No authority whatsoever

Jeff,

There’s an old show business saying that goes,’I don’t care what you say about me, as long as you say asomething.’ In that context, why clutter up a fine and informative blog with any mention of the National Catholic Reporter?? It is irrlevant to the Church and should be ignored.

It isn’t that they don’t understand Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, it’s that they think that encyclicals are just position papers issued by the present leadership, which can be altered or revoked by a subsequent administration. They’ve got a congressional/parliamentary model of governance stuck in their heads, and appear to be impervious to the glaring fact that the Church has never been run this way in all its history. Of course, they’d say that most of world that now practices democracy was once under autocratic monarchies, and they changed their way of being governed, so the Church will too, if we push hard enough. This only proves that they also labor under the Whig view of history, first set down by Gibbon, which basically claims is as a necessity of human nature that every day in every way the world gets more and more liberal and individualistic. Oy.

By the way, did anyone point out to these aspiring priestesses that Ste. Therese’s feast is October first? I don’t know where they picked up the idea that it was November fourteenth, but my ten-year-old knows that.

I understand the position that the impossibility of women’s ordination is to be definitively held per the Church’s ordinary magisterium. However, the Pope can and should make a solemn, ex cathedra pronouncement of the infallibility of this fact. By so doing, it will end the so-far interminable rumblings and agitations of the leftist feminist kooks, or else label them clearly as heretics. It will define things. It will hearten the faithful. If the priestess agitators leave the Church over it, fine. It would be an improvement.

Call me simple, but it seems to me that if God wants you to be a priest, you will be born male and gifted with a vocation. If both of those are not the case, then you would be better off spending your time in prayer asking God to manifest His will for you and get busy on that.

And dontcha just love the artificial nexus that these folks try to draw between the ‘injustice’ of not ordaining women and covering up sex abuse? The persuasiveness of that argument doesn’t rise above the level of sophistication that a 10-year old uses to take this heat of himself when caught red-handed doing something wrong? “Ok, so maybe I did break that window, but Johnny did [insert other bad act of your choice].”

I hope that prayer will move them off of their wrongheadedness but I’m thinking that St. Therese may need to whap them upside the head with a bunch of roses to get through to them.

Tim,

I doubt if it would do any good at all even if the Pope made a formal ex cathedra statement on the subject.

Then-Cardinal Ratzinger previously replied that this belongs to the deposit of faith and thus can not be reformed. There are also plenty of others subjects that have dogmatic teachings that they dissent from anyway.

Dubium: Whether the teaching that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, which is presented in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis to be held definitively, is to be understood as belonging to the deposit of faith.

Responsum: In the affirmative.

This teaching requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium (cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium 25, 2). Thus, in the present circumstances, the Roman Pontiff, exercising his proper office of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32), has handed on this same teaching by a formal declaration, explicitly stating what is to be held always, everywhere, and by all, as belonging to the deposit of the faith.

That’s what I always wonder too: why don’t the become Episcopalians? Why do they stay in a Church for which they apparently have no respect?

Jeff,

I understand your point re: ex cathedra. I even agree with you that it may not stop the behavior. But, what it would do is to provide confusion-proof direction to faithful Catholics who may at some point be faced by groups claiming Catholicity who have priestesses. It would end the debate for faithful, but perhaps not well-catechized laity, who may not get “ordinary magisterial infallibility”, but who could not fail to notice the howl of the media and the dissenters after the ex cathedra announcement.

Gretchen, what a priceless mental picture! Smack, yip, yip, yip. Roses from heaven. I’m not sure Therese of Lisieux would have done this; but I’m sure Teresa of Avila would have! Twice. At. Least.