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Sunday, October 12, 2008

Bread Rising; Needed from Pope Benedict Prophetic Action


In Bread Rising, a newsletter by Terry Dosh, there are several rich nuggets of spiritual insight:
In 2003, Catherine Nerney wrote in " Communities define Christian living":
" A spirituality of communion defined the way early Christians lived the
gospel. "She cites that the Gospels and Pauline letters are vivid " handbooks for community" and that in the Pauline understanding "God's Trinitarian communion unfolds in communiites that live in God for the sake of others."

One of my favorite quotes in the newsletter is by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1962:
"The meaning of prophecy is the protest against the self-righteousness of the institutions. God thoughout history, has not been on the side of the institutions but on the side of the suffering and the persecuted."

Now is the time for Pope Benedict to apply this grace-filled insight to the Roman Catholic Church he now leads. As a Roman Catholic Womanpriest, who serves the marginalized in the church, I raise the issue of the second class citizenship of women in the contemporary church. The institutional church is on the wrong side of history again. The movement toward the full equality of women in church and society is the voice of God in our time. The institutional church needs to abandon laws that discriminate and/or increase women's sufferings and repent of its self-righteousness, and embrace all whom it persecutes as God's beloved ones. May the light of the Holy Spirit dawn once again, on Pope Benedict in a New Pentecost of prophetic action and community building.
Bridget Mary Meehan, rcwp
Pittsburgh, 2006

2 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Aric said...

Would you care to cite a source for the quotation from Pope Benedict? Without further context, it appears to be the very opposite of his life's work. God doesn't take sides among the faithful. (Marxists might, but that's a different story.) God was with Blessed Carl, the last Habsburg emperor. And He is with the most downtrodden in the streets.

In short, without a cite, I suspect it to be a fabrication.