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Saturday, February 28, 2009

Jesuit blasts St. Paul, Catholic teaching on women's ordination

"In a recent article for The Washington Post and Newsweek’s On Faith site , Father Aloysius Howe, a Jesuit and international visiting fellow at Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center, has blasted Catholic teaching on women’s ordination. "

http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=2134

Father Howe argues:
"The Pauline analogy of husbands mirroring Christ and wives mirroring the church has within it the seeds of much in theology and church discipline that is sexist and misogynist. ...If Catholics are told that only men can be, for sacramental purposes, in persona Christi, standing in the place of Christ at the Eucharist, are we seriously meant to believe that this does not lay down the germ of an idea, namely that women are inferior to men, even in the order of God's grace? If all the discernment and decisions that affect women in the Church are made only by celibate men, are we to conclude that this has no effect at all on the attitudes of Catholic men towards women?...

Father Howe continues, “The sin of clericalism, however, is a choice, and not an ineluctable consequence of being a Catholic priest. Similarly, Catholic men may read St Paul, or the latest Vatican instruction against women priests, and yet come away unconvinced that socially-conditioned notions from 2 millennia ago have the force of divine will.”

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