Female Catholic Priest

[Gottle_of_Geer]

On the CNN website they have a story about a “female Catholic priest” named Jane Via, who is leading a Catholic congregation in a Methodist Church in San Diego. (I know, I know, go figure–but I promise that’s what the report said. Go to CNN.com it’s there.)

Why bring this up? Well, it’s intereting. However, the report references that she was “ordained” by a “Roman Catholic” group in Switzerland who want women priests. A spokesman for the Church, who did a good job I think, indictated that this was an ordination from outside the Church. Thus, maybe this group only calls themselves “catholic.” Does anyone know who these people are? I always wonder why, if you disagree with the Church, or any organization that you belong to, this much, why do you stay?

If everyone who was in any way unqualified to belong to the Church were to leave, no one would be left in it.​

The Church is not a club for the deserving, or the virtuous, or the righteous - it is not a club like one of those country clubs which won’t take Jews for no reason but their Jewishness. It is a communion of sinful, useless, worthless, scummy people, whom the Spirit of God has convicted of their uselessness & utter imcompetence to deserve anything from God but Hell. The sacraments are not rewards for virtue or holiness or goodness - they are medicine for the sick & the dead.

This is so because the Church is founded not on worthless human merit, but on the grace of Christ - & that undercuts all self-made “holiness” & self-conceit. And that means the “unrighteous” are the very people who can be saved; indeed, the only people who can. So-called “good people” have (in a sense) no place in the Church - Jesus did not come to call them. He was uncompromisingly severe towards them, because they were so blinded by their own goodness & piety & right-thinkingness that they had nothing but contempt for those who did not “keep the rules” which they set. That this is possible, shows that those who are self-righteous are as in need of healing as those they regard as unrighteous. This is one of the paradoxes in Christian faith - self-righteousness is just another form of sin, & can be more dangerous than the sins of the “unrighteous”.

Hell is can be full of pious people who attended novenas, said their Rosaries, went to daily Mass, hated heresy, were pro-life, and so forth: none of those things will stop a man being damned, because none of them absolutely requires conversion to Christ. That, is so great a thing that God alone can give it - & He gives it to whom He Wills; not to whom we think He must.

Only sinners need apply to join the Church - the so-called good can’t because they are too full of themselves to realise that their own righteousness is worthless in the eyes of God. It was this self-satisfaction of the pious that killed Christ. The danger of this Pharisaism is that it makes the Church into the very opposite of what Christ intends - it makes it into a club for the self-righteous, & wants the very people to go away out of it whom He came to call to it. That abolishes the Church, for if it is not the communion to which sinners can belong & need to belong, what is ?

That is why it so dangerous to compare oneself with others - because of course one will be better than many other human beings, & that knowledge swells one’s ego. It is by comparing oneself with Christ, that one realises that one is unclean & wicked & vile & wretched & useless - & that one realises one has not the ghost of a justification for looking down on others as inferior to oneself. He alone is Good; we are not good.

It remains true that women can’t be ordained. But there are thousands of ways to be unChristian, as many as there are sins - & the Catholic name is useless if it is not Christian. None of us are really Catholics, because we are all sinful. It’s easy for some people to think they are more Catholic than they are, because some ways of being unCatholic are more obvious than others. ##

 

[Denise_Shae]

I know this is straying from the topic, but since the issue was brought up, I just gotta’ post this:

Several years ago, my husband hands me a copy of “Parade” magazine. (It’s an insert in that comes w/our Sunday paper.)
He tells me to turn a certain page.
So, I go to the page (and this is no exaggeration) right there is a full color photo of two men engaged in a kiss, before an altar, in what looked like a Catholic Church.
Standing between the two men and the altar, (larger than life) with arms spread wide open and a huge smile on his face, was the priest that married me and my husband back in 1985.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. My jaw, literally, dropped.

Outlining this full page photo was an article describing the “blessed event” and the name of the priest (who identifies himself as a “catholic” priest) who married these two men in the “Gay Catholic Church” in a certain city in PA.

But here’s the kicker. The whole article lead people to believe that The TRUE Catholic Church approves of gay marriages.

Down at the bottem of the page, in the smallest italic print I’ve ever seen, was a notice that Fr. "So & So" is no longer in union with the Roman Catholic Church.

I mean; if you weren’t paying close attention to the article (and believe me, that photo was so distracting, one could miss certain details) you would not have noticed that little tidbit.

That’s what really got me.

They knew, exactly, how to form that article so that it would mislead people into thinking the Church approved gay marriages.

They should have printed, in BOLD letters, at the beginning of the article, that the “Gay Catholic Church” along w/Fr. "So & So" are not in union with or associated with the Catholic Church in Rome.

It’s very sad that the secular media has to resort to things like this in order to try and discredit the Church.

I only wish there were a way to combat this anti-Catholic epidemic.

God Bless.

 

[ComradeAndrei]

Only sinners need apply to join the Church - the so-called good can’t because they are too full of themselves to realise that their own righteousness is worthless in the eyes of God. It was this self-satisfaction of the pious that killed Christ. The danger of this Pharisaism is that it makes the Church into the very opposite of what Christ intends - it makes it into a club for the self-righteous, & wants the very people to go away out of it whom He came to call to it. That abolishes the Church, for if it is not the communion to which sinners can belong & need to belong, what is ?

I don’t think that pharisaism was the point of mshealy’s post. If someone flagrantly flaunts the teachings of Holy Church to do things their own way, they have reached the hight of pharisaism. Today’s pharisees often preach the “gospel” of modernist “tollerance, love and diversity”-to the exclusion of what Holy Church really teaches. We need not become so soft that accusations of not being “loving” or “tollerant” break our orthodoxy.

Making a sound moral judgment on what is heresy and to be avoided is the action of a good Catholic. The good Catholic acknowledges their sinfulness and knows that but only for the grace of God that they remain on the good path. Knowing what is right and doing what is right cannot be automatically claimed to be “self-righteousness”.

 

[Cavaille-Coll]

A woman can no more be ordained a priest than a man can become pregnant. Funny, I’ve never seen groups of angry men outside a maternity ward demanding uteruses. This is just so unfair.

 

[rwoehmke]

So… The name Catholic Church is not a registered trademark, nor is it copyrighted. Anyone who nwants can and do appropriate the name for their own purposes. There is something about the media in cases like this…like they want to tweak our noses and get our goats and they sure do. After this past weeks Gospel, you know that God may not have good things in store for those who give scandal and mis-lead others. That’s in His hands though, so lets smile a puzzled smile and go on.