Pope Francis on Women Priests and Related Recent News Items: "I do not know whether to laugh or cry at Pope Francis’ suggestion about women’s position in the Church"

Altar of Veit Stoss, descent of the Spirit at Pentecost, St. Mary's Church, Krakow, Poland, photo by Robert Breuer at Wikimedia Commons

As Virginia Saldanha, "Why I find pope’s ideas on women priests disturbing," notes, Pope Francis recently nonsensically (and all over again) said that men in the Catholic church are meant to follow a "Petrine principle" that allows men — but not women — to be ordained, run things, and mirror Christ. Women are called to follow a "Marian principle" and mirror the feminine church, not — heaven forfend! — the male Christ. (Translation: women are called to serve). 

Having Left Twitter Because Musk Acquired It, I'm Resuming This Blog

 

Photo of Leslie Jordan by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, from discussion of his book How Y'All Doing?: MIsadventures and Mischief from a Life Well-Lived with Megan Mullally on the Main Stage at the National Book Festival, 3 September 2022; Library of Congress Life - 20220903SM2320, from Wikipedia, available for sharing via Creative Commons

Because I've now left Twitter after Elon Musk acquired it — I refuse to do anything to enrich that man in any way — I'm going to switch back to this blog to provide the kind of religious-political commentary I was providing on Twitter. I will appreciate it if anyone who happens to read my postings here and thinks they're worth sharing would do so, so that I can re-establish an audience for the blog.

Centering Religion on Possession or Lack of a Penis Seems to Have Some Significant Downsides

Tina Beattie, "A 'frozen idea of the feminine," The Tablet, 20 Feb. 2020

I think this morning of three famous men in the world of religion I met while I was active in the religion academy as a scholar and teacher. One was a theologian whose work has been very influential in the area of peace studies, especially in his Protestant world.

Footnote to My Eulogy of Carmel McEnroy: "As so Many Others Have Experienced in This Life, Her Complete Redemption Had to Wait Till the Next Life"

Mercy Sister, Carmel McEnroy, author who captured women's role in #VaticanII, dies https://t.co/UxKj64GdVU via @ncronline @SistersofMercy @GerardRMoloney @FlanneryTony @MiriamTDuignan @vofwomen

— Sarah R Mac Donald (@SarahRMacDonald) December 3, 2019

A response David Jackson made to my remembrance of my graduate school colleague Sister Carmel McEnroy, RSM, prompts me to add a footnote to that posting. David writes,

Remembering Carmel McEnroy, RSM, a Distinguished Theologian Whose Career Was Cut Short by St. Meinrad Theology School

Mercy Sister, Carmel McEnroy, author who captured women's role in #VaticanII, dies https://t.co/UxKj64GdVU via @ncronline @SistersofMercy @GerardRMoloney @FlanneryTony @MiriamTDuignan @vofwomen

— Sarah R Mac Donald (@SarahRMacDonald) December 3, 2019

I've learned today from the tweet of Sarah R. MacDonald above  that my graduate school classmate Carmel McEnroy has left us. Carmel was a few years ahead of me in the graduate theology program at University of St. Michael's College of the Toronto School of Theology. I'm saddened to hear of her death. Carmel was a person of great integrity, who suffered much when St. Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology School fired her, a tenured professor, after she signed a statement calling for keeping discussion of women's ordination open.

Ruth Krall, Historical Meandering: Ideologies of Abuse and Exclusion (2)

Vasily Polenov, Le droit du Seigneur (1874), in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow

The essay below is the second part of Ruth Krall's essay entitled "Historical Meandering: Ideologies of Abuse and Exclusion." The first part was published on Bilgrimage several days ago. As the introduction to the essay at the link I have just provided explains, the essay is one of a series of essays Ruth has published on Bilgrimage, under the series title "Recapitulation: Affinity Sexual Violence in a Religious Voice." Links to the previous essays in this series appear at the link I've just given you above. The common theme binding these essays together is the endemic natural of religious and spiritual leader sexual abuse of followers. The current essay explores this theme by arguing that clergy sexual abuse is a global public health issue whose noxious presence can be found inside multiple language groups and national identities. The secong part of Ruth's essay, "Historical Meandering," follows (note that footnotes begin with xiii because this essay is a continuation of the first part published previously):

Southern Baptist Abuse Report, Next Installment: "Preying on Teens"

The third installment in the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News investigation of abuse in Southern Baptist churches is out today. It's entitled "Preying on teens: More than 100 Southern Baptist youth pastors convicted or charged in sex crimes." An excerpt:

Southern Baptist Abuse Report, Next Installment: "Offend, Then Repeat"

The next installment in the Houston Chronicle (and San Antonio Express-News) ground-breaking report on abuse within Southern Baptist churches and institutions has just come out. It's entitled "Offend, then repeat":

Houston Chronicle Invites Readers to Share Stories of Abuse in Southern Baptist Churches: My Commentary

Houston Chronicle is not playing, with its exhaustive investigation of abuse within Southern Baptist churches. On a page attached to its exposé report yesterday, the Chronicle invites readers to reply directly via an online form and share their own experiences of abuse in Southern Baptist churches with the Chronicle reporting team:

Joanna Moorhead in The Guardian on Pope's Letter re: Sexual Crimes of Clergy and Cover-up by Church Officials — "[H]ow Dare You Ask Ordinary Catholics Like Me to Atone?"

Joanna Moorhead for The Guardian on papal letter about clerical abuse crimes and their cover-up by church officials:

LGBTQ Catholics and the Conversation About Staying or Leaving: 15 More Theses About Truths That Need to Be Heard in This Conversation

My last posting was an attempt to tell truth that is, in my view, often obscured and even barred as Catholics discuss the "problem" or "challenge" of welcoming LGBTQ people within Catholic spaces, or as LGBTQ Catholics discuss the question of staying in or leaving the church. As that posting indicated, some of us who are LGBTQ and Catholic have never had any choice in the matter: we were shoved from the church when our vocations were shattered without explanation, our livelihood removed, our daily bread taken from our mouths, our healthcare coverage yanked from us — as we were shown the door and it was slammed in our faces.

Mary McAleese on Catholic Church As "Primary Global Carrier of the Virus of Misogyny" and on Theology Denying Ordination to Women as "Pure Codology"

This is really Sarasi's post and not mine. In the past two days, she has provided a wealth of links to commentary about the stellar address former Irish president Mary McAleese gave in her opening address to the Why Women Matter conference in Rome this week. I'm simply passing on to you now links Sarasi has gathered and generously shared.

Pope Francis This Week: "All Walls Fall. All of Them." Pope Francis Last Week: The Ban on Women's Ordination Is A Last Word, Forever.

"Dear brothers and sisters, all walls fall. All of them. Do not be fooled."
-- Pope Francis on eve of US electionhttps://t.co/7DY9sP4eLB

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) November 7, 2016

Good. Wonderful. Yes.

But does Pope Francis listen to his own words? 

Michael Moore: Men, Your "10,000-Year Reign Is Over"; Pope Francis: Female Catholic Priests Never Happening — Two Headlines Worth a Thousand Words

When I woke in the wee hours of the morning and scanned the news before trying to catch a few more hours of sleep, Huffington Post had these two articles juxtaposed on its main page — the first is at the head of the posting, Michael Moore warning men that our "10,000-year reign" is over.

Footnote to Discussion of Role of Women in Early Christian Rome: Women Priests Project's Rome Poster Campaign Challenges Ban on Women's Ordination

#Rome poster campaign challenges Catholic ban on female priests #ordainwomen https://t.co/Bn5sncka4j

— WomensOrdinationConf (@OrdainWomen) May 26, 2016

I cannot say this better than Chris Morley says it in a comment in response to my posting yesterday, which ended with the following statements: 

More Commentary on Pope Francis and Women Deacons: Jamie Manson and Mary Hunt — "He Believes That God Simply Cannot Work Through the Female Body in the Way in Which God Works through the Male Body"

Here are two more pieces of good commentary I'd like to recommend to you, regarding the discussion of the possibility of studying the place of women deacons in the Catholic church and Pope Francis's recent remarks to a group of women religious about this. I discussed this topic last week.

From Strawberries on the Cake to the Diaconate: Commentary on Pope Francis's Remark About Studying Women and the Diaconate

As many of you will perhaps know, Pope Francis made an off-the-cuff remark to a closed-door meeting of superiors of religious women last week, about the possibility of studying whether women might be admitted to the diaconate, and the media and twitterverse lit up right away with reports that the pope of grand surprises might be opening the door to women's ordination to the priesthood. However, as AP reported almost immediately afterwards, Vatican officials then began "tamping down expectations" with alacrity as the Vatican media guru Father Lombardi announced that the pope had not meant to signal any openness to ordaining women deacons, let alone women priests.

Jamie Manson on Pope Francis's Curiously Straitened Notion of Mercy When Women and Women's Ordination Are Under Consideration

For the University of Arizona's Zócalo Public Square blog, Jamie Manson explains the anguish of Roman Catholic women like herself, who experience a calling to the priestly vocation, but who are told by the pastoral leaders of their church that "[t]he body God gave women makes God incapable of working through women." Jamie concludes,

Papal Visit Wrap-Up, Or Unwrapping Media Spin Along with Women, Abuse Survivors, and LGBT Catholics

Not a wrap-up of the papal visit, but an attempt to unwrap the neatly wrapped package that has just been delivered to us vis the media (i.e., via the self-appointed official mediators of reality for the rest of us) in the visit of Pope Francis to the U.S.:

The Francis Effect: Putting Rhetoric Together with Reality on Eve of Pope's Visit (3)

For parts one and two of this series, see here and here.

The Francis effect? Anecdote #1: in a National Catholic Reporter article published yesterday, Joshua McElwee reports on a forthcoming book from the Catholic Women Speak project. The book, entitled Catholic Women Speak: Bringing Our Gifts to the Table, will be published by Paulist Press before the October Synod on the Family begins. It gathers essays from Catholic women in various places in the world.