Women celebrating a Eucharist
"'Ordinatio sacerdotalis', an ill-closed door"
The grace (or not) of being a woman
"Machismo has a letter of citizenship in certain sectors of the Church"
Manuel Regal, March 22, 2017 at 08:57
Who will best represent Christ will be the person, man or woman, who lives most in the attitude of serving to the point of giving life
( Manuel Regal ) .- A few days ago Christina Moreira made public through the media her status as a woman ordained as a priest and her pastoral practice as such in the community "Home Novo" of A Coruña.
The first Galician woman, the first Spaniard to take this step, is among the 240 women in the world, including a dozen female bishops, that is, without any structure of power. She did so knowing that with all this she and the community that accompanied her broke with the prevailing ecclesiastical norms, but from the conviction that it responded to a highly discernible personal vocation, based on the equality that man and woman have for Nature as members of the Christian family through baptism.
We have already transmitted in these same pages our opinion on the question of the ordination of women as caregivers of the community. When, after Vatican II, Pope Paul VI had to respond to the ecclesial demand of a debate on the question, he requested the opinion of a team of experts on biblical subjects; They unanimously stated that from an exegetical point of view there was no impediment for women to be ordained as caregivers of the community.
However, at the suggestion of this Pope, the Commission for the Doctrine of the Faith, presided over by Cardinal Seper, in 1976, published the statement " Inter insigniores" , which closed this possibility by basically using two arguments: Christ , Designating the Twelve Apostles created the priestly service only for men, and the sacramental action in persona Christi demands that it be man who can represent it.
We think, with many believing people, with many theologians too, that these two arguments are very debatable ; The first because there is no certainty that the designation of the Twelve would have had for Jesus the scope of creating a priestly body as it later appeared in the Church; And the second, for the same reason and also because conditioning the representative capacity of Christ with sex, today seems simply aberrant. Who best represents Christ will be the person, man or woman, who lives most in the attitude of serving to the point of giving life .
But those were also the arguments that Pope John Paul II used to close the debate in his short letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis of the year 1994. And he has no hesitation in stating that it is "a provision that must be attributed to the Wisdom of the Lord of the Universe "(No. 3). Permit me the vulgarity, but it is a lot to say of God to be able to affirm such thing very Pope that one is , maximum when there is no evidences that justify it and the consequences are so serious for the whole ecclesial group and for the specific women, in a moment Historical in which feminism presents itself as a sign of the times that demands faithful listening, attentive discernment and carefully maturing practices.
Without doubting his intentions, many people in the Church have come to us as a way of avoiding the debate of a truly thorny subject, passing on to the very God the hot potato.
The archbishopric of Santiago, in his schematic and aseptic statement, only uses these same arguments to declare illicit and invalid the ordination as a priest of Christina Moreira and, therefore, also the sacraments that she and her community perform and live.
But, things are like this. The desire of Pope John Paul II that the matter was definitively closed has not been fulfilled, because the society is there tightening and because a very considerable part of the Church we continue to think that it was a badly closed door .
We run the risk of becoming an anachronistic institution , perhaps we are already being to a great extent, and not precisely because we attach ourselves in body and soul to the lifestyle of Jesus, which would be worth the isolation, but to link artificially to some models Which could change precisely by seeking to be more faithful to the spirit of Christ.
Something that our neighbor, a village woman, with no theological knowledge, but with a fine Christian sensibility, solved in her own way with this simple argument at a time when a small group was talking about these things: "I do not care Doctor is a man or a woman, that the teacher of our children is male or female, that the veterinarian is male or female, what I want is for him to be a good person and to fulfill his job well. The simplest is almost always the truest .
The response in the digital media to the performance of Christina Moreira demonstrates to what extent the disregard for women, machismo, has a letter of citizenship in certain sectors of the Church, as it also has unfortunately in the society of which we are part .
We suppose that Christina Moreira makes public her condition and practice of cure because she sees it as normal because she understands that it can be a prophetic sign for the good of the Church and women, because she thinks it can help keep the debate alive Despite everything. We assume that she will be willing to put her back under the blows that are going to fall on her, as do those who risk such things. We hope that all this can live without any desire of Christian anachronistic merits and prestige. On our part receive respect, a certain admiration and gratitude and prayer : that the blows do not sink it, that the applause do not confuse it. And God will say.
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