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narcasse"When women were first ordained as Church of England priests in 1994, about 400 Anglican clergy became Roman Catholics in protest."
(Church to discuss female bishops BBC News article)
There’s not much else I can say to that other than "You sad fuckers" crude as it may be. What that really tells me is more about the four hundred guys in question, who were more concerned about keeping their gentlemen only club intact rather than spreading the message of the god that they’re supposed to believe in. It’s no small step too for an Anglican to convert to Catholicism. Those are the two main opposing camps as far as things go. To be part of a Christian denomination, the Christian denomination that rejected the overall power of the Pope and then convert to not only the authority of the Pontiff but also to the ‘cult of Mary’ just because girls were being allowed to play in the boys sandbox is so utterly petty.
There is the weight of history between the two sides. If you’re Catholic then every one else is nominally Anglican if they’re Christian. If you’re Anglican then those Catholics always seem to look like they’re worshiping Mary due to the mistranslation of ‘maiden’ as ‘virgin’. What the ever loving fuck people! You don’t swap sides just like that over something as tiny as this. The divide between the two is huge; you can’t just jump from more liberal and marginally saner to the transfiguration of wafer in the middle of Mass or believing that a chap in Rome is the representative of god on Earth.
I suppose what I’m more enraged about is their conversion, granted a couple of years too late, than anything else. The women priest thing is a non-issue as far as I’m concerned and the assertion that Jesus didn’t appoint female followers is daft considering the historical context. Of course he didn’t appoint female apostles; what women would have been listened to when she was preaching, what woman would have been given any respect if she travelled the country spreading those teaching, what woman would have even survived travelling on her own in those days? Considering that it was a patriarchal society that they were functioning in at the time, what normal Jew would have seen a woman preaching and breaking all kinds of ingrained taboos as anything other than very, very strange, if not potentially mad in the process? That said, Catholics used to pray for the Jews at Easter ‘so that they’d return to god’ always taking care to forget that Jesus was Jewish to start with and that the early Christians had to become Jews first if they weren’t before then converting to Christianity. I don’t know if they still praying for the Jews as part of the Holy Week services since it’s been quite some time since I’ve set foot inside a church but considering the sort of Cardinals that the previous Pope elected to the Collage of Cardinals just before he died, somehow I don’t think change could be really that fast in coming.
I don’t see the issue as one for theological debate for the most part and even if it is then it’s probably only worth abstract debate not this sort of whole scale furore. I suppose those who want to kick up a stink about details and entirely ignore the nature of their religious teachings should be fine and happy in the Catholic Church, it’s what it’s good for after all. Because if your mandate is to ‘spread the good news’ and ‘love one another’ all the wanking about nonsense is surely getting in the way of that. On the other hand if you want to sit on your arses because you’ve been forced into Holy Orders due to family prestige and good old Catholic guilt, by all means keep on desperately trying to turn back time and justify needless oppression.
I’ve met one Catholic in my entire life who wasn’t a rank hypocrite or woefully naïve; he was a priest and that at least is perhaps one of the few things that gives me any hope for that particular religion. It probably doesn’t hurt that he gave a genetics lesson either.
Though I suppose when I do consider it, the only reason I can see any value in Christianity at all is due to my wonderful acquaintance with folks in the Salvation Army who really did carry their faith through their daily lives, in action and understanding rather than fancy displays of ‘holier than thou’ and through knowing, quite a good few years ago now really, a marvellous Anglican organist who’s playing was always breathtaking and who also never needed to wave his Christian credentials about to prove that he was a good person.
(Church to discuss female bishops BBC News article)
There’s not much else I can say to that other than "You sad fuckers" crude as it may be. What that really tells me is more about the four hundred guys in question, who were more concerned about keeping their gentlemen only club intact rather than spreading the message of the god that they’re supposed to believe in. It’s no small step too for an Anglican to convert to Catholicism. Those are the two main opposing camps as far as things go. To be part of a Christian denomination, the Christian denomination that rejected the overall power of the Pope and then convert to not only the authority of the Pontiff but also to the ‘cult of Mary’ just because girls were being allowed to play in the boys sandbox is so utterly petty.
There is the weight of history between the two sides. If you’re Catholic then every one else is nominally Anglican if they’re Christian. If you’re Anglican then those Catholics always seem to look like they’re worshiping Mary due to the mistranslation of ‘maiden’ as ‘virgin’. What the ever loving fuck people! You don’t swap sides just like that over something as tiny as this. The divide between the two is huge; you can’t just jump from more liberal and marginally saner to the transfiguration of wafer in the middle of Mass or believing that a chap in Rome is the representative of god on Earth.
I suppose what I’m more enraged about is their conversion, granted a couple of years too late, than anything else. The women priest thing is a non-issue as far as I’m concerned and the assertion that Jesus didn’t appoint female followers is daft considering the historical context. Of course he didn’t appoint female apostles; what women would have been listened to when she was preaching, what woman would have been given any respect if she travelled the country spreading those teaching, what woman would have even survived travelling on her own in those days? Considering that it was a patriarchal society that they were functioning in at the time, what normal Jew would have seen a woman preaching and breaking all kinds of ingrained taboos as anything other than very, very strange, if not potentially mad in the process? That said, Catholics used to pray for the Jews at Easter ‘so that they’d return to god’ always taking care to forget that Jesus was Jewish to start with and that the early Christians had to become Jews first if they weren’t before then converting to Christianity. I don’t know if they still praying for the Jews as part of the Holy Week services since it’s been quite some time since I’ve set foot inside a church but considering the sort of Cardinals that the previous Pope elected to the Collage of Cardinals just before he died, somehow I don’t think change could be really that fast in coming.
I don’t see the issue as one for theological debate for the most part and even if it is then it’s probably only worth abstract debate not this sort of whole scale furore. I suppose those who want to kick up a stink about details and entirely ignore the nature of their religious teachings should be fine and happy in the Catholic Church, it’s what it’s good for after all. Because if your mandate is to ‘spread the good news’ and ‘love one another’ all the wanking about nonsense is surely getting in the way of that. On the other hand if you want to sit on your arses because you’ve been forced into Holy Orders due to family prestige and good old Catholic guilt, by all means keep on desperately trying to turn back time and justify needless oppression.
I’ve met one Catholic in my entire life who wasn’t a rank hypocrite or woefully naïve; he was a priest and that at least is perhaps one of the few things that gives me any hope for that particular religion. It probably doesn’t hurt that he gave a genetics lesson either.
Though I suppose when I do consider it, the only reason I can see any value in Christianity at all is due to my wonderful acquaintance with folks in the Salvation Army who really did carry their faith through their daily lives, in action and understanding rather than fancy displays of ‘holier than thou’ and through knowing, quite a good few years ago now really, a marvellous Anglican organist who’s playing was always breathtaking and who also never needed to wave his Christian credentials about to prove that he was a good person.
