Interfaith Worship and Communion at Castle Otttis with Miriam Picconi ARCWP and Wanda Russell ARCWP

Miriam Picconi ARCWP and Wanda Russell ARCWP, Baptism of two children

Sunday,MARCH 31 at 10:00 AM there will be an INCLUSIVE Interfaith Worship and Communion Service

at Castle Otttis located at 103 3rd Street, St. Augustine, 32084.  Due to limited parking area, please carpool.

Sorry, there are no handicap facilities.  Please dress according to weather.  No air conditioning or heating.

For additional information call Miriam Picconi, 386-569-7311 or e-mail at miriampicconi@gmail.com.

For information about the castle and directions, go to www.castleotttis.com.  

LENTEN PRAYER AND COMMUNION 

Wednesday evenings, MARCH 13, 20 and 27 AND APRIL 3 and 10 at 7:15 at 2 Westmill Ln., Palm Coast, FL 32164

HOLY WEEK SERVICES

APRIL 18 HOLY THURSDAY AND APRIL 19 GOOD FRIDAY at 7:15 PM at 2 Westmill Ln., Palm Coast.

MASS AT TITISVILLE 

Saturdays, MARCH 30 and APRIL 27 at 4:00 PM at the Church located at the Great Outdoors RV and Golf Resort.

125 Plantation Dr., Titisville, FL 32780.  All are welcome to the Table!  

If you or someone you know are traveling in the area, join the St. Christopher Community 

for Mass any Saturday.   Just tell the person at the gate that you are going to the church.

MASS 

Saturday, APRIL 13 PALM SUNDAY CELEBRATION at 4:00 PM at 2 Westmill Ln., Palm Coast, FL 32164

Hospitality follows.  Bring your favorite appetizer or dessert if you like.

INTERFAITH WORSHIP AND COMMUNION AT CASTLE OTTTIS on EASTER and following Sunday

EASTER Sunday, April 21 and APRIL 28 at 10:00 AM there will be INCLUSIVE Interfaith Worship and Communion Services at Castle Otttis.  To help us celebrate EASTER, if you are able, we invite you to bring a lilly or other favorite Easter flower to the Easter service to make our worship area more celebratory.  You may take it home with you and gift it to a family member or friend.  See location information, etc  above.

"Women have been robbed of religious heritage" Mary T Malone, Irish Times by Ursula Halligan

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/ursula-halligan-women-have-been-robbed-of-religious-heritage-1.3830394?fbclid=IwAR26uR_RDlbfpeFaLp9ZKnjL4nkbFIfRogXfvZiDGoQcGWyPJw08dmMEw54#.XJDOvpYGpts.facebook

My Response: 

Yes, "Women in early church were disciples, martyrs, leaders and teachers just like men" , and should be treated the same today by the Catholic Church! I highly recommend Mary T. Malone's outstanding book that calls the question of women's equality in the Church as a major issue today. 

Below is a fabulous interview with one of my favorite theologians, Mary T. Malone. So the question is are women ready to rock the boat in Ireland and begin a renewed priestly ministry in egalitarian, inclusive communities in Ireland? Bridget Mary Meehan ARCWP, https://arcwp.org
sofiabmm@aol.com, 703-505-0004

If, as Pope Francis said recently, every feminist is “machismo with a skirt” then I’m off to buy myself a new wardrobe.

I couldn’t bear anyone questioning my feminist credentials.

One of my earliest memories is of protesting outside our parish church. My mother was trying to fix a hat on my head by tying a ribbon under my chin. I kept pulling away from her because the ribbon was pinching my skin.

My two older brothers had gone into the church with their heads uncovered and I wanted to do the same. My mother said women had to cover their heads in church because Our Lady always covered hers.

I may have been five years old but I didn’t buy it. Intuitively, I knew the imposition of the hat was a tug on my freedom as a girl. Just like I knew the absence of women priests from the altar meant the church thought women were less important than men.

Eight years later, I had an encounter with a monk in Mount Melleray who told me – dead-pan – that I couldn’t join my father and three brothers on a tour on the monastery; because I was a daughter of Eve, and Eve was the one who brought sin into the world.

I laughed, thinking the man was being funny – but one look at his face told me he wasn’t.

I knew the absence of women priests from the altar meant the church thought women were less important than men

It would be years later before I realised that all these experiences were examples of an entrenched sexism rooted in the church from its earliest days.

• Women still under glass ceiling, according to business survey
• Ireland’s pay gap between men and women in R&D highest in Europe
• State must ensure greater equality between men and women

All-male elite

The monk in Mount Melleray was simply continuing what a powerful, all-male elite had been doing to women for centuries: systematically excluding, silencing, demonising and vilifying us – using the image of Eve.

Growing up in a world where all the authority figures were male, and men were the only ones allowed to interpret the Bible, formulate doctrine and conduct acts of worship, it was easy to buy into the illusion that patriarchy was the natural way of things.

The rebellious little five year old in me never did. She instinctively knew it wasn’t right, but what she didn’t know, was why it wasn’t right.

Every time she’d stomp her foot and say “It’s not fair that only men can be priests”, the church’s stock answer was “Jesus picked 12 male apostles. He didn’t pick any women, get over it.”

My inner five-year-old self never got over it. So, you can imagine how happy she was to discover that scholars, investigating the ori gins of the church, had burst a big hole in the church’s theory that its hierarchical order and exclusive male ministry is the way it is because, that’s how Jesus organised it.

Amazingly, many Catholic women still don’t know this. They have no idea that over the last 40 years the history of women in the early church has been significantly revised. They have yet to hear the good news.

They don’t know that new evidence about the role of women has emerged contradicting everything the institutional church ever taught us.

They don’t know that Jesus never “ordained” anyone in his life; that he had lots of apostles, not just 12 and they included many women; that the hierarchical church didn’t emerge until hundreds of years after Jesus’s death and that the word “priest” wasn’t used until the middle of the second century.

Feminist theologians

These are explosive new findings that have yet to be fully appreciated by the majority of Catholics. Their discovery is due to painstaking scholarship carried out by historians and feminist theologians.

Jesus picked 12 male apostles. He didn’t pick any women, get over it

Like a detective forensically re-examining a crime scene, they discovered that women in the early church were disciples, apostles, martyrs, house church leaders, ecclesiastical scholars, diplomats, missionaries and teachers, just like the men.

And “crime scene” is the appropriate way to describe the examination of the origins of our faith tradition. It becomes clear that in later centuries women were robbed of their religious heritage and unjustly relegated to a subordinated status by men.

The perniciousness of this is felt today by every woman who learns that a global organisation like the Roman Catholic Church, purporting to represent God’s people on Earth, excludes half its membership from leadership positions, because they are female.

Can you imagine any other organisation in the western world getting away with such a practice? Isn’t it astonishing we have to remind ourselves that women are half the human race? Their invisibility in the church and the hierarchy’s failure to see women as full human beings is the elephant in the church.

Ursula Halligan is former political editor of TV3 and now journalist in residence at Dublin City University. (This is an edited version of a talk given by her at the recent launch of a revised edition of The Elephant in the Church, a book by theologian Mary T Malone)

• Topics:
• Mary T Malone
• Pope Francis
• Ursula Halligan
• Catholic Church
• Dublin City University
• TV3

READ MORE

• Ireland drops to 9th in narrowing gender gap, report shows
• ‘There’s nothing wrong with women . . . We are more than capable’
• Are plans to close gender gap in university posts fair?
• Funds for women-only professorships aim to end gender inequality
• Glass ceiling in Irish higher education needs to be smashed

"Leading Benedictine Nun in Germany Calls for Women Priests" by Christa Pongratz-Lippitt

https://international.la-croix.com/news/leading-benedictine-nun-in-germany-calls-for-women-priests/9694

"We intend to look for forms (of celebrating the Eucharist) which suit us and develop new ones," she added. This is great news! A Benedictine prioress, a nun is offering new , innovative ideas on celebrating Eucharist as the Body of Christ challenging traditional theology and man-made laws that discriminate!
She is a breath of fresh air, indeed! Nuns in rebellion, wow!
Bridget Mary Meehan ARCWP






"The leader of one of Germany's most important female religious communities has called into question the Catholic Church's exclusion of women from the ordained priesthood.

"It is surely only natural for women to be priests and I cannot understand the reasons given as to why not," said Sister Ruth Schönenberger, head of the Benedictine Priory of Tutzing, the Bavarian motherhouse of a worldwide missionary order.

"I am surprised that the presence of Christ has been reduced to the male sex," she said in a recent interview with katholisch.de, the official website of the German Catholic Church.

"Here in Tutzing, we, too, have excellently qualified women theologians. The only thing they lack is ordination – nothing else," said 68-year-old Schönenberger, prioress of Tutzing since 2015.

The priory is one of the most important in the Benedictine world. In 1885 it founded the Missionary Benedictine Sisters of Tutzing, a congregation that today numbers some 1,300 sisters in 19 countries around the world.
Priesthood should not be based on gender

Schönenberger, who is responsible for the 70 members at the Tutzing priory and those at two other Benedictine convents, said the criteria for priesthood should not be based on one's gender.

"Our present image/concept of the priesthood urgently needs to be fundamentally revised and I am genuinely surprised that priests themselves don't protest more against present developments since they involve them," said the prioress, noting that men and women should be treated as equals.

"The extent to which this power imbalance exists the world over is truly alarming and so is the fact that we have not learned to grapple with it more effectively. It is something we must rigorously tackle," Schönenberger said.

She called for greater and open discussion on the issue to look for concrete steps that could be taken to remedy the imbalance "and not just comfort us women somehow – as, for example, by promising to look into the question of women deacons."

Schönenberger said she and her fellow sisters often discuss the subject.
New forms of Eucharist?

"After all, we experience concrete examples of subordination day after day. If we, as a group of women religious, want to celebrate the Eucharist together, we have to arrange for a man to come and celebrate it, every single day. He stands at the altar and leads the celebration. We are not allowed to," the Tutzing prioress said.

"We intend to look for forms (of celebrating the Eucharist) which suit us and develop new ones," she added.
Worldwide prayers for gender equality in the Church

She said she and her community fully supported the prayer initiative for gender equality in the Church that was launched in February by Sister Irene Gassman, prioress of the Benedictine Monastery of Fahr (Switzerland).

The Swiss religious has invited Benedictine communities around the globe — as well as parishes and other communities — to include the "Prayer on Thursday" during compline (or night prayer) each week.

Schönenberger said prayer alone was not enough, but added: "Why shouldn't we pray for gender equality in the Church? It is most important that all discussions on reform be offered up to God."

Upper Room Inclusive Catholic Community - Third Sunday in Lent - Presiders: Donna Rougeux, ARCWP, and Mary Skelly

Donna Rougeux, ARCWP, and Mary Skelly led the Upper Room’s liturgy for the Third Sunday in Lent with the theme: Unexplainable encounters that change us. Donna’s homily reflection follows the readings below.

First Reading: When Love Gives Way

Glaciers crack and groan,

Tearing into drifting floes

Rivers course and pound the shore,

Flowing into new tributaries.

Trunks grow branches and twigs,

 Reaching for the clouds and stars.

Lovers, friends and siblings drift

Apart with reluctance and surprise

As if their one time love was something

That could have been locked in,

Impervious to the pull of time

And assorted, sometimes sordid paths they choose.

Some of us are lured into the unknown

and so become more ourselves;

Revelatory for us but mystifying

To others who feel less need of change.

Others of us are devoted to what we cherish

and so define ourselves;

Reassuring for us but claustrophobic

For others who prize momentum.

Despite everyone’s wishes, loving gives way

Misunderstandings devolve into fear, righteousness, and judgment.

Oh, to be the trunk that doesn’t begrudge the branch or twig!

To be the tributary streaming away yet thankful to mother river!

To be the stolid glacier, melting and reforming into one whole!

If only people could drift with our casting each other adrift.

Then, it would be in our human nature

For one time love to spread

Across differences

And trust to find a home

In our most tender hearts.

These are the inspired words of an ARCWP Priest and the community affirms them by saying: Amen

Gospel: Luke 9:28-36

Jesus took Peter, John and James and went up onto the mountain to pray. While Jesus was praying, his face changed in appearance and the clothes he wore became dazzlingly white.

Suddenly two people were there talking with Jesus-Moses and Elijah.

They appeared in glory and spoke of the prophecy that Jesus was about to fulfill in Jerusalem.

Peter and the others had already fallen into a deep sleep, but awakening, they saw Jesus’ glory-and the two people who were standing next to him. 

When the two were leaving, Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, how good it its for us to be here!Let’s set up three tents, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah!” Peter didn’t really know what he was saying.

While Peter was speaking, a cloud came and overshadowed them, and the disciples grew fearful as the others entered it.

Then from the cloud came a voice which said, “This is my Own, my Chosen One. Listen to him!”

When the voice finished speaking, they saw no one but Jesus standing there. The disciples kept quiet, telling nothing of what 

they had seen at that time to anyone.

These are the inspired readings from the gospel of Luke and the community affirms them by saying: Amen

Donna’s Homily Reflection:

Karl Rahner is a theologian who describes God as Absolute Mystery. Rahner posits that this Absolute Mystery reveals his/herself with self-communication. This revelation does not resolve the mystery; it increases cognizance of God’s incomprehensibility.  Mystery therefore will always be incomprehensible and always revealing itself. This is what today’s gospel reading is describing. A similar story to the transfiguration is the story of Moses and the burning bush. A story about Abraham encountering an invitation to be in a covenant relationship with the God pictures God as a burning pot. These stories are describing theophanies. A theophany is a visible manifestation of God to humankind. These manifestations to humankind of the Absolute Mystery continue throughout history into the present day.

St Patrick, who’s feast day is today, described a theophany that he experienced in one of his books. He writes about a vision he encountered, “I saw a man coming, as it were from Ireland. His name was Victoricus, and he carried many letters, and he gave me one of them. I read the heading: "The Voice of the Irish". As I began the letter, I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people…and they cried out, as with one voice: "We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.” This vision had such a transformational effect on Patrick that we still celebrate his life today and call him the patron saint of Ireland.

When Absolute Mystery reveals his/her self to us we are changed in a variety of ways. The poem that is our first reading today illustrates ways nature and people are changed when God or as the poem says “when love gives way.” God is love and gives way or breaks into our world causing glaciers to crack and groan, trunks to grow branches and twigs and people to grow into their authentic selves.

What are the stories about theophanies and our own experiences of mystery trying to teach us? First, we cannot contain mystery by putting up tents like Peter wanted to do in today’s story. Even though we are tempted to keep our mountain top experiences in safe places like tents or tabernacles, mystery is bigger than us and uncontainable. Second theophanies are always breaking into our existence and changing us. A beautiful sunset, the birth of a child, being present for the last breath of a loved one, are all experiences of the Absolute Mystery.

We cannot help but be aware of the awe and fear that can arise in the face of Mystery and the incomprehensibility of the encounter. Third we are being challenged to let go of thinking we have all the answers. We are being called into something bigger than us but at the same time into something that gives us meaning purpose and life that is worth living.

These unexplainable encounters of mystery humble us, fascinate us, and call us to be one in the spirit with change and diversity. We are tempted to fight change, fear growth and contain the uncontainable. When we accept theophanies with gratitude, open hearts and a willingness to be changed we will be transformed in unimaginable ways. Division, judgement and misunderstandings can be transformed into wholeness, peace and authenticity.

Richard Rohr points to the awakening or enlightenment that happens when he reflects on today’s gospel reading and says, “Taking ordinary people ‘up a mountaintop by themselves’ sleepy men are about to be awakened. The stage is fully set for encounter and divine intimacy.”

God is always breaking in and inviting us to growth and change. Divine intimacy is God’s gift to us. Once we courageously accept this invitation our awakening begins and we can go back to sleep but like Jesus and Moses and all who have been called by love our journey is our destiny.