Well, did I get told.
"Wow. Being CATHOLIC has nothing to do with the Bishop of Rome!"
"WHO ARE YOU TO DECIDE when the Holy Spirit calls these women?"
"Pray to God to rid you of your bigotry and prejudice."
I'm like, ya know, wow, do I even have to reply to this stuff? Know what I'm sayin'?
6 comments:
Didn't some king or other of Catholic Christendom pray "Will no one rid me of my turbulent bigotry?"
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»What we've got here is a failure to excommunicate.«
— Cool Hand Lukan Community
So very very tolerant of them.
Where is Fra Savonarola when you need him?
... Occurs to me that if one believes that the Bishop of Rome has nothing to do with being Catholic, there's no need for his approval of ordination of women to a priesthood that claims to be Catholic.
According to researchers and indeed the experience of a friends of mine -- one who planted a presbyterian church in a new suburb in western Canada, and another who planted a church of UCC liberal retirees in Florida -- it is very easy to plant a church. One arranges to rent space in a nearby school gym or wherever, and one goes door to door explaining that one is starting a church and one invites the residents one speaks to to attend next Sunday morning at this time and place.
One doesn't usually "convert" people this way into attending church for the first time: one brings in lapsed members of the denomination one sets out to plant a church in.
From the success that my friends have had planting mainline churches, I would have to suppose that the declining denominations are simply not seriously trying.
Bultmann insisted that it makes no sense to believe in miracles when you also use electricity etc, but when has consistentness been useful in religion or in politics? Among Christians in scholarship, those most likely to credit miracles and in general the inerrant reading of the Bible are those in the hard (sc the real) sciences and engineering; those most likely to write such stuff off as 'mythic narrative' etc are social scientists, literary critics, art historians, etc (sc who have only a layperson's grasp of science at all). So the whole bleat that churches must decline in an age of science is empirically false.
Anyway, in planting a church by going door to door inviting lapsed Christians or whatever denomination to attend, soon a regular membership is establish'd and fund-raising to build a church building for the congregation (or "assembly" as RCs will say) begins and before long one has a flourishing church.
To do this obviously one must have something substantive on offer to make getting out of bed on Sunday morning worthwhile for enough people. And it is by not offering anything substantive that makes church memberships dwindle.
Accordingly, we shouldn't be surprised if this method would work to get liberal Catholic Churches started -- I mean, liberal in the sense of full-fledged spirit of Second Vatican reform. Female priests, marry'd priests, gay and lesbian priests etc. Because according to academic RCs, John Paul 2 and Benedict 16 et al don't speak for most Catholics in North America.
It's true that such Catholic Churches would in a way be "self-appointed," but according to Weber and Machiavelli, every institution begins as apparently self-appointed. These new Catholic Churches could claim to be validated by the Holy Spirit, and who is to say whether this claim is accurate or not?
The Vatican doesn't own the copyright or something on "Catholic" or even "Roman." But for clarity's sake, the new spirit of vatican 2 denomination could style itself Roman Catholic Progressive Church or something like that -- and make a very matter-of-fact statement that they are independent of the Vatican's RCC and aren't claiming to replace the Vatican's RCC or declare the Vatican's RCC invalid.
Obviously this Church by declaring gays and lesbians, women and marry'd men to the priesthood disagrees with patriarchal homophobic organizations of whatever sort, but the accent would be on positive continuity with Jesus' esteem for women and the presence of women in various roles even within Christendom.
One doesn't need the pope's permission to be a dissenting Catholic Christian.
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In terms of an actual worship experience, obviously the primary religio-cultural target would not be Catholicism as such but would continue to be Calvinism, which is consider'd to be obtuse to women's ways of knowing, women's experience, and presumably also to the nuanced understanding of life that LGBT persons are in general bless'd with.
Even Leo Strauss agrees that Calvinism ruin'd the fine arts; Calvinism may have been beneficial politically, but wasn't the equal of Lutheranism in music or Catholicism in oil paintings and novels and recusant poems (Natural Right and History, p. 51).
In sum, there would be no reason for this Progressive Roman Catholic Church full of formerly lapsed Catholics to pick fights with the Vatican or this or that self-appointed group of conservative activist RCCs. The Reform RCC would simply confidently stride ahead with the vision of Catholic Christianity that they have.
Planting real churches that live out the vision of Progressive Catholic Christianity would be far more fruitful than trying to prise open the Vatican-control'd churches to the ordination of the marry'd, the female, the gay and lesbian et al. I mean, while they're at it, why not do activism for equality of women in positions of power within Southern Baptist organizations, the LDS, Islam etc?
Surely it's easier to build an inclusive independent organization than to coerce the patriarchy into the 20th and 21st centuries.
It's a big wasteland out there with lots of room for a new denomination, even one claiming to be older than the RCC by working from Jesus' esteem for women in leadership and His freedom from homophobia.
The Vatican may declare such a church heretical and schismatic. But that's just labelling. And, heck, we protestants have been shrugging off the heretic-schismatic label for centuries. It's no big deal.
When Luther heard that the papacy had specially anathematized him in a special nocturnal ceremony involving special wordings and the extinguishing of 12 black candles cast down on a floor, he and Bucer probably gave each other a high five. One doesn't need the pope's permission to be a dissenting Catholic Christian.
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