lol…I love how you ignore facts to struggle to make your comparisons. This has been fun to watch all you have had to do in your efforts to mock us.
I don’t mock people. Nor do I need to use other forms of violent speech to try to make others feel bad, because I feel no inner insecurity where I need to cling to and protect beliefs that make me feel secure. In discussions like this, anger typically arises in those who cling to beliefs that provide them with a mental sense of security, not in doubters who have learned to live with not knowing everything. It is anger, and its cousin, malice, that gives rise to the kind of sarcasm and mockery people typically engage in, in forums. I am not angry with you, and I have no wish to harm you. I simply disagree with some of your views. That doesn’t mean I think you are a bad person or have inferior intelligence.
You don’t.address the theological argument at all
It is an argument based on what we believe about the Sacraments, it isn’t a political.argument.
Mormonism doesn’t have the same sacramental views. Water has been substituted for wine. Their teaching is that their church is authorized to make these kind of changes. The womens group calling for ordination using that argument, asking the Mormon leaders to pray to ask God if it is ok to ordain women.
The Catholic Church is not going to change the elements of a Sacrament. It just isn’t going to happen. A man is not a woman, and a woman is not a man. No one is claiming one is more or less human than the other.
I think I have addressed this argument from several angles, but I can try to be more explicit.
Before arguing that an elemental change is not allowed in a sacrament, one must first decide what constitutes an actual element.
One of the problems I have with this kind of reasoning, is the essentialist thinking. That is the idea that there is a substantial difference between male and female. There is an essence of being man and an essence of being woman, and the Church is only authorized to ordain one of the two. We see the same kind of thinking with regards to bread. The Church does not see itself as allowed to use completely gluten free hosts because without gluten it ceases to be bread. In reality, the hosts used today are very different from the bread Jesus would have used in the last supper, and so that sacramental “element” has changed quite a bit. But because one wrongfully thinks that there is some inner essence that makes bread bread, it is ok if its outward appearance is radically different, but not ok if the bread lacks gluten, even if it is very much like the bread Jesus would have used. Jesus **never **taught anything like this, implicitly or explicitly nor did he say you could use crackers instead of bread. The idea is purely based on man made philosophy of essentialism (Aristotle), and it is wrong:
If you go on a mountain hike, and you encounter a very flat rock, you may designate it a table and eat from it. To you, it is a table. That does not mean that a substance change has happened, where the inner essence of a rock is transformed into a table, while the outward appearances remain. A change of designation has happened, what was a rock for you has become a table for you. The object has not changed in any way, from its own side, but from your viewpoint it has. There is no purpose located in the object, only in the mind that uses it. Objects don’t have essences that make them what they are. They are designated as particular objects based, in part, on function.
As for humans, some argue that there is an essence, called a soul, that makes us human, and without it we would be just another animal. I am not going to use space here to analyze this. There is no teaching, to my knowledge, in the Bible, teaching of the CC or in recognized apostolic tradition, that the soul of a woman and the soul of a man are different “elements” or essences.
Thinking that there are separate female vs. male elements in humans is a completely arbitrary choice. One might just as well say there is an essential difference between a Jewish male and a Caucasian male, as racists do, and argue that Jesus only allowed the ordination of the Jewish “element” and not the Caucasian.
The whole essentialist thinking has proved to be very harmful. It is what enables dehumanization, where one thinks that there are animals which look human in every way, but lacks the inner human essence of what makes someone human, and so it is ok to enslave or kill these “humanoids” because that is the way we treat animals. Such reasoning has always been used by slavers (blacks didn’t have “souls”, so they were not fully human, it was argued), people who commit genocide (The Holocaust, Rwanda), etc. It is also argued by those who defend abortion. The fetus isn’t really human or a person. What pro-lifers actually do is challenge this idea and ask exactly WHAT this human/person essence is that the fetus lacks. No matter what it is said to be (personality, reason, intelligence, awareness, etc…) the pro-lifer can point to people we do recognize as humans/persons with rights, who lack the same thing, permanently or temporally.
In summary, my viewpoint is that men and women are not different sacramental elements, since there is no such thing as a male or female element/essence. Hence the CC is authorized by Jesus to ordain women, because he ordained humans and women are humans. The one important consideration is whether someone can function as a priest, and there is no defect in all women that makes all women unsuitable to serve others in this capacity.
