The role of women is interesting generally. I'd never considered that married men can serve as deacons and how that might play into things. Is door opening for women in the Catholic Church? Miami woman leading the call has new hope For more than a decade, Ellie Hidalgo has been campaigning to expand the role of women in the Catholic Church. The Miami woman is co-director of a nonprofit, Discerning Deacons, which invites other Catholics to consider ordaining women as deacons — a clergy role that has already been opened to married men. That would allow women for the first time in centuries to preach the Gospel, preside at baptisms, direct charitable services and perform other duties long confined to males. From her past work, she knows the value women can add to the church. As a pastoral associate at a Jesuit parish near downtown Los Angeles, she worked with immigrant women from Mexico and Central America. In times of need, Hidalgo, who is trained in pastoral theology and fluent in Spanish, was called on to preach, assisting a priest who had trouble communicating with congregants. She’s also met with Catholic indigenous women in the Amazon region of Brazil who are on the front lines of defending human and land rights. Hidalgo, who now attends Our Lady of the Divine Providence in Sweetwater, knows her devout Cuban grandmothers would never question why only men could serve pastoral roles. But that’s definitely not the case in conversations with her own nieces — they want to hear someone with “their own lived experience, from somebody who’s a sister or a daughter or a mother.“
While manners and norms have changed, I still think it is polite to open the door for women, including catholic women.
The Church has confirmed her position on woman as priests for centuries upon the understanding that the priest acts in the person of Christ in the mass, in which the marriage of Christ to His bride--the Church--is consummated. God is surely beyond gender, and Jesus is the second person of the tiune God, and therefore is God...but he was also fully man, and came into the world as a man ( well, male baby, who grew into a boy, then a man). Hence His role as spouse vis a vis His *bride* ( the Church), buttresses the Church's adherence to male priests to the exclusion of female priests. So women's rolls may well and ought to increase, but I do not expect the Church to change that fundamental aspect at all. That said, I'm not sure how that might be applied within the deaconite.
So I feel guilty that I haven't responded to this thread yet, having so much to say and no way to organize my thoughts. So I'm going to do the rude thing and potentially hijack it with something else Catholic. Catholicism is heavy on natural law, the thought, to oversimplify, that we should base human morality on what we observe in nature. It's often used (and misused, IMO), by extreme social Conservative Catholics as an argument against gay marriage, gay rights, etc. I have had those debates both online and internally, but that's not why I'm making this post. I finished this fascinating read by Steve Brusatte this week. He talks about that even though the Chicxulub meteor was undisputedly the proximate cause of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, it might not have been such a mass extinction event except for some pre-existing population decline in the genetic diversity of the large plant eaters. They don't fully understand why that was occurring, but it made the dinosaur population as a whole much less resilient. And it brought me back to a point that I think about often. If you're serious about natural law, how can you oppose diversity? DeSantis and his anti-DEI campaigns. Inbreeding and monoculture or not consistent with natural law and harm the species. If we are going to extrapolate from the law of nature to the way we organize society, I think we also have to consider that diversity is a value that we want to uphold. I do hope to comment on the gender issue within the Church soon. It's not for lack of thoughts
The Bible says “confess your sins to one another.” It’s an impediment to discussion that people conflate church with Catholicism. It’s especially bad in Hollywood.
Instead of trying to change the Bible why don’t unhappy parishioners just join another church that is happy to accommodate their aspirations to control others ?
Pope Francis, as long as he remains Pope (health is failing), has taken about this many measures as can be accomplished in one papacy to promote women to leadership positions, including appointing three women to the Dicastery on Bishops, which appoints future bishops, and as voting members the most recent general synod. Those are pretty strong breaks with past teaching and have really upset a lot of Catholic conservatives, especially in light of recent teachings like Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, in which John Paul II stated that ordination was reserved solely to men under somewhat specious reasoning, and more offensively, Responsum ad Dubiuum, in which then Ratzinger later Pope Benedict tried to define this teaching as eternal within the reposit of the faith, not subject to future change. I'm using the lay language. It's really an absurd teaching. They try to claim that they don't have the ability to name female priests because Jesus did not name females as disciples. That ignores not only the role of Mary Magdalene as the apostle to the apostles but also the fact that most of the original disciples were married but the Church has had no problem thinking it can change that teaching. It's absurd and logically indefensible. But famously, the Church is the oldest institution in continuous existence in the West, for two millennia, and change comes extremely slowly. Pope Francis has done everything he can to move it forward but it will take future papacies, likely not the next one, in which it's widely expected to have a reactionary appointment. A lot will depend on how many more Cardinals Francis can name. The Right has already pre-conclaved various extreme conservatives, including from Hungary. Certainly I would welcome the change. I've been married 34 years to a teacher of Catholic doctrine although she's long since retired from taking an active role
Jesus left us a church, not a book. Your book, good as it is, actually tells you this (feel free to quote me chapter and verse, where He writes anything down at all... or where He pre figures 'scripture' that will come into being... or His Faith, being reduced to a book (or set of books)).... Question: Why did Jesus bother with the Apostles? Why do we know the names of the Apostles, while the distinct body identified as 'disciples' is not specifically defined? (Admiiting for overlap, notwithstanding...).
