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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 24, 2005
\"Womanpriests\"
How did I get this assignment? I've been marked as a "traditionalist Catholic" since I came over from the Anglican Church barely 18 months ago. Well, I was a traditionalist Anglican before that; and my path since adolescent atheism has been consistently towards Christian orthodoxy. It feels odd, to be defending Catholic authority, so soon after my arrival.Yet, if I don't speak, who will? It can be no secret that the majority of Canadian Catholic bishops are cowards. With the important exception of the Bishop of Calgary (Fred Henry), they run away from almost any opportunity to defend the faith they were entrusted to defend. They will act, grudgingly, when they get instructions directly from the Vatican, but then they let everyone feel their pain. Some appear to be themselves opposed to most Church teaching. It is thus left to the laity to do for the Catholic Church that for which its "hands on" leadership have not the stomach. I leave my colleague Janice Kennedy to explain what the "Roman Catholic Womanpriests" event at Carleton is all about. It will culminate in an attempted sacrilege on a boat in the middle of the St. Lawrence River near Gananoque tomorrow (the mock "ordination" of several women). I write "attempted", because the people who are doing it have already announced their apostasy, by rejecting the Church's authority. It should thus be unnecessary to excommunicate them, for they have excommunicated themselves. These "boat ordinations" are a form of political theatre, that radical feminists have been indulging since a prototype event on the Danube River, between Germany and Austria, in 2002. It is every bit as silly as it looks, though far from innocent. According to the Catholic Register, a Canadian candidate among these "ordinands" is Michele Birch-Conery, an ex-nun who teaches "feminist literary analysis" at North Island College on Vancouver Island. She told the paper she had taken no interest in seminary or community preparation. As for the priestly requirement of celibacy, she said, "I could live with a man if I wanted." She imagines that once "ordained", she will give out miscellaneous blessings, and perform gay and lesbian "marriages". She looks forward to becoming a British Columbia marriage commissioner. Only a very decadent society could produce such a woman in the first place. As will be seen from the above, nothing would appease her. She rejects, without hesitation, every aspect of Catholic teaching that is presented. Yet she wants to dress up like a priest -- or more exactly, cross-dress. That she wants it both ways -- to ignore Catholic teaching completely, yet be ordained as a Catholic priest -- would have been recognized as evidence of schizophrenia, as recently as a generation ago. It is sad that, given the broad decline of standards in our society, such a woman is presented today as a "model to the sisterhood". It would be pointless to argue with her. Even the "moderate" feminists within the Church, or surrounding it, are content to utter plausible-sounding slogans, or cite claims about "women in the early Church" from sources that are laughably unscholarly. They do not argue, they merely assert. The explanation of why the Catholic Church adopted a celibate, male priesthood from the beginning -- in the face of an ancient world that was priestess-ridden -- would require much more space than I intend to use. That argument would have to begin on a premise deeply embedded in both Scripture and Tradition: that "God created them male and female". In the Christian view, men and women are seldom interchangeable, and the priesthood is a place where it counts. However, the post-modern world in which we live, believes in men who aren't men and women who aren't women. It makes no sense to the squandered, post-modern mind that there could be an expressly masculine vocation to priesthood -- just as there is an expressly feminine vocation, to motherhood (mystically presented in the person of Mary, the "Mother of God"). Similarly, they cannot grasp that Christ was "very man" -- so "man" as to be neither female nor hermaphrodite. But that post-modern mind is itself anti-Christian, to say nothing of anti-Catholic. It believes what it believes (nothing, consistently) in defiance of Christian, and all other religious traditions. Is it a danger to the faithful? You bet. And not only because it offers anodynes, to lure them away from their intellectual, moral, and spiritual commitments. I felt this danger, last week, in a radio commentary the CBC commissioned from a retired engineering professor -- a certain Bob Ferguson -- who said that the Canadian government should "overcome the inertia" of the Catholic Church by imposing such things as "gay marriage" and "woman's ordination" upon it by law. His reasoning was tortuous, and he displayed no knowledge whatever of church history, but I'm sure his "modest proposal" would be embraced by all aboard that Gananoque showboat. The glibness with which the totalitarian solution is proposed marks it as post-modern. The result would be two "Catholic churches", as there now are in Communist China. One, faithful to Our Lord, and flourishing underground despite police raids and murderous persecution. The other, an "official" church for show, emptying of membership but obedient to the State's every whim. St. Anthony of Egypt, the founder of Christian monasticism: "A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, 'You are mad, you are not like us'." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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