Chicago Women trying to become Deacon

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Agreed. I have no problem with discussions of those kind. I posted some questions that I felt would need to be resolved before having those discussions on the other thread going on this same article.

One of the things which has come up as I have looked into this is, according to various scholars on the subject, there seem to be significant differences which arose very early in the Church, regarding the form that the office of Deaconess took between East and West. In addition, the impression that I get from what I have read so far is that the numbers of deaconesses were much higher in the East than in the West. Some scholars suggest that in the West the office of Deaconess was an honorific given to the wives of Deacons, while others suggest a more stand alone office. As such, attempting to use the Orthodox example for Deaconesses, is probably not a good idea. If it is going to be restored, or at least the conversation had, then we in the Roman Church should be faithful to our own Sacred Tradition in the process.

After all of that is hashed out, the magisterium can figure out if it is really needed in today’s Church.
 
Michelle9 said:
And I say you get yourself to a confessional pronto because you are not following Jesus at all. Who are you to say where I belong? How dare you!
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I did not say where you belong. I said I did not understand why you chose to be Catholic when you obviously do not agree with much of what the Church teaches. I also suggested that you learn what the Church teaches on following an incorrect conscience because doing so can have eternal ramifications, including going to Hell. I am not making it up, it is the simple truth, given to us by Divine Revelation and taught by the Church for over 2,000 years. Aquinas is a great source because he puts it forth very clearly and the Church herself often cites him when teaching on the subject.

As for the rest, I am done conversing with you. I cannot force you to accept things that you do not wish to accept and there comes a time when enough is enough. Reply, or don’t it is no matter to me. I will be blocking your posts from view, so I will not see them regardless of what you say. I will instead, follow the instructions of our Blessed Lord.
Matthew 10:12-14:
As you enter a house, wish it peace. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; if not, let your peace return to you. Whoever will not receive you or listen to your words—go outside that house or town and shake the dust from your feet.
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Agreed completely. I am only suggesting that, since it was brought up earlier that the various Orthodox Churches are considering the restoration of the office, that we in the Roman Catholic Church should be sure to follow our own Tradition. I got the impression, perhaps wrongly on my part, that the standard of behavior for the Orthodox was being put forth as some sort of suggestion for us. Again, perhaps I misunderstood the intent behind the words.

Also, if Eastern Catholics are so inclined, I would rather see them explore the office based upon their Eastern Traditions, rather than those of Rome. My suspicion, nothing more since I am not informed enough on the issue, is that there were many differences regionally regarding how the office of deaconess manifested.
 
This is true. I have heard that the Greeks have contemplated such an endeavor limited to Abesses of monasteries…but I don’t have much information on that.
 
jwinch2 said:
I did not say where you belong. I said I did not understand why you chose to be Catholic when you obviously do not agree with much of what the Church teaches. I also suggested that you learn what the Church teaches on following an incorrect conscience because doing so can have eternal ramifications, including going to Hell. I am not making it up, it is the simple truth, given to us by Divine Revelation and taught by the Church for over 2,000 years. Aquinas is a great source because he puts it forth very clearly and the Church herself often cites him when teaching on the subject.

As for the rest, I am done conversing with you. I cannot force you to accept things that you do not wish to accept and there comes a time when enough is enough. Reply, or don’t it is no matter to me. I will be blocking your posts from view, so I will not see them regardless of what you say. I will instead, follow the instructions of our Blessed Lord.
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No need to block sir. I have asked to have my account deleted because I’m done with people like you. If an article written by a Catholic bishop can inflame you so much than I would likely say being so judgemental will not earn you a place in Heaven.

I don’t know what I expected to find here but I am very disappointed in the Catholics I have met here.

I think Catholic answers is a great site but they really should eliminate the forums. It will discourage anyone who is thinking of joining the Catholic Church.
 
Michelle9 said:
No need to block sir. I have asked to have my account deleted because I’m done with people like you. If an article written by a Catholic bishop can inflame you so much than I would likely say being so judgemental will not earn you a place in Heaven.
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My dear sister in Christ Michelle,

May God be with you on your journey to eternity. Please be careful. I know that you are upset and you disagree with some things that Jason has communicated…but we should never make comments about someone’s chances of being accepted into the Heavenly Kingdom. We are all sinners and we are working out our salvation with fear and trembling.

Peace be with you. Christ is in our midst.

That sinner,
Mickey
 
Mickey said:
My dear sister in Christ Michelle,

May God be with you on your journey to eternity. Please be careful. I know that you are upset and you disagree with some things that Jason has communicated…but we should never make comments about someone’s chances of being accepted into the Heavenly Kingdom. We are all sinners and we are working out our salvation with fear and trembling.

Peace be with you. Christ is in our midst.

That sinner,
Mickey
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He was judging me first. Look at all the things he told me.

If we were in ancient times he probably would have stoned me.
 
Really? Well I just wrote to the Forum Administrator to delete it as I can find no good use for this forum.
 
In the spirit of trying to help, I will make a lousy attempt at St. Thomas Aquinas’ teachings on conscience. Any screw up is mine, not St. Thomas’ or the Dominican Friar who taught me this stuff.

The first thing to understand is that we can have both: Correct Conscience, which means that your conscience is properly formed within the teachings of the Church; and Incorrect Conscience, which means it is not. A properly formed conscience is the voice of God within us and helps us to align our will with God’s will. An incorrect conscience is not the voice of God and in fact is the voice of someone else. However, as a general rule of thumb, both a correct and incorrect conscience are to be followed, because in the spur of the moment, one cannot always distinguish between a conscience which is correct or one that is not correct. This does not mean that a person with an incorrect conscience is off the hook. Far from it. The question which must be asked is: why is one’s conscience is not properly formed? To figure this out we have to have an understanding of: Willful Ignorance, meaning that you have intentionally chosen not to seek proper teaching in order to form the conscience vs. Unintentional Ignorance, which means that one is totally unaware that their conscience is not properly formed. The last thing we have to understand is: Rejection, which means that they have been informed of proper teachings, but have chosen not to follow them. This highlights the exception to the general rule above, in that a person who has rejected Church teaching is not supposed to follow their conscience.

We have a number of scenarios we can fall into:
  1. Where one follows a correct conscience. That is a virtuous action.
  2. Where one follows an incorrect conscience because they are ignorant of Church teachings due to no fault of their own. People who do this have not chosen to be virtuous, but also have not chosen condemnation.
  3. Where one follows an incorrect conscience because they have chosen not to seek out Church teachings which would form their consciences correctly. A person who does this has chosen condemnation if they do not repent down the road.
  4. Where one follows an incorrect conscience while knowing what the proper teachings are and choosing to reject them. This means that one has chosen condemnation if repentance does not occur.
  5. A person has a properly formed conscience, but chooses not to follow it. Regardless of whether one has deliberately followed an incorrect conscience or has deliberately violated a correct one, this person has chosen condemnation.
  6. A person has a properly formed conscience and wants to follow it, but sins anyway. This person has chosen condemnation providing that they violated their conscience under their own free will. If they were forced to not follow their conscience, then they have not chosen to reject God’s love. And of course, if this person repents, they are freed from condemnation. These are the people we think of as faithful Christians in that they want to do what is right but are still sinners.
People who are aware of Church teaching on a subject but choose not to follow it are condemning themselves. If they rationalize it by claiming that they are supposed to be following their conscience, then they are also fooling themselves. They are saying that they are right and God is wrong and as long as they stay in this state, they cannot repent. The grace which flows from the Sacrament of Reconciliation requires contrition on the part of the penitent. This means that they know what they did was wrong and intend not to do it again. This can be Perfect Contrition (a person is repentant because of the love of God and desire to do his will) or Imperfect Contrition (a person is fearful of God and does not want to go to Hell). God is merciful, but obviously wants us to do things out of love for Him.

A person who is not contrite either does not believe what they did was wrong, or does not intend to conform their will to God’s, or both. As such, they are not open to the reception of God’s grace through Confession. Not being able to receive the grace of the Sacrament means they are not able to receive the grace of the Eucharist. In fact, in attempting to do so, they are subject to the same rules of correct versus incorrect conscience, and willful versus unintentional ignorance, and are very possibly choosing condemnation in the process.

People who persist in *willful ignorance *of Church teachings (e.g. they know there is a Catechism and they can’t be bothered to read it) are also condemning themselves. A person who is perfectly contrite truly loves God will seek out His teachings, and will try to act upon them out of love for Him. A person who is imperfectly contrite will seek out God’s teachings out of fear of his just punishments and will try to act on them.

People who would have wanted to do the right thing had they known about it are not condemned, but neither are they necessarily rewarded.

Finally we have those who are sincerely seeking to do the will of God by properly forming their conscience and attempting to follow it. Those people still sin from time to time. However, because they are contrite and penitent, they are open to receiving God’s grace through the Sacrament of Reconciliation which then allows them to receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Over time two things can happen: 1) they will be more able to align their will with God’s will; 2) imperfect contrition can become perfect contrition.

Michelle, I hope that helps, in some small way, for you to understand what I was referring to on conscience and the results of following an improperly formed one.

I will allow you to have whatever last word you wish to have at this point, and will limit my discussion to the interesting topic of the office of Deaconess in the early Church.
 
Mickey said:
This is true. I have heard that the Greeks have contemplated such an endeavor limited to Abesses of monasteries…but I don’t have much information on that.
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My understanding is that the situation of cloistered female religious is one of the main ways that Deaconesses were used in the East in ancient times. I wonder about a need for such today. In the Benedictine Tradition, the Abbot or Abbess has plenty of authority for purposes of teaching, etc. I would assume it is the same in Eastern Monasticism among females, but honestly do not know for sure.
 
Spare me your lectures. I am not interested in hearing them.
I think its a shame that some Catholics will not even consider something written by a fellow Catholic and no less than 2 of its clergy.

I have read many excellent religious works by Catholics such as Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux and St. John of the Cross.
 
Having read through this thread, I smell a big fat rat! There was a full page article in today’s New York Times about 3 female Roman Catholic Bishops, who insist they are legitimate. After almost a full page of liberal Catholic Blather, there was only a casual reference to the fact that any woman who tries to be ordained a priest is automatically excommunicated as is the Bishop and any othe Catholic Clergy associated with that ordination.
This is typical of the secularist mass media stiring up the people with mis-information and outright lies!
 
George_Stegmeir said:
Having read through this thread, I smell a big fat rat! There was a full page article in today’s New York Times about 3 female Roman Catholic Bishops, who insist they are legitimate. After almost a full page of liberal Catholic Blather, there was only a casual reference to the fact that any woman who tries to be ordained a priest is automatically excommunicated as is the Bishop and any othe Catholic Clergy associated with that ordination.
This is typical of the secularist mass media stiring up the people with mis-information and outright lies!
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I think this is a lot different than the article I posted.
 
Michelle9 said:
Altar girls may be up to the priest nevertheless I am very happy to see them in my Church.
I was taught about the Inquisition in my 11th grade religion class in a Catholic school. The Inquisition was a blight on the Church. You are attempting to make the Church look perfect. It wasn’t then, Doesn’t matter if it was not millions. It could have been only 10 people still doesn’t look good.
Blind faith is not a good thing.
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Wait, I’m doing WHAT? I’m not saying what you accuse me of saying.

I’m not saying that people who acted did so correctly, but I am saying --and the Church agrees with me, not you–that The Church’s TEACHING on faith and morals is perfect (infallible).

And if you are accusing me of ‘blind faith’, care to say what is ‘blind’ about it? If the Church’s teachings aren’t wrong, I would be blind and stupid to claim they were!
 
Tantum_ergo said:
Wait, I’m doing WHAT? I’m not saying what you accuse me of saying.

I’m not saying that people who acted did so correctly, but I am saying --and the Church agrees with me, not you–that The Church’s TEACHING on faith and morals is perfect (infallible).

And if you are accusing me of ‘blind faith’, care to say what is ‘blind’ about it? If the Church’s teachings aren’t wrong, I would be blind and stupid to claim they were!
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Not recognizing what the Church did wrong during the Inquisition is like blind faith.
 
But what can I say about someone who has a quote like that as his signature when there are so many quotes from the Church’s saints and Biblical quotes that are so more profound than that. Not that I favor women priests but I’d hardly make that my slogan.
Really pathetic and sad.
 
Michelle9 said:
Not recognizing what the Church did wrong during the Inquisition is like blind faith.
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My dear woman, “The Church” in its individuals certainly did some wrongs, but you’re acting as though the entire Catholic Church from the Pope on down taught as infallible teaching to ‘execute people’ and that is NOT what the Inquisition is about or what the people did.

The Church did not make errors; some people in the Church did.

You can’t go around saying “The Church” as if every individual involved was ‘executing heretics’ because they weren’t. The Church was not teaching ‘execute heretics’. The Church, in so far as ‘faith and morals’ teachings is concerned, was not, and did not, making errors then or now. Individuals in the Church in trying to carry out the teachings made errors; that does not make the teachings wrong.

I keep on saying, “The Church has never CLAIMED that every action of its members is perfect. Or that the actions of its priests and bishops, even several of them together, is perfect. However, the TEACHINGS of the Church on faith and morals, and** I have stated this in my posts, please go back and read them, IS perfect.”**
So again, please do not accuse me of making statements which I did not make, and even worse, saying those show me to have ‘blind faith’.

Here’s a contemporary example. A few priests in the Church in late decades have sinned against youth. And some bishops likewise, thinking that they were doing a ‘good thing’ because they were told by doctors that the priests were cured but needed to have a ‘clean slate’, accepted the words of the expert doctors and sent the priests off, who then sinned again.

Does that mean “THE CHURCH” sinned against youth, or that certain members, who were not carrying out the Church’s teachings, sinned, or WERE MISTAKEN, thinking they were doing the right thing?

The Church has NEVER taught that pedophilia is acceptable, so the people engaged in that sin in the Church were actually going against Church teachings, weren’t they?

And the people who accepted the words of the medical experts (which most of us are supposed to do, after all, why go to a doctor if you aren’t going to abide by his expertise?) did not know the priest wasn’t cured, and weren’t trying to harm anybody. They were trying to abide by law, and didn’t know the doctors were wrong, or that the priests would lie and sin. So they weren’t doing wrong, even if wrong resulted.

And the ones actually doing wrong were doing wrong not because the Church told them to, but in spite of the Church telling them they were wrong.

Either way, you just can’t go around saying, “The Church did wrong”. It didn’t. Some people did.
 
Michelle9 said:
But what can I say about someone who has a quote like that as his signature when there are so many quotes from the Church’s saints and Biblical quotes that are so more profound than that. Not that I favor women priests but I’d hardly make that my slogan.
Really pathetic and sad.
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For your information, my dear, I **happen to be a woman. **

**A very happy 56-year-old cancer survivor, grandmother and faithful Catholic woman. **
 
Tantum_ergo said:
For your information, my dear, I **happen to be a woman. **

**A very happy 56-year-old cancer survivor, grandmother and faithful Catholic woman. **
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I will have to revisit the Inquisition since what I learned in a Catholic school about it seems not to be what happened according to you.

I didn’t mean any disrespect. I commend you on being a cancer survivor. I think you mean well but you and a lot of other people here might rethink this strategy because it does not help reach others.
 
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