Church history and views on women

  • Thread starter Thread starter Eric_Prine
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
StrawberryJam said:
I am a defender of the Church when the Church gets it right and in the specific case of priesthood I defend her. In the case of when a girl should become pregnant, I guess I have a harder time defending the beliefs. She was just twelve years old for crying out loud.
Click to expand...
So to answer my question, you think that women who reject the Church on account of some supposed ancient quotes the Church no longer makes anyway are secretly rejecting the Church because they reject the Church’s current teaching on the male priesthood or pregnancy or something like that?
 
MarcoPolo said:
So to answer my question, you think that women who reject the Church on account of some supposed ancient quotes the Church no longer makes anyway are secretly rejecting the Church because they reject the Church’s current teaching on the male priesthood or pregnancy or something like that?
Click to expand...
Not at all what I was saying.
 
dmar198 said:
I am sure I am Catholic. Where are you getting your information that Mary was pregnant at 12?
Click to expand...
Are you certain you are a real Catholic to ask me that question?
Do you realize I am not making this up???
There is even more to outrage you if you like.
 
StrawberryJam said:
Not at all what I was saying.
Click to expand...
So why do you think these women are bringing up ancient quotes if that is irrelevant to their rejection of the modern Church? And/or what do you think the reason is for these women to refuse to join the Church?
 
dmar198 said:
I am sure I am Catholic. Where are you getting your information that Mary was pregnant at 12?
Click to expand...
Strawberry,
Times were different then. By the time children hit puberty (male or female) they were considered adults.

In modern times, this has changed due to the school system grade levels, voting laws, etc. For example: how much difference is their MENTALLY between a 16 year old and an 18 year old? Not much.

Physically, what’s the difference between a 12 year old girl who receives her period and a 16 year old girl? Not much, other than the 16 year old looks older. By the time girls are 12 or 13 they are often (not always) reached the height they are going to reach.

Also, girls physically and mentally mature much faster than boys. Some girls can achieve physical adulthood by 12, while some boys don’t reach it until 16 or 17

However, in today’s society, we treat boys and girls the same and say they both become legally adults at 18. However, physically, girls become adults typically a few years before boys do and some times several years before boys.

Is what we do today wrong? No. Is what they did before wrong? No. Society is different. You didn’t need all the education back then that we need today to survive. PLUS, with infant mortality rates they way they used to be, as a species, we need women giving birth to as many children as possible. Plus, the younger a woman is when giving birth, the safer she is. Today our technology helps lower the mortality rates of both infants and moms. But back then, it was best for girls to have their kids as young as possible.

This is simply just a fact of biology and technology.

I hope this makes sense.

God Bless
 
Here is a good resource for you to dig into:
catholiceducation.org/en/controversy/feminism/pope-john-paul-ii-s-teaching-on-women.html

Sample:
As to our theme, honoring the Catholic woman, to honor someone is to confer high public esteem upon him. It presupposes the dignity of its recipient; dignity being an excellence that rightly commands esteem. It is right, then, that we begin with Pope John Paul II’s vision of the excellence on which we seek to confer our public esteem today. For despite all that has been said recently about women, about human fulfillment and human sexuality and roles in Church and society, there is a fundamental advance in this philosopher-pope’s teaching. Indeed, it enables us to dispose at once of any apparent anomaly in the fact that eight Catholic women are speaking today. We might appear to be in the embarrassing position of honoring ourselves. But such is not the case. For the Catholic women who are being honored today are those who truly have the dignity described by the Holy Father. That dignity is not mere birth and maturity as women, coupled with Catholic baptism. It is nothing less than genuine feminine holiness, a gift which none of us would dare to claim as her own.

The primary source for Pope John Paul II’s teaching on women is, of course, his Marian year meditation, the letter On the Dignity and Vocation of Women (DVW). [1] I propose to interpret its basic theme in the light of other papal and ecclesial writings, notably Love and Responsibility, [2] the Lenten talks on Genesis, [3] the encyclical, The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World [4] and the pamphlet deploring the new reproductive technologies, Respect for Human Life [5] The Holy Father affirms the strict equality of women with men in the dignity of being persons. Our equality, in fact, is a religious equality, the deepest equality of all. It is revealed chiefly in two places: the Adam and Eve story in Genesis and the accounts of Jesus’ many conversations with women in the Gospels. But our personal dignity is differentiated sexually. And so, equality is not sameness, and difference is not inequality.

Thus we shall begin with the general notion of universal human or personal dignity and then see how that dignity is particularized in the female sex. Once having established the distinctive human dignity of women, we shall make some assessments of the women’s movement in our country. For contrary to his bad press, Pope John Paul II has a very good understanding of our American culture. DVW applies almost item-by-item to the American feminist agenda. Along the way we shall also see that this celibate male, so widely accused of having no compassion for women, has in fact a compassion for us that is exquisite and deep.

The religious equality of men and women is clear from the creation of Eve as Adam’s helpmate, a helpmate precisely in the task of being a person. That task required another person with whom a “unity of the two” might be formed, so that man, precisely as such a unity, might be in the image and likeness of God (DVW, pp. 22-25). Adam recognized Eve’s religious equality with himself in the joyous cry with which he greeted her, “Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!” (Gen 2:23).
 
phil19034 said:
Strawberry,
Times were different then. By the time children hit puberty (male or female) they were considered adults.

In modern times, this has changed due to the school system grade levels, voting laws, etc. For example: how much difference is their MENTALLY between a 16 year old and an 18 year old? Not much.

Physically, what’s the difference between a 12 year old girl who receives her period and a 16 year old girl? Not much, other than the 16 year old looks older. By the time girls are 12 or 13 they are often (not always) reached the height they are going to reach.

Also, girls physically and mentally mature much faster than boys. Some girls can achieve physical adulthood by 12, while some boys don’t reach it until 16 or 17

However, in today’s society, we treat boys and girls the same and say they both become legally adults at 18. However, physically, girls become adults typically a few years before boys do and some times several years before boys.

Is what we do today wrong? No. Is what they did before wrong? No. Society is different. You didn’t need all the education back then that we need today to survive. PLUS, with infant mortality rates they way they used to be, as a species, we need women giving birth to as many children as possible. Plus, the younger a woman is when giving birth, the safer she is. Today our technology helps lower the mortality rates of both infants and moms. But back then, it was best for girls to have their kids as young as possible.

This is simply just a fact of biology and technology.

I hope this makes sense.

God Bless
Click to expand...
I have read this post since you posted it. So many times it is making my head hurt from banging it up against a wall and face palming.
You have made so many claims, and made no citations to offer for evidence of these claims.
 
God loves all women and all men to the point that Jesus, True God and True Man, is present in the Catholic Eucharist. God’s view trumps human views. 😃
 
StrawberryJam said:
I have read this post since you posted it. So many times it is making my head hurt from banging it up against a wall and face palming.
You have made so many claims, and made no citations to offer for evidence of these claims.
Click to expand...
Strawberry -
Let me ask you a question: where did you find the quote that Mary gave birth at 12? I’m sure it’s possible, even the fact that Mary was betrothed and would have had her Bat Mitzvah, but I’ve never seen anything that says that is was actually 12. Only that she most likely was not younger than 12.

I’m a father of a 3 year old daughter (she will be 4 this weekend). I will tell you that if ANYONE touched her and got her pregnant at 12 years old, I would most likely kill him.

Now, with that said, my great-grandmother, who was born in the United States (Pennsylvania) married her first husband at 14. He later died and she was remarried before turning 18 or 19. This was the early part of the 20th century when she got married.

BUT I also didn’t say that MOST woman married that young, because most did NOT. Usually, only the upper class married extremely young, but you were considered an adult post puberty until the 19th & 20th centuries in most cultures.

For Jews, the Bar & Bat Mitzvahs happen at 13 for a boy and 12 for a girl (even today). And even today, the Jews say that after the Bar or Bat Mitzvah is when their child becomes a man or woman. So it’s not too hard to imagine that 2000 years ago, 12 year old girls were getting married after their Bat Mitzvah.

For sources: I don’t have any specifically that I was using from my original post … I just studied history and sociology in college (I’m a Political Science major who almost minored in sociology.

I just Goggled a few links. How about starting with this website which cites a ton of different sources with several different points of view: discover-the-truth.com/2013/09/09/age-of-consent-in-european-american-history/. While I wouldn’t recommend the website (nor do I recommend teens getting married today) they do quote a number of different sources you can review.

From the end of bullet nine in the above link, it says the following at the bottom:
In his book, The Emphatic civilization, (Penguin, NY, 200) Jeremy Rifkin points out that the concept of adolescence only emerged during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. Society started to think of childhood as extending beyond puberty, into the later teenage years. Before that, children were considered to graduate into adulthood with the onset of puberty.”
Click to expand...
todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/02/teen-girls-stop-commonly-getting-married/

myjewishlearning.com/article/ancient-jewish-marriage/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_and_Bat_Mitzvah

Finally, the truth is that a lot of the scholarship out there is based on the written laws and public census records (and that’s even true with modern history). Often, the reasons for laws or the good intentions behind them (even behind a bad law) are hard to find when studying the ancients. We have to piece it together based on several contributing facts.

Good laws with good intentions usually always help society and remain for centuries. But bad laws with good intentions often lead society down the wrong path over time. Like some of the marriage laws/norms, which eventually lead to women being treated as property. But again, most laws are always made with good intentions, but bad laws have too many unintended consequences. This was true 2000 years ago and it’s true today.
 
Are you telling me Mary was not twelve years old when God chose for her to bear a child?
Is that what you are telling me?
I really need you as a father of a young girl to put their thinking cap on right now and study this.
 
StrawberryJam said:
Are you telling me Mary was not twelve years old when God chose for her to bear a child?
Is that what you are telling me?
I really need you as a father of a young girl to put their thinking cap on right now and study this.
Click to expand...
I would like to know where you read that she was positively 12 years old? Are. Your refering to the Protoevangelium of James?

While I think it’s very possible and likely that she we betrothed around 12, I think it’s more likely that she was in her teens, perhaps around 14 when Christ was born.

But then again, maybe she was 12…? I think it really depends on when St Joseph was ready to provide her a Jewish home so he could complete the marriage ceremony. Was the betrothal to be several months long or years?

But it doesn’t matter. God selected a woman who was worthy of being the Mother of God. Whether she was 12 or 22 makes little difference because she was a virgin and worthy of being the Mother of God.
 
phil19034 said:
I would like to know where you read that she was positively 12 years old? Are. Your refering to the Protoevangelium of James?

While I think it’s very possible and likely that she we betrothed around 12, I think it’s more likely that she was in her teens, perhaps around 14 when Christ was born.

But then again, maybe she was 12…? I think it really depends on when St Joseph was ready to provide her a Jewish home so he could complete the marriage ceremony. Was the betrothal to be several months long or years?

But it doesn’t matter. God selected a woman who was worthy of being the Mother of God. Whether she was 12 or 22 makes little difference because she was a virgin and worthy of being the Mother of God.
Click to expand...
Joseph was already married and had children. Provide her a home? He had one for crying out loud. Do you ever read the bible or know your faith traditions at all?
 
StrawberryJam said:
Joseph was already married and had children. Provide her a home? He had one for crying out loud. Do you ever read the bible or know your faith traditions at all?
Click to expand...
Did you read what I said? We don’t know if Mary moved into Joseph’s old house or a new home. But what we do know is that Mary was pregnant while betrothed to Joseph.

We also know that the EARLIEST Jewish girls were betrothed is 12. We also know that not all girls get married at 12, it usually just the rich married as soon as the law allowed.

Now you make the claim that Mary was twelve when she had Jesus. But you have refused to name your source. Multiple people have mentioned that they are unaware of any official Church teaching which identifies Mary’s age. Yet you accuse us of not knowing our faith. If you know she was 12, beyond a doubt - not someone’s theory - please share your source.

God Bless
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top