http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-08-04/news/ct-oped-0804-excommunicate-20100804_1_excommunication-bishops-hierarchy
Excommunicate me, please
August 04, 2010|By Sheila O'Brien
"Would someone in Rome formally excommunicate me, please? I want to be excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church because walking away will break my heart.
My grandparents left Ireland with nothing but their vibrant faith. They and my parents brought my siblings and me to a baptismal font and promised to guide us to Christ. And, they did that by word and deed. They taught us to love the Gospel and challenged us to live that Gospel at all costs. I love the Mass, Catholic social teaching, the scores of nuns who built the church around the world, the dedicated priests and people who love God with all their hearts and bring that love to the world. It is my life, the center of every experience, the filter for reality.
But, the headlines continue — more pedophilia, more stonewalling by the bishops, more "norms" from Rome protecting perpetrators. Now, it is a "crime" of the church to attempt to ordain people like Mother Teresa or St. Teresa of Avila — women. And, the hierarchy, who have arguably hidden crimes and criminals, who will not open the books so we can see where our money has gone and who always claim the moral high ground, have grouped ordaining women with pedophilia.
Our heads swirl. How can we stay in a church whose leaders protect pedophiles? Yet, how can we leave and relinquish our church to those very leaders?..."
Sheila O'Brien is a wife, mother, daughter, sister, a product of 22 years of Catholic education and active in her parish. She is a justice of the Illinois Appellate Court, Chicago.
Judge Sheila O'Brien's earnest plea for excommunication reflects the pain at the heart of many Catholics. Indeed, how can the Vatican protect pedophiles and excommunicate women priests?
Since this news, Roman Catholic Womenpriests have heard from many people, especially women, who are fed up with the church's discrimination against women. The good news is that some qualified women are discerning a vocation to the priesthood!
Bridget Mary Meehan, RCWP
703-505-0004
sofiabmm@aol.com
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Living Gospel Inclusivity and Empowerment Now
Sheila O’Brien’s misguided editorial (“Excommunicate me, please”) attacking the teaching of the Catholic Church on the nature of the priesthood instituted by Christ is a sad example of the confusion embraced by those who claim to love the Church while despising some of the Church’s most profound truths.
ReplyDeleteFirst, her diatribe against the Church is filled with factual error. There are far fewer claims of clerical sexual abuse these days, not more. The Church does not protect priests who have been found guilty of these horrendous crimes; rather they are laicized, removing them from the priestly state forever, never to return. The secular courts are then free to prosecute them. The bishops have not stonewalled attempts to reform the Church; rather, no other institution on earth has even come close to the Church’s work of ridding itself of child sexual abuse, even though the incidence of this crime is exponentially greater outside the Church than within it.
Also, in her harangue against the renewed norms of the Canon Law of the Church, she disingenuously mentions the names of Mother Teresa and St. Theresa of Avila as though she can thereby somehow claim their backing for her baseless support of female ordination.
These women never once and never would have sought ordination because they, unlike O’Brien, understood that the Holy Spirit speaks through Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition and the Sacred Magisterium of the Church about the true nature of Catholic Holy Orders.
And for her to invoke the Holy Spirit at the end of her editorial after blatantly rejecting the Holy Spirit’s infallible guidance of the Church is nothing short of willful spiritual blindness.
In addition, she writes that it is now an ecclesiastical crime to participate in the simulated ordination of women. So what is new there? The simulated ordination of women has always been a violation of Church law and a sacrilege against the sacrament of Holy Orders, most often resulting in an immediate (or “latae sententiae”) excommunication. Adding simulated ordination to the list of “delicta graviora” (“most serious”) crimes simply emphasizes the sacrilegious nature of this act.
For 2,000 years the Church has taught clearly and unambiguously that the priesthood as instituted by Jesus Christ is restricted to men for reasons related in part to the person and nature of Our Lord. In fact, this teaching was more deeply affirmed during the pontificate of John Paul II who declared, “it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium” and is a de fide (“of faith”) truth that “is to be held always, everywhere, and by all.”
I struggled in vain to find one true thing in O’Brien’s piece but gave up when I realized that she has rejected all truth but her own. How terribly sad.
May the Holy Spirit turn her away from her ongoing rebellion against the faith her ancestors embraced and bring her home to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church which is the veritable Body of Christ.
John Servorum
Chicago