Davison's Doodle

Really? Crime Against Faith. Really?

When I saw this, “Vatican Says Women Priests a ‘Crime Against Faith,'” I thought I was reading a headline from The Onion, but after further review this is an actual news story posted on the Telegraph.co.uk — then I kept reading.  Headlines like this are why our “liberal” denomination’s practice of Christian faith is important.  We are an oasis for those that discover that they can no longer journey in faith in their current denominational expression of Christian faith.  There will be many in Catholicism that will applaud this move as a necessary protection of orthodox faith and the many are will be primarily in developing countries or are in post-industrial countries so invested in the institutional Catholic church that their very identity as well as their world view is challenged by the idea of women priests.  The people in the pews that practice orthodox Catholic catechism are good people, but Pope Benedict XVI and the men that protect him, and orthodox Catholic faith, are segregating themselves from the rest of practicing Christianity.  Not to mention that the Pope, as the Vicar of Christ, by extension just claimed that women ordained into Christian faith and those that recognize their ordinations are Christian criminals.  Has he read the New Testament?  Mary Magdalene went and told the men, who were hiding, that she has seen the risen Christ?  Really?

Vatican Says Women Priests a ‘Crime Against Faith
by Fiona Govan | Telegraph | 15 July 2010

The new rules issued by the Vatican puts attempts at ordaining women among the “most serious crimes” alongside paedophilia and will be handled by investigators from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), considered the successor to the Inquistion.

Women attempting to be priests, and those who try to ordain them, already faced automatic excommunication but the new decree goes further and enshrines the action as “a crime against sacraments”.

Read the New York Times reporting:

Vatican Rulse Equate Pedophilia and Ordaining Women
by Rachel Donadio | The New York Times | July 15, 2010

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.

he decision to link the issues appears to reflect the determination of embattled Vatican leaders to resist any suggestion that pedophilia within the priesthood can be addressed by ending the celibacy requirement or by allowing women to become priests.