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Thursday, December 5, 2024

New Film on Women priests: forbidden vocations, beyond excommunication

 https://www.lesuricate.org/femmes-pretres-vocations-interdites-par-dela-lexcommunication/



“The Catholic Church does not believe that men and women are equal. They say we are equal in dignity. But we are not equal in rights and roles. They don’t have wives, they don’t have daughters. It’s the most radical patriarchy in the world because you have a small elite of men who have no connection with women.”

It is with these words from American theologian Jamie Manson that Women Priests: Forbidden Vocationswill open, then giving way to several speakers of different ages and origins, all of whom have come to share their testimony, their experience and, by the same token, their example. But all united by the same ideal consisting of questioning the line of conduct set out by Pope John Paul II in his Ordinatio Sacerdotalis of May 22, 1994, namely "that the Church has in no way the power to confer priestly ordination on women." A line of conduct since then rigorously observed by Popes Benedict XVI and Francis I.

Beyond the hermeneutic question of whether, for example, Mary Magdalene was really the "apostle of the apostles" and whether women can therefore assume the priesthood or not, this societal debate will offer a historical parallel with the first Christians, practicing their worship in the secrecy of the Catacombs.

Having entered the priesthood with the greatest discretion, the various participants will then feed the film with their experiences and their personal frustrations.

Women Priests will thus focus – among other things – on presenting the “Danube Seven”: seven women ordained on June 29, 2002, then excommunicated on December 21 of the same year. Two of them, Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger and Gisela Forster, subsequently became bishops, in turn ordaining other women in the United States, Canada, France with Geneviève Beney from Lyon, or in Spain with Christina Moreira who will also intervene to share her personal experience.

The contribution of the latter being particularly enriching, while allowing a shift into the unexpected terrain of love and marriage, Christina Moreira herself being married to a priest: "The fact of living love as a couple, of sharing life, gives us roots in matter, in true existence, in society, in reality to be credible when we speak of love to others", she will say.

Beyond the religious aspect, the quest of these women will then seem to be a search for authenticity and life experience when it comes to establishing a dialogue with the faithful.

Thus, Women Priests: Forbidden Vocations offers an immersion into an unusual feminist struggle that is relatively unknown to the general public, showing strong, calm, composed, thoughtful and patient women who know how to shine their light from the shadows in which they are currently forced to exist. A documentary that will raise various particularly interesting human, societal and philosophical questions, while recalling in its own way what Stendhal wrote in 1826 in his "Rome, Naples and Florence", namely that "The admission of women to perfect equality would be the surest mark of civilization".

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