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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: A decision to cross the Tiber
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TubaMirum
Shipmate
# 8282
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Posted
Well, I guess that about sums it up; all present and accounted for. RCC, Anglican, and Evangelical reasoning: check, check, and check. It's all right there.
Now we need a representative from the Quakers. ("Priests"? Why "priests"?.....)
Posts: 4719 | From: Right Coast USA | Registered: Aug 2004
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CL
Shipmate
# 16145
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Chesterbelloc:
I really don't want to get caught up in this argument too much - time doesn't allow - but I just want to point out what I hope are a couple of uncontroversial things.
1) There is nothing close to scholarly consensus about whether there were ever female deacons ordained in the full sense in which men were: i.e., with precisely the same key indicators, including the laying on of hands with the explicit invocation of the Holy Spirit for that office. That's just a fact.
2) The Roman Catholic Church has not definitively ruled on whether women can be ordained to the diaconate.
3) This has no bearing for Catholics on whether women can be ordained to the priesthood because that has been definitively ruled out, as discussed above.
The priesthood encompasses the three degrees of diaconate, presbyterate and episcopate. Women cannot be ordained deacons for the same reasons they cannot be ordained presbyters. Ordinatio Sacredotalis applies across the board.
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"Even if Catholics faithful to Tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the ones who are the true Church of Jesus Christ." - Athanasius of Alexandria
Posts: 647 | From: Ireland | Registered: Jan 2011
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Chesterbelloc
Tremendous trifler
# 3128
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Posted
If you say so, CL - but you're the first I've heard saying so explicitly.
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"[A] moral, intellectual, and social step below Mudfrog."
Posts: 4199 | From: Athens Borealis | Registered: Aug 2002
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Divine Outlaw
Gin-soaked boy
# 2252
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by CL:
The priesthood encompasses the three degrees of diaconate, presbyterate and episcopate.
You're making this up. More charitably, you're confusing orders as such with the ministerial priesthood.
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insert amusing sig. here
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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by leo:
quote:
Originally posted by ken:
We don't need to search antiquity, the Bible trumps it.
For protestants, maybe.
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
For pretty much all Christians I'd hope because its our only direct witness to the life of Jesus, who is God incarnate.
And its a lot better basis for an argument than "the Pope said so" which is the one about a third of the RCs on this thread are using (mysteriously it seems to go with usernames begining with the letter "c")
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Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
Shipmate
# 11274
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Posted
Leo, I find that on this side of the pond Episcopalians talk increasingly of the Church's "lived experience" in addition to scripture, tradition and reason. Indeed, sometimes here the formula now seems to one of scripture, tradition, and lived experience, the last of these seemingly either doing double duty for reason or having displaced it. This was not, however, the formula thirty or forty years ago (it maybe gained currency only in the last decade).
Posts: 7328 | From: Delaware | Registered: Apr 2006
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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
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Posted
But reason is not and cannot be a "leg" in this context. Its just how we think about the "legs", that is our sources of knowledge of God, such as experience, Scripture, tradition, revelation.
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Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
Shipmate
# 11274
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Posted
I don't see how you can imply that reason - the intellect - isn't a primary source of our "knowledge" (is that really the best word for it?), i.e. our understanding , of God.
Or is your rejection of that just some characteristically evo-low church thing?
Posts: 7328 | From: Delaware | Registered: Apr 2006
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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras:
I don't see how you can imply that reason - the intellect - isn't a primary source of our "knowledge" (is that really the best word for it?), i.e. our understanding , of God.
Reason isn't a source of information, it is just a name for thinking done right. Logical rather than illogical. Any understanding must involve reason, whatever it is based on. Our understanding of revelation has to be reasoning, our understanding of tradition has to be reasoning. That's what understanding is. Unreasoning or illogical thought is the opposite of understanding.
"Reason" cannot be a leg of our metaphorical three-legged stool of authority, any more than "lack of woodworm" could be a leg of a real wooden stool.
I think some people are loosely using the word "reason" instead of "experience" but that is unhelpful, because it is perfectly possible to believe nonsense based on your own experience, unless you think about it reasonably and logically. Also because it implies - maybe it is meant to imply - that people who derive their understanding from Scripture are doing it in an unreasoning way.
[ 22. July 2011, 13:20: Message edited by: ken ]
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Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
I see ken's point. It's the difference between the source of information and the method of processing it.
Almost Cyprian's fountain and channel again, actually.
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
Posts: 18173 | From: Under | Registered: Jul 2008
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Soror Magna
Shipmate
# 9881
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Posted
Is it really beyond the realm of possibility that the development and growth of the idea that women are equal to men is also the work of the Holy Spirit? OliviaG
Posts: 5430 | From: Caprica City | Registered: Jul 2005
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TubaMirum
Shipmate
# 8282
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Posted
Here's an interesting article from yesterday's NYTimes: In 3 Countries, Challenging the Vatican on Female Priests. Excerpt:
quote:
More than 150 Roman Catholic priests in the United States have signed a statement in support of a fellow cleric who faces dismissal for participating in a ceremony that purported to ordain a woman as a priest, in defiance of church teaching.
The American priests’ action follows closely on the heels of a “Call to Disobedience” issued in Austria last month by more than 300 priests and deacons. They stunned their bishops with a seven-point pledge that includes actively promoting priesthood for women and married men, and reciting a public prayer for “church reform” in every Mass.
And in Australia, the National Council of Priests recently released a ringing defense of the bishop of Toowoomba, who had issued a pastoral letter saying that, facing a severe priest shortage, he would ordain women and married men “if Rome would allow it.” After an investigation, the Vatican forced him to resign.
Posts: 4719 | From: Right Coast USA | Registered: Aug 2004
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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Louise:
quote:
Originally posted by TubaMirum:
That's a good point, Angloid, and shouldn't be forgotten.
Most women have not had any secular rights in most places for most of history - not only in the West, but pretty much everywhere on earth. No right to vote (where there was a right to vote); no right to own property; no right to an education or to go to university; no real possibility of supporting themselves.
It's not really at all surprising that the priesthood was simply one more thing denied women.
Well yes, precisely, which is where I came in on this thread. In the words of the sainted Basil Fawlty, it's stating 'The Bleeding Obvious' that ecclesiastical 'Tradition' is institutionally sexist and homophobic, and historically always has been. When challenged about 'The Bleeding Obvious' that this is unjust, the proponents of Tradition argue that it's precisely because they have such a long and appalling track record of institutional discrimination that it must be right!
Those are good points.
What I sometimes find hard to appreciate is how far, and how quickly, we have come even in living memory. For some of my parent's lifetime, it was a common practice for employers to have an explicit policy of paying women less than men for the same work. For some of my grandparent's lifetime, women couldn't vote on the same terms as men. For some of my great-grandparent's lifetime, they couldn't vote at all. There are people alive today who were born when women did not have the vote.
And today you would have to search very hard to find anyone willing to defend to old order. We still have sexism, of course, but the idea of an intrinsically inferior legal status for women has gone from being ordinary and unexceptional to being literally indefensible.
If you want to exclude women from a certain role, it isn't at all convincing to refer back to a time when they are excluded from practically everything as authority. We all agree, on both sides of the ordination debate, that past ages were wrong about almost everything that they restricted women from doing. There's not the slightest desire to revive their inequalities in any sphere but this. If women are to be excluded from ordination, then it must be a special case, an exception to a universal rule. The onus is on those making the exception to explain why. "Tradition" doesn't cut it, because "tradition" justifies being unfair to women in all sorts of ways which have been rightly abandoned.
Against that, it is telling that as soon as the social restrictions on women (which everyone agrees were wrong) began to disappear, the churches began to realise that women could be priests, and when they have been ordained, it has been found by experience that they are no less able or blessed by God than men. If the special reason for restricting women from this ministry is an inscrutable divine disapproval, it makes no sense that the overwhelming trend is for the doubtful or undecided to become convinced of the validity of women's ordination.
If, on a hypothetical view, the Church had, because of a deeply sexist social environment, made an understandable but serious error in perpetuating sexual inequality, and the Holy Spirit wished to correct us while respecting our free will, what would the result look like? Isn't it a fair surmise that what we would expect to see would be extremely sexist practices in the church endorsed by socient, but with a latent trend throughout church tradition saying that despite appearances, men and women were on some deep and important level of equivalent value, and as soon as the social prejudice against putting that into effect were removed, women's ministry being recognised and blessed? And how does that differ from what we actually see?
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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"
Richard Dawkins
Posts: 4619 | From: Hampton, Middlesex, UK | Registered: Mar 2005
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TubaMirum
Shipmate
# 8282
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Posted
And those are good points, too, Eliab....
Posts: 4719 | From: Right Coast USA | Registered: Aug 2004
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