology. Please recall the maxim of Bp. Gene: "Love can endure, even if a marriage cannot " which follows from another of his fundamental theorems: "A thing can both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect." Once you grasp these propositions, all absurdity becomes truth, and all truth becomes absurd.
