On Women Priests: Part Four

Finally, the last part is up!  Here's Part Four of my essay on women priests and O'Malley's PD article; here are Parts One, Two, and Three for your viewing pleasure if you missed them.

The article continues:

The Women's Ordination Committee, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that advocates for women priests, said it has 10,000 supporters on its mailing list, half of whom are dues-paying members. The committee estimates there are about 125 women priests in the United States.

The committee's director, Erin Hanna, said her organization does not ordain women, but there at least four groups that do.

One hundred and twenty-five women “priests?”  I’m torn between being depressed that there are so many and being glad that there are so few - does that even make sense?  I’m not sure which one it is.  Anyway, I would like to know just how these “four groups” go about “ordaining” women – ordination requires a bishop, after all, and any bishop who simulates ordination of women is reprimanded and/or excommunicated, as far as I know.  And besides, I thought that bishops had no authority?  In that case, there isn’t even a simulation of ordination by a bishop.

Ann Klonowski, 62, of Independence, was recently accepted into one of the groups, Roman Catholic Women Priests, to study for the priesthood. She expects to be ordained within two to three years.

"A lot of people say, 'This is ridiculous,' " said Klonowski who has a graduate degree in theology from John Carroll University. "Well, it might be, but there won't be any changes unless people stand up on their hind legs.

"I'm reconciled to be a voice in the desert. I don't have to worry about what the institutional church thinks of me. I have to worry about what God thinks of me."

Klonowski must prepare herself not only for the priesthood, but for the excommunication that the Catholic church says is automatic.

Two to three years?  Whatever happened to the requirement that priests need at the very least a four-year degree in Catholic philosophy, plus four more years studying theology?  Perhaps I’m jumping to conclusions here, but I think that this “two to three years” of education is going to be woefully inadequate – not to mention distorted, seeing as they have so many issues with Church authority and Her central teachings.  Yes, it is ridiculous – not only because of the heretical nature of this whole situation, but also because of the obviously woefully deficient education in Church theology and philosophy that they have received or will be receiving, which is never a good thing in any situation.

Moving on!  Ah yes, the whole “voice in the desert” nonsense.  It has a nice ring to it, what with the quoting from the Bible, and it evokes an image of them as the sole voice of Truth in a whirlwind of lies and injustice.  The problem here, however, is that she is simply letting herself be taken by that whirlwind of falsehood that she thinks she is standing up to.  As was already established earlier, she is going up against the Truth itself – the teaching of the Holy Spirit as passed on to us through the Magisterium – and she will never be able to change the Truth as given by God.  In this particular case, standing up to the “institutional church” and its infallible teachings is tantamount to standing up to Christ Himself – a situation no one should ever want to find themselves in.  The very fact that she is prepared to take the excommunication as an acceptable consequence of her actions only highlights the depth of her error.   For her, it seems that the excommunication means nothing, which makes her opinion of Church authority even clearer than it was before – if that was even possible.  But I'm beating a dead horse, really, so: moving on.

The Rev. Roy Bourgeois of Georgia, who has worked with Zeman, supports women priests and has participated in their ordinations. The church considers him excommunicated and he is facing dismissal by his religious order the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers.

The Maryknolls have repeatedly ordered him to recant his position on women priests, but Bourgeois has refused.

"I will not recant," he said in a recent telephone interview. "I will not lie.

"Who are we as men to say that our call to the priesthood is authentic, but God's call to women is not?" he added. "This movement of gender equality is rooted in justice. You can't stop this movement. It's like trying to stop the women's suffrage movement."

Oh, Mr. O’Malley, you’re really making me giggle here.  In the words of a commenter on the PD site: “Not a single (non-heretical) Catholic quoted in the article.  Good job, P-D!”  O’Malley can only find people who support women’s ordination in the fringes of Catholic liberalism; orthodoxy, which is the mark of true and faithful Catholicism, is firmly against his and Zeman’s beliefs and agenda.

On the subject of Father Roy Bourgeois: as you may have read already in the article by Jimmy Akin on the NCR, Bourgeois has consistently and steadfastly refused to adhere to his priestly vows, recognize his error, and recant; another obstinate and misguided soul to add to that sadly growing list.  Bourgeois’ comparison of women’s ordination to women’s suffrage is a pathetic and fruitless attempt to make the priesthood a right in the same way that voting is (and incidentally, it’s also a perfect example of a bad analogy, for the philosophically-minded reading this post); however, I believe we covered this one earlier with that helpful paragraph from the Catechism (1578).  His arguments for women’s ordination have all already been shot down with gruesome finality by the good Mr. Akin (here’s the link again, in case you didn’t get to it the first time), and I consider him to be exactly the same as Ms. Zeman here: completely wrongheaded and in dire need of our prayers for his soul.  I am reminded of that verse from the Gospel of Luke: 

“He said to his disciples, ‘Things that cause sin will inevitably come, but woe to the person through whom they occur.  It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin’” (cf. Lk 17:1-2).

I shudder to think how many well-meaning Catholics Bourgeois and Co. have misled with their rhetoric about equality and independent interpretation.  They certainly haven't helped when it comes to American Catholics, at least judging by the surveys that Mr. O'Malley cited.  That's not to say that they are the sole cause of the average American Catholic's views, but all the same, I find it hard to deny that they had no part in it at all.

I pray that Fr. Bourgeois and Ms. Zeman will come to see the truth before it is too late; in light of their obstinate refusals to cease their heretical and misleading activities, I think it's clear that only the grace of God can reach them now.  Please pray for all those misguided souls who have gone astray, that they may no longer spread division, strife, and misinformation among Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

And that's the end of this essay; I hope you at least found it to be informative and interesting.  In a similar vein, I'm planning on commenting about so-called "Catholic" politicians and whether or not they are true adherents to Church teaching in a later post - not too sure when, but it'll be sometime in the coming month, I should think.  In the meantime, thanks for reading!  Comments and thoughts are thoroughly encouraged and welcomed.

Pax Christi.

On Women Priests: Part One

Hello, world. My name is Aloysius, and this is the first blog post I have ever made in my life. I hope to become better at this sort of thing as time passes, so bear with me if my first few attempts seem ungainly. This will be a rather long inaugural post, but I think the issue calls for some detailed examination. Thus, this will come in small increments (I went rather crazy with this one, so there will be two or three parts to it), and I hope you have the patience to slog through my commentary. Input of any kind, whether it be praise or constructive criticism, would be highly appreciated; I’m brand new to this whole blogging game, and any advice on how to improve would be immensely helpful from the gurus who have been doing it for a while.

I thought that for my first post, I would comment about something that never fails to get me worked up: the ever-present ‘question’ of women priests in the Catholic Church. I was reminded (again) of this tiresome issue when I came across an article about this subject in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, written by the inestimably objective and unopinionated Michael O’Malley. And just to make things clear here, that was sarcasm just now; I have a habit for sarcasm which is a little on the heavy side, so I’m doing my best to quell that instinct. Whether I succeed or not is another question. As a side note, all boldings are mine, and are meant to emphasize a point that I am addressing in the piece.

The article is dated Saturday, November 12^th, although I first heard about it on Monday the 14^th while at breakfast with my father and some friends (Elizabeth’s parents, actually) after morning Mass; Dad always gets the paper when we go out. It’s titled “Woman priest, a Beachwood native, sees her ordination as valid; Roman Catholic Church does not.”

Disregarding the title, which had alarm bells ringing in my head already, I’ll get to the dissection of the article. Here’s the link, by the way: http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/11/woman_priest_sees_her_ordinati.html

It starts:

Women priests are taboo in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church, and those who participate in ordinations of women automatically excommunicate themselves from the church, according to laws of the Holy See.

But the Rev. Barbara Zeman, a Beachwood native, considers herself both a priest and a devout member of the Catholic faith.

Zeman, who now lives in Chicago, will be in Northeast Ohio this week to say a Mass. She was ordained in 2008 within a movement that believes God calls women as well as men to the sacrament of Holy Orders. She is one of an estimated 125 women in the United States who wear priest vestments and administer the sacraments.

Okay, not too bad. There’s the obligatory bit that emphasizes the views of the hierarchy of the Church as opposed to the views of the laity, a common enough tactic with regard to this topic. There's also the irksome reduction of the Church's position on women priests to a "taboo," implying that it really comes down to social custom or emotional aversion rather than theology, ontology and Biblical precedent. But then it really starts getting sad:

"As we see it, our ordinations are valid," said Zeman, who was raised Catholic. "We are Roman Catholics and we are following our consciences. We are disobeying an unjust law that says only men can be ordained."

Zeman, 63, will be here Thursday to lead a discussion on women's ordination and say the Mass. The event, sponsored by the Community of St. Malachi, a local nonprofit Catholic group focused on social justice issues, will be at 7 p.m. at the West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church in Rocky River.

Oh, where to begin? First of all, there is the telling “As we see it” bit – a statement of personal belief and opinion. It gets worse when she says that “we are Roman Catholics and we are following our consciences.” If it weren’t for the appellation of Roman Catholic included in that sentence, I would have thought we were talking about a Protestant here – they do, after all, lay so much emphasis on personal interpretation. But I digress. There seems to be an inherent misconception about the role of conscience in the Catholic faith. Zeman here seems to believe that conscience is paramount; it trumps all other considerations, especially those onerous laws and rules imposed upon Catholics by the Church hierarchy. I’ll get around to addressing the hierarchy bit in a moment and focus for now on the role of conscience.

To be sure, following one’s conscience is immensely important in living a life of faith. Conscience has been called the inner voice of God within us, informing us on right and wrong. But I think some clarification is in order, just to be sure. St. Thomas Aquinas, the Doctor Angelicus of the Church and my personal hero, writes in his Disputed Question on Truth, Question Seventeen, “On Conscience”:

Conscience is nothing else than the application of science to some special act…

Deciphering the more archaically worded bits of the passages may be puzzling at first, but the message is clear. Thomas here uses the term science to refer to “the knowledge of things from their causes,” and not the more popular conception of the term that refers to the branch of knowledge known as naturalism. In a more modern context, the Catechism of the Catholic Church defines conscience as “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed” (1778).

Okay, so we’ve established what conscience is. Aquinas writes further that the conscience is absolutely binding: “…it is clear that conscience is said to bind in virtue of the divine precept,” i.e. the precept that necessitates that we avoid evil and do good. Furthermore, the CCC states that “[Man must not] be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters” (1782). So it would seem that Zeman actually has a case here. But Aquinas further goes on to address the questions Can conscience err? and Can an erroneous conscience bind? With regard to the first question, Aquinas puts forth unambiguously that it may indeed err:

Conscience is nothing else than the application of science to some special act, in which application error can arise in two ways: in one way, because that which is applied contains an error in itself, in another way in this that it is not correctly applied. Just as in syllogizing fault comes about in two ways, either because one uses falsehoods, or because one does not reason correctly.

So in other words, a conscience may err either in (a) the premises one uses to come to a particular moral decision or (b) a simple failure to reason properly.

Zeman and her compatriots certainly qualify for the first example, and the key – and flawed – premise here is her claim that the doctrine of male-only ordination is an “unjust law.” She perceives it to be an injustice, and so her conscience compels her to reject it. I’ll address this shortly, but first, a little more from the CCC regarding conscience and error:

1790 A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. If he were deliberately to act against it, he would condemn himself. Yet it can happen that moral conscience remains in ignorance and makes erroneous judgments about acts to be performed or already committed.

1791 This ignorance can often be imputed to personal responsibility. This is the case when a man "takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin." In such cases, the person is culpable for the evil he commits.

1792 Ignorance of Christ and his Gospel, bad example given by others, enslavement to one's passions, assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy of conscience, rejection of the Church's authority and her teaching, lack of conversion and of charity: these can be at the source of errors of judgment in moral conduct.

The issue of whether an erroneous conscience binds is fundamental to this issue. Thomas, in his exhaustive treatment of the matter, writes:

…we are said to be bound by precepts because we incur sin when we do not observe them. Therefore conscience is not said to oblige us to do something because to follow it is good but because not to follow it entails sin.

To go against your conscience is to necessarily go against what you see to be the will or precept of God. Thus, an erroneous conscience binds because to go against it, even though it is erroneous, would be per se going intentionally against what is seen to be the law of God, which characterizes a mortal sin of the highest order. In this sense, then, Zeman is right, in that to follow her conscience is required absolutely of her. The problem that must be addressed is the error in her conscience. I’ll address that issue in the next part of this series.

I hope you like how this is coming along. Any comments, advice, or thoughts that you folks have are greatly appreciated.