"Patricia Sodano Ireland tells of attending a 15th-anniversary celebration of the ordination of women in her former Church and finding it a 'lamentation orgy' about the 'suffering of female clergy at the hands of men,' without a single 'satisfied woman.' Evidently, ordination had not brought them happiness."
Hmmm. This is mere anecdotage. If I recall my thousands of conversations with my fellow priests, I could spin them any way I chose. If you asked me "did ordination bring them happiness?" or "did celibacy bring them happiness?" I would be hard put to give an answer. The issue was not a quest for happiness in the first case. Nor do women serve in the ministry, ordained or otherwise, out of some self-centred search for happiness.
Why not do a statistical survey of women active in church life and see if Catholic women are less frustrated and discouraged than women in our other Christian churches? I do not hear Protestant women screaming in rage as so many Catholic women are. And the rage is not just what you will call feminist tantrums -- it is prophetic anger.
"our other Christian churches" is a slip -- where did that "our" come from? But I like the expression.
"And the rage is not just what you will call feminist tantrums -- it is prophetic anger."
No, it's telling Jesus to go [bleep] Himself.
Now, that's a fine reason to ordain women: anger management...
Actually, you will not many young Catholic women who are enraged. Though I do understand the rage of so many older Catholic women, especially the radical religious women. In the late 1960s and 1970s, everything seemed so bright -- for them, of course; for the Church, it was one of its darkest periods. Ordination of women and "positions of power" within the Church seemed in their reach...
"you will not FIND many", is what I meant.
By the way, if you can really prove that women ordination obliterates female anger, I think many Catholic husbands will gladly form an association for the ordination of their wives.
Perhaps they will have some success in erasing Apostolic doctrine, since they know how to get things moving in this patriarchal society called "The Church".
The anger of a Joan Chittester is Christ-like anger, healing and challenging. Christ reserved his own anger for the pharisees, Mt 23 is an amplified echo of that. And boy, are the pharisees on the beat these days!
By the way, you can see my sunny smiling weblog talking about the Incarnation today. I am seeking to join the amlpb ring of "moderate liberal progressive bloggers" -- time to take at lest this media out of the cold, dead hands of the rightists.
http://josephsoleary.typepad.com....com/my_weblog/
now has articles on Demystifying the Incarnation, Dogma and Religious Pluralism, Melanchthon's Critique of Origen, Language in Luther's Incarnational Breakthrough, and Incarnational Ethics.
Thanks to Dr Blosser for his good wishes re my blogspot. It begins with some heavy theological pieces, and I am not sure of the technology yet, but I hope it will be a serene area, avoiding the tit for tat of our present polarized situation.
On homosexuality, it strikes me that this topic now has EXACTLY the same place and function as artificial contraception has among Catholics in the 1960s. To salute the prophetic wisdom of Humanae Vitae served as a litmus test of orthodoxy for decades, but now it is replaced by the gay issue. You may say there was never the odium theologicum against users of contraceptives that there is against sexually active gays. But actually there was fierce polemic against the "Contraceptive Mentality" and Family Planning Clinics were regarded with a distaste and hostility that would be reserved for gay locales now. While the contraception controversy has blown over, with church teaching unchanged and ignored in practice, the gay controversy is still virulent. But it, too, will blow over.
The animosity against gays in the Church has less to do with fratboy homophobia than with theological anxiety. Gay sex is today what contraceptives were in the sixties: a perceived element of anarchy, a surd that was not satisfactory resolved into harmony with the belief-system. The welfare of married couples was not the issue in the 60s and the welfare of gays, or of anybody else, is not the issue now. Rather the issue serves as a quilting-point (if that is not a misuse of Lacan's expression) for filling a void, overcoming a threatening indeterminacy, in our belief-structure.
"The anger of a Joan Chittester is Christ-like anger"
Ha! Ha! Ha!
I can only say you are very amusing at times.
"Why not do a statistical survey of women active in church life and see if Catholic women are less frustrated and discouraged than women in our other Christian churches?"
Because Christ established the Church for our satisfaction right? And if it doesn't 'feel' right it can't be can it?
Hey fidens, I am only riposting to the anecdotal argument of pb by pointing out that it does not prove anything. My proposed poll is NOT to determine what the Church should be but merely to offer a check on the claim that Catholic women active in ministry are happier with their Church than their Protestant counterparts are. But of course you know that, and are once again sounding off at a tangent to what I actually said.
As to the guy who laughed about Joan Chittester, here is a USA Today article on that truly evangelical lady:
For Sister Joan Chittister, defiance is a form of obedience.
And silence in the face of injustice is a sin.
The powerhouse sister may come packaged like a powder puff — a powder-blue suit matching her powder-blue eyes. But her outspoken ways challenge any tired stereotypes of women religious, as Catholic sisters and nuns are known.
"I do believe what I was taught," says Chittister, 68. "It's a matter of becoming the best of what we set out to be. We aren't up to the theology we proclaim."
Not for lack of trying on her part. Chittister, an international peace activist and advocate for Catholic women's ordination to the priesthood, is well-known for questioning authority; she even named the newest of her 30 books on faith, love and social justice Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir (in bookstores now).
She comments on religion and society in columns for the National Catholic Reporter and the spirituality Web site Beliefnet. Her own Web site, Benetvision.org, focuses on contemporary spirituality.
But when Chittister blasts the "mind-binding of denominationalism," it calls for a question to her:
Why is she still Catholic?
"I can't not be Catholic!" she exclaims, calling her church a "treasure house" of culture, history, tradition and discipline that "develops the soul."
Yet she also was shaped by "three great streams of change: Vatican II, Vietnam and the women's movement. No one can stand in the midst of all these deluges and not know you are being carried to a new place."
So why, half a century after her first vows, is she still a sister?
"It's the way I can model Jesus. He was always walking, giving, doing, challenging, questioning, raising people up, always fearless."
It's what sisters do, says Chittister, prioress of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pa., from 1978-90 and head of the national Leadership Conference of Women Religious in 1976-77.
Her 148-year-old Erie community follows the Rule of St. Benedict, a sixth-century guidebook for monastic life based on the values "of work, holy leisure, stewardship, community, humility and peace."
While she was prioress, the Erie sisters added a "corporate commitment focusing on nuclear disarmament, ecological stewardship and identification with the poorest of the poor, particularly women."
The Vatican bureaucracy doesn't dictate the Erie Benedictine's daily lives or ordinary decisions, but it
The Vatican bureaucracy doesn't dictate the Erie Benedictine's daily lives or ordinary decisions, but it has the right to discipline any Catholic institution. In 2001, a Vatican committee asked the prioress, Sister Christine Vladimiroff, to block Chittister from addressing an international women's ordination conference; Vladimiroff declined. In the end, there was no formal discipline from Rome, which ruffled some conservatives.
"I would call (Chittister) a notorious dissenter," says Peter W. Miller, editor of an independent Catholic newsletter in Seattle. "She obstinately rejects something she knows to be church teaching, and she does it publicly," says Miller, who prefers the traditions of the pre-Vatican II church.
Pope John Paul says the male-only priesthood is an unchangeable doctrine. Chittister and others argue that it's a historic, human tradition. Yet, no one expects to see women priests any time soon.
So, will Chittister ever give up?
Never.
"It looks pragmatically correct to say (ordination) won't happen. But I'm not a pragmatist. I'm an idealist. I breath optimism. I cannot do otherwise, no matter how muddy the road ahead," she says.
Look where God has carried her so far. Her father died when she was 3. At the funeral, her mother introduced the nuns as "special friends of God's who would stay with him until the angels come to take him to heaven." From then on, that was all little Joan ever wanted to be.
But when her mother remarried, it was to a Presbyterian, who never converted to Catholicism. "I heard all the arguments over who was going to heaven."
Despite her father's opposition, she worked her way through parochial high school and joined the Benedictine Sisters of Erie at 16.
She arrived at the monastery on Sept. 8, 1952. She was stricken with polio Oct. 15. It was four years before she walked again unaided.
Her mother died in 1995 after 28 years with Alzheimer's. Her stepfather died in a car wreck in 1971.
After his thoroughly Catholic funeral, she whispered to his coffin in the cathedral, "Daddy, I'll explain all this later."
Chittister, her eyes framed by crinkles from years of laughter, insists, "My life is a series of jokes!"
And stories. She was shaped not only by faith and by history but by the bedtime tales her parents told.
Her iron-willed mother's best story was The Little Engine that Could, starring a little engine that tows an impossibly heavy freight train up a hill, chugging, "I think I can ..."
Her father's was The Emperor's New Clothes, starring the blunt boy who tells the world that the emperor is actually naked "while all the elders hide behind lies. My father always said, 'Tell the truth.' "
Their Joan grew up to be both iron-willed and a teller of the truths she's heard and seen. "Once you know something, you know it, and you have no choice but to be aware of it. When you get a new awareness of God, you can't go back
Their Joan grew up to be both iron-willed and a teller of the truths she's heard and seen. "Once you know something, you know it, and you have no choice but to be aware of it. When you get a new awareness of God, you can't go back.
"Consciousness commits," she says exultingly.
Consciousness commits...
Sr Joan is also angry about Iraq:
"This is what I don't understand: All of a sudden nothing seems to matter.
"First, they said they wanted Bin Laden "dead or alive." But they didn't get him. So now they tell us that it doesn't matter.
"Our mission is greater than one man.
"Then they said they wanted Saddam Hussein, "dead or alive." He's apparently alive but we haven't got him yet, either. However, President Bush has told reporters, "It doesn't matter.
"Our mission is greater than one man."
"Finally, they told us that we were invading Iraq to destroy their weapons of mass destruction. Now they say those weapons probably don't exist. Apparently that doesn't matter either.
"Except that it does matter.
"I know we're not supposed to say that. I know it's called "unpatriotic." But it's also called honesty. And dishonesty matters. It matters that the infrastructure of a foreign nation that couldn't defend itself against us has been destroyed on the grounds that it was a military threat to the world.
"It matters that it was destroyed by us under a new doctrine of "pre-emptive war" when there was apparently nothing worth pre-empting.
"It surely matters to the families here whose sons went to war to make the world safe from weapons of mass destruction and will never come home.
"It matters to families in the United States as their life support programs are ended, whose medical insurance has run out, whose food stamps were cut off, whose day care programs were eliminated so we could spend the money on sending an army to do what did not need to be done.
"It matters to the Iraqi girl whose face was burned by a lamp that toppled over as a result of a U.S. bombing run.
"It matters to Ali, the Iraqi boy who lost his family -- and both his arms - in a U.S. air attack.
"It matters to the people in Baghdad whose streets are unsafe, whose 158 government ministries' buildings and all their records have been destroyed, whose cultural heritage and social system has been looted and whose cities teem with anti-American protests.
"It matters to the United Nations whose integrity was impugned, whose authority was denied, whose inspection teams are even now still being overlooked in the process of technical evaluation and disarmament.
"It matters to the reputation of the United States in the eyes of the world, both now and for decades to come, perhaps.
"And surely it matters to the integrity of this nation whether or not its intelligence gathering agencies have any real intelligence or not before we launch a military armada on its say-so.
"And it should matter whether or not our government is either incompetent and didn't know what they were doing or were dishonest and refused to say. The unspoken truth is that either as a people we were misled, or we were lied to, about the real reason for this war. Either we made a huge - and unforgivable mistake, an arrogant or ignorant mistake
Either we made a huge - and unforgivable mistake, an arrogant or ignorant mistake, or we are swaggering around the world like a blind giant, flailing in all directions while the rest of the world watches in horror or in ridicule.
"Of what are we really capable as a nation if the considered judgment of politicians and people around the world means nothing to us as a people?
"If Bill Clinton's definition of "is" matters, surely this matters. If a president's sex life matters, surely a president's use of global force against some of the weakest people in the world matters. If a president's word in a court of law about a private indiscretion matters, surely a president's word to the community of nations and the security of millions of people matters.
"And if not, why not? If not, surely there is something as wrong with us as citizens, as thinkers, as there must be with some facet of the government. If wars that the public says are wrong yesterday - as a majority of U.S. citizens did of a unilateral attack on Iraq ・suddenly become "right" the minute the first bombs drop, what kind of national morality is that?
"Of what are we really capable as a nation if the considered judgment of politicians and people around the world means nothing to us as a people?
"What is the depth of the American soul if we can allow destruction to be done in our name and the name of "liberation" and never even demand an accounting of its costs, both personal and public, when it is over?
"We like to take comfort in the notion that people make a distinction between our government and ourselves. We like to say that the people of the world love Americans, they simply mistrust our government. But excoriating a distant and anonymous "government" for wreaking rubble on a nation in pretense of good requires very little of either character or intelligence.
"What may count most, however, is that we may well be the ones Proverbs warns when it reminds us: "Kings take pleasure in honest lips; they value the one who speaks the truth." The point is clear: If the people speak and the king doesn't listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the king acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people.
"It may be time for us to realize that in a country that prides itself on being democratic, we are our government. And the rest of the world is figuring that out very quickly.
"From where I stand, that matters.・
OK, you're right. Chittister is a Christ-like character.
Like some kind of 1960s Catherine of Siena. Holy anger, holy anger... So your theory is that ordination could ease her anger management problem?
-Sister: Doctor, I cannot control my anger.
-Doctor: Sister, I recommend Mogadon and ordination.
Sigh. It seems like the sister does not follow the Rule, because she is not obedient to her superiors, which would seem to be the bishops, or the Pope.
In many ways, she reminds me of Luther. Angry, probably rightly at many things, but unwilling to recognize that even in the Church, there are the wheat and the tares. Why does a "choose-your-own-adventure" novel come to mind?
Ah, USA Today: as always, fearlessly asking the tough questions.
Someone mentioned Catherine of Siena -- a good model of Christian freedom and prophetic anger. And there were plenty of patronizing males of that time to tell here "go back to your convent, sister, and obey your reverend mother"!
St. Catherine was not a sister in a convent, but a Dominican tertiary.
She was also staunchly orthodox and faithful. Which is why my comparison of Chittester with her was pure irony.
Thanks for that, I did not know she was a Dominican tertiary.
I wonder, though, if her orthodoxy was quite as obvious to Catholics in her day as it is now, and I am pretty sure that Sr Joan Chittester's orthodoxy will be quite obvious to all in due course.
Hey everyone, her name is Chittister, not Chittester. I don't know that she's ever tested a single chit. :-P
Fr Joe let us be honest all this dissent is about sex is it not. example King Henry VIII sex. all Schismatics sex divorce and remarriage. Amchurch dissent sex samesex sex. this century will be the great century against the sixth commandment the one before against the fifth. antonio g.
Chittister dissents not about sex but about justice --- though it is true that in some cases injustice is based on sexual discrimination -- against women, gays, or third world people held hostage to a reactionary sexual politics. Chittister has shown prophetic anger against other injustices not based on sex -- against the people of Iraq, the victims of poverty or the US capital punishment system, etc.
It's not good manners to post your stream of consciousness, particularly when it requires extensive editing.
My prediction is that Chitister will be remembered by history as one of the heresiarchs of the modernist/feminist heresy.
Sister Joan Chitister will be forgotten, as will the Palestrina of our day (Marty Haugen) when we regain our moral compass.
Why would you do such a horrible thing as to liken the horrendous schlockmeister Haugen to Palestrina????
Audietur vox mulieris ex Mumbai: http://www.nationalcatholicrepor...lpers/
index.htm
Sorry. Didn't mean to raise blood pressure. Sarcasm is sometimes lost in the written word. I'm a member of the society for a moratorium on the music of Haugen, Joncas and Haas. He, Haugen, has, by serious people, seriously sick people, been called the Palestrina of the Post-Vatican II Church.
Aha. I was hoping you were being sarcastic.
I'm also a member of the same society -- though it's my secular name that's on their list, not my religious name that I prefer to use here and in other venues.
The deliverances of Joan Chittister and Marty Haugen, both sets of which I had to deal with for years (the former as a full-time lay minister, the latter as a choir member), are only mildly annoying blips on my radar screen that will pass in due course like so many others. I have no interest in discussing them. Nor do I care much for the kind of syndrome-thinking I too often see in these comment boxes. Theological orthodoxy and right-wing politics need no more go together than theological heterodoxy and left-wing politics. Both theology and life are more complicated than such thinking would suggest. What I do care about discussing in a setting such as this are the questions in what sense and to what extent the teaching of the Catholic Church is true. That holds both generally and for the topic of this thread.
The women cited in the Ferrara-Ireland book have answered that question for themselves and have done so in a way that cradle Catholics need to emulate. Having attended secular universities, taught in Catholic ones, and having later been an RCIA director, I've always been more impressed by the fervor, piety, and orthodoxy of most converts than with those of most cradle Catholics. To my mind, both the journeys and the destinations of intelligent converts are good indicators of where the rest of us should be. That's why I take this book as one bit of evidence for the truth of the Church's teaching about women's ordination.
Not that such evidence is enough; I have debated this issue on and off for three decades with many well-educated people, some of whom are priests and religious. How such debates usually end up was well exemplifed by a few extensive discussions over at Pontifications last month. You might want to check them out: Male Priesthood and the Grammar of Faith and Do You Have a Pope in Your Belly?
Michael Liccione is to be welcomed here as he has the courage to post under his own name. His website which I have been looking at contains a great wealth of interesting articles. Of course there is much to argue with as well, but that must be for another day.
Joe O'Leary | 06.28.05 - 12:24 am | #
Very interesting -- so a guest at this weblog thinks himself the gatekeeper of who is welcome to post here and who is not welcome?
Am I so welcomed, merely because I post under my own name? I too welcome Michael's input, but as a fellow poster not as a pontificator or owner of the site. (or in this case the hijacker of the site).
I post under my own name too, but Fr. O'Leary and the person calling himself Jerry have made it abundantly clear that they want me to bug off.
I don't what you to bug off, Poly.
That's not the impression I'd gotten, but I will take you at your word, Father.
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