And as I have been saying, everyone would be happier if these wannabe priests left for a more welcoming church:shrug:
What does ‘happiness’ have to do with Truth?
Sure you can pursue Truth and find happiness in doing so. (As a Catholic Christian I have found Truth in Jesus and His Church, and I am ‘happy’.)
But you can also pursue Truth and not be all that happy about it. (Remember St. Augustine’s famous prayer, “Lord, make me chaste–but not yet”.) IOW, St Augustine thought that in following Truth he would lose the ‘earthly happiness’ of illicit sexual gratification.
But when St Augustine finally accepted Truth he found that TRUE happiness was more than the kind of fleeting carnal satisfaction that he thought (wrongly) was what happiness was all about.
If ALL that mattered in life was simply living for one’s ‘happiness on earth’, you’d have a valid argument AA. . .
but it isn’t.
We would be very POOR Christians if we would deny these women, or indeed anybody, even angry atheists, the chance to experience Truth (and ultimate eternal joy) because in the pursuit of truth they might be, for a period of time on earth, ‘unhappy.’
Do we want people to be unhappy? No. But let’s face it. Nobody on earth is every going to be 100% ‘happy’ from birth to death. Even the ‘happiest’ events have ‘thorns’ if you will.
I’ll bet that Jesus, in His walk to the Cross, was FAR from happy. In fact it would have appeared to everybody that far from succeeding in His mission, He had failed spectacularly. He had been beaten, mocked, insulted, and was now on His way to a painful death – a death He had prayed would be spared Him.
But instead of railing at the people (and heaven knows He could have), instead of taking the easy ‘satisfying’ way out, Jesus listened to His Father.
If these women ‘wannabes’ had a real understanding of Christ and His teachings, they would want to listen to Him and NOT to themselves. They would be trying to satisfy God and not themselves. They would understand that they were being tempted by the great ‘lie’ of ‘You shall be like god’. And so no, we don’t want them to go wandering off someplace where their errors will be accepted as truth. We want them to stay and to embrace that big-T Truth, to repudiate their errors and to accept the real Truth. That’s what we pray for.