Women Challenge Gender Apartheid in the Catholic Church by Angela Bonavoglia

http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/2010summer/2010summer_Bonavoglia.php

If ever there were doubt about the relationship between the Catholic Church's spectacular failure to address the clerical child sex abuse crisis and the church's glaring system of gender apartheid, the Vatican put it to rest in July. Engendering a firestorm of criticism, their new canonical guidelines for handling and punishing the most "grave crimes" in church law revealed just how enraged the hierarchy is at women who dare to challenge them. Along with the crimes of sexually molesting children and developmentally disabled adults, and of using and distributing pornography, the Vatican listed: "the attempted sacred ordination of a woman."

In other words, the two greatest problems the Catholic hierarchy faces are women and children..."

"So threatening was the Danube event that one month after, Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, publicly denounced and excommunicated all seven women. That is a sanction he has never issued— even now, in the new canonical guidelines — against a single cleric who raped or sodomized a child or a single bishop who aided and abetted such crimes..."

"Benedict's actions have not stemmed the tide. Nearly 100 women have been ordained or are in training to be ordained through the Roman Catholic Women Priests movement, vividly documented in Jules Hart's just-released film, Pink Smoke Over the Vatican. The new canonical guidelines call for excommunication of the ordained woman and the priest who ordains her, which is redundant, since the Vatican did that in 2007. But it also authorizes speedy recourse to the ultimate punishment for a priest: laicization, or the end of his priesthood."

"That laicization threat shows just how dangerous the hierarchy sees the passionate, public expressions of support from high-profile Catholic priests, like beloved peace activist Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of the School of Americas Watch. Under threat of excommunication for co-presiding at one of the ordinations, Bourgeois remains an outspoken advocate, insisting that "there will never be justice in the Catholic Church until women can be ordained."...