Edicts like this remind me why even though I have some form of religious leaning, I’m not a member of an actual church.
The Vatican issued its most explicit decree so far against the ordination of women priests on Thursday, punishing them and the bishops who try to ordain them with automatic excommunication.
The decree was written by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and published in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, giving it immediate effect.
A Vatican spokesman said the decree made the Church’s existing ban on women priests more explicit by clarifying that excommunication would follow all such ordinations.
Getting excommunicated by the Vatican should be considered an honor.
I would like to point out that the way the Vatican acts, it’s better to have child molesters as priests than have women as priests. That’s seriously fucked up.
What is “fucked up” is the way people conflate the issues of pedophilia, celibacy and women’s ordination. It is an insult to women to assert that the reason they should be ordained is to keep men from abusing children. The profile of the American pedophile is NOT some wrinkled old celibate, but a 40 something married white male. What kept the thousands of these males from molesting children for centuries, while their wives stood idly by? Moreover the abuse case in my former parish was a school principal who had an affair with one of HER male students. Moreover the real scandal was NOT the abuse. As tragic as that was, sexual abuse happens – In schools, on sports teams, in families. The scandal was the way the bishops covered up the abuse,enabling the abusers, ignoring complaints (many from fellow priests who demanded the bishop do something) and coercing the victims into silence.
If women should be ordained as Catholic priests it is not because they have the desire, but because they have the gifts for ministry. Even the most secular of us will describe someone as “gifted”. Who gave them these “gifts”? ANd if they have the gifts for priestly ministry, why should they not be tested and if present recognized as evidence they are “called” by God to be priests?
Best thing that ever happened to me was my grandfather being excommunicated before I was born.
Everybody knows nuns have cooties.
“What is “fucked up” is the way people conflate the issues of pedophilia, celibacy and women’s ordination. It is an insult to women to assert that the reason they should be ordained is to keep men from abusing children.”
Thank you for proving you are illiterate. It’s never too late to learn to read.
I said nothing that could even be misinterpreted as suggest having women priests would stop pedophile priests. And I never even mentioned celibacy at all.
What I did point out was that according to Vatican rules, having a woman as a priest is much worse than having a child molester as a priest. Remember, the unofficial rules regarding pedophile priests was to cover up their crimes. It wasn’t to punish the priest, never mine excommunicating them.
Sieg Heil, Cardinal Ratzinger!
You can take the boy out of the Hitler Youth…