brighid

The problem is not that they simply say – Hey, Christ was a man and therefore we think men should be priests. The problem is the PUNISHMENT they extend when that rule is violated, particularly when compared to how they treat predatory criminals like Father Geoghan and Adolph Hitler. Although the rule doesn’t have any moral foundation! Furthermore, the whole Christ is a man and therefore women shouldn’t have certain rights, or privileges has been used throughout history to justify all sorts of injustice and oppression against the female sex. It is a part of the continued hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and their deliberate oppression of the female gender. The question is do Catholics/Catholicism view ordained women (who have committed NO CRIME) as worse then murders and child molesters? The answer is an resounding YES, despite the pandering to the opposite and attested to by the ACTIONS of the Church against ordained women and their rather gentle treatment of criminal priest whom they DID NOT EXCOMMUNICATE for molesting child, after child, after child while the Church obstructed justice.

Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo was threatened with excommunication because he broke his vow of celibacy by marrying (and thereby having sex with his wife). It seems that priests who break their vow of celibacy by having sex with children should also face excommunication, don’t ya think? So, a priest has sex with a woman and it is somehow worse then with a child, thereby deserving of excommunication. Does anyone else see the pattern here?

From Catholic Encyclopedia:

Excommunication (Lat. ex, out of, and communio or communicatio, communion -- exclusion from the communion), the principal and severest censure, is a medicinal, spiritual penalty that deprives the guilty Christian of all participation in the common blessings of ecclesiastical society. Being a penalty, it supposes guilt; and being the most serious penalty that the Church can inflict, it naturally supposes a very grave offence … The right to excommunicate is an immediate and necessary consequence of the fact that the Church is a society. Every society has the right to exclude and deprive of their rights and social advantages its unworthy or grievously culpable members, either temporarily or permanently… In the celebrated text: "Whatsoever you shall bind upon earth, shall be bound also in heaven; and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth, shall be loosed also in heaven" (Matt., xviii, 18; cf. xvi, 19), it is not only the remission of sins that is referred to, but likewise all spiritual jurisdiction, including judicial and penal sanctions … Not only would it be wrong for a Christian to be punished without having committed a punishable act, but justice demands a proportion between the offence and the penalty; hence the most serious of spiritual chastisements, i.e. forfeiture of all the privileges common to Christians, is inconceivable unless for a grave fault.

For criminal priests … jure and ab homine
Excommunication is either a jure (by law) or ab homine (by judicial act of man, i.e. by a judge). The first is provided by the law itself, which declares that whosoever shall have been guilty of a definite crime will incur the penalty of excommunication. The second is inflicted by an ecclesiastical prelate, either when he issues a serious order under pain of excommunication or imposes this penalty by judicial sentence and after a criminal trial.

Brighid

taken from:
<a href="http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05678a.htm" target="_blank">http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05678a.htm</a>

Bree

Amos -

You are confusing me (BREE) with BONDUCA.

In the first page of this thread, you referred to Bonduca using my name.

Just thought we'd clear that up. Bonduca is a million times more articulate than me, and I'm sure she wouldn't want to be confused with my wise-ass remarks (that's "wise-butt" to you, Gemma).

Bible Humper

Hello Amos,

&lt;priest&gt; Should we not forgive the miniscule sin of child-rape in men who work for the One Correct Church(tm)?

&lt;congregation&gt; Baaaaaaaa, baaaaaa, baaaaa

&lt;priest&gt; I call upon you, my flock, to donate generously to help the One Correct Church(tm) hire lawyers who are mercenary enough to suggest as a defense that the children "asked for it" by tempting the servents of the One True Deity(tm) anyway!

&lt;congregation&gt; Baaaaa, baaaaa, baaaaa

&lt;priest&gt; I am proud of you, my flock, remember not to shirk your duty to enroll your children in church programs that are unsupervised by non-clergy. We have already promised that we would defrock priests that become notorious for pedophilia, so if your child does get abused, just wait until the offending priest becomes notorious enough and you will see justice served at last!

&lt;congregation&gt; Baaaaa, baaaaa, baaaaa.

I bet Gemma doesn't share this forgiveness, she might not want to get into it with atheists but I can't imagine her protective maternal instinct allowing her to accept child sex abuse as some sort of minor detail that makes no difference in the grand scheme of things.

Oh boy! Hear that ladies? Thanks to your ability to catch the eyes of the men in the church, you are equal in status after all! Be happy that the tonsured twit who blames you for eating the magic apple that doomed us all to sin can enjoy your beauty!

ROFL, since when did Gaia become part of the pantheon? Your own new age nonsense is not official dogma, Amos.

Perhaps Gaia was invited into the pantheon to give Yahweh something to look at? Does this make Gaia equal to Yahweh by the same logic that makes women equal to men in your ideology?

Was he so jealous that all of his representatives had someone to abuse while he could only peep that he created her ex nihilo? How much do you wanna bet he created an 8 year old Gaia instead of a fully grown woman?

If all creation is the merging of the positive and the negative, the male and the female, and God is allegedly omnipresent, Yahweh is a hermaphrodite.

bonduca

But evidently many others do, or else this would not be an issue. As for correctness, then why not only allow priests to be ordained who were conceived out of wedlock, born in a barn, and have them flogged and crucified also? Just to maintain the proper "vibe of the thing."

bonduca

Nuh-uh.

ManM

brighid,
For the sake of argument I'm going to try to support the Catholic side on this. I'm no Catholic, but I can see their reasoning. Excommunication was traditionally used as a tool to protect the faith from corruption. A women priest is a clear dogmatic violation. In order to preserve the dogma, the Church separates itself from those who teach otherwise. The excommunication of sinners is a trickier point, simply because they do not pose as direct a threat to Church dogma. Sinners are tolerated by Church dogma, women priests are not. And so I would expect the excommunication of sinners to be less consistent than the excommunication of women priests.

The foundation for such action is the preservation of the Church's dogma. If that dogma was given by God Himself for the salvation of humankind, what could be more immoral than tainting it by current social pressures? If you lose the dogma, you lose the means to salvation. And with a dogma as rigid as the Catholics, every little infraction can be looked at as a slippery slope to disaster. And so there you have the moral foundation for preserving every bit of dogma.

I can see where they are coming from here. The sinner is not necessarily a threat. Someone who blatantly opposes an established Church doctrine is dangerous. If a priest taught that child molestation was acceptable, I suspect he would be excommunicated in a heartbeat.

bonduca

brighid

Man M,

What is a better teacher - words or deeds?

Brighid

ManM

bonduca,
That was a great example of the silliness I was talking about. When a 100% solution is impractical, we tone down the requirements. We don't automatically throw away all of the requirements. It is just common sense...

Bible Humper

Hello ManM,

They teach exactly that! As long as the offending priest doesn't become "notorious", they have publicly decided that the priest in question is to be forgiven.

Pedophilia is an ancient tradition of the Catholic church, there is as much chance of them changing their minds on pedophilia as some other minor ritual or taboo.

Only if the scandal starts to cost them more than they can tolerate in money and followers will they get tough on child rape, otherwise they would rather just allow it as an incentive for certain men to join the priesthood.