I was thinking more about the whole women ordination movement and some further thoughts came to me on the subject. Groups like the Women’s Ordination Conference who advocate for priestesses within the Catholic Church are really missing key components. Say for example that you buy the premise that women can be ordained as priests, which I certainly don’t. Then why would the process for women entering the priesthood be so different from men then? Why aren’t they building seminaries to train them first? Shouldn’t there be some kind of discernment other than just the feeling of a call? Do they believe that all women who feel this call are always being called by God to the priesthood? Jesus said in John 15:16 "You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you." So there has to be a process of discernment to determine if someone is called to the priesthood or not. There has to be a sifting out to determine someone’s vocation. In Catholic seminaries not every male who enters goes on to be ordained. Ultimately it is the bishop of the diocese or head of a religious order that makes this decision.<\/p>\n
Do they believe that these women require zero training in theology, philosophy, the pastoral life, etc first? If they do and they believe in equality then why aren’t they demanding that the Church drops seminaries and that any man who feels he should be a priest is immediately ordained? That these men should just seek out any sympathetic bishop regardless of the church they belong to and be ordained immediately. <\/p>\n
If they did start seminaries exactly what would be their ecclesiology. I have often mentioned that dissenting Catholics have no rational ecclesiology. That the Church is the true except the parts you disagree with is not exactly a deep ecclesiology. That the Holy Spirit guides Holy Mother Church in all truth except when he doesn’t. I think they would have a difficult time determining what to teach in the first place. Martin Luther soon found out that that everybody has a "pope in their belly" and so would these women find out the same thing. When you cut yourself of from the magisterium there should be no surprise that you start to drift. The magisterium is the anchor of the Bark of Peter. How do you settle theological arguments when each individual is their own magisterium? No surprise that the women’s ordination movement would have the same problems of Protestantism, they are just less honest than Martin Luther was. By their own actions they believe that you can just get ordained and setup shop where ever you want. So I guess you also don’t need a diocese with a Bishop in the first place since you don’t really need any sort of permission from the local ordinary. You can also do away with the Pope since if you don’t have to be obedient to him, then he is just a figurehead that can be done without.<\/p>\n
Now another question I have is that if these women can just determine of their own volition that they are called to the priesthood, then why can’t I just show up there and tell them that I was called to be their bishop and start ordering them about ? Do you think that they would buy that one? I think not, but I don’t see how they could discredit my argument without invalidating theirs. Again it is hard to appeal to authority or tradition when you yourself deny such an appeal by your actions. Dissent is in the eye of the beholder. When you are the one dissenting it is a wonderful and brave thing, when someone dissents from you it is not quite viewed the same way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was thinking more about the whole women ordination movement and some further thoughts came to me on the subject. Groups like the Women’s Ordination Conference who advocate for priestesses…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-punditry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}