Following is an excerpt from Bishop Gumbleton's homily from the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time (emphases mine). How he continues to get away with this stuff is beyond me. Maybe it's time for an intervention...
"Then there was an article in The Michigan Catholic this week that caught my attention. It's a survey of what's going on around our country, where place after place, church after church is being closed. It points out, in Cleveland, the diocese has closed 27 parishes within the city of Cleveland itself — 27 within the city and most of them in the black community — and then 67 altogether throughout the diocese because there are no priests.
The article lists other diocese: Camden, New Jersey, this year they closed 56 of 124 parishes because they have no priests. Syracuse, New York, 36 out of 173. Scranton, Pennsylvania, more than 100 parishes in a diocese where there is less than 200. What's happening? Why aren't we listening? Isn't God taking any initiative to provide us with the ministers we need?
The answer is, of course God has, and there are those who have proclaimed how God has called them, and I'm talking, of course, about women, and we refuse to accept them as ministers.
In the early church, women did go out and proclaim the good news. In today's Gospel, Jesus sends out the 12, but you can be sure there was another time where it's recorded he sent out 72 in pairs, and surely there were men and women that went together and preached. Now when we are so desperately in need of priests, ministers of the gospel, ministers of the Eucharist, we don't have them.
And there are those who are calling for it, but then they're pushed away like Amos was pushed away, silenced. "You can't speak about that as a possibility, not to speak about ordaining married men or about women." Yet, I am confident that God is taken an initiative and we who are the church have to begin to listen to that and to respond to it and try to make sure our leaders respond to it."
His hot-line to heaven was disconnected a long long time ago - his confidence in God's initiative is in direct opposition to God's revealed ordained plan. Which kinda makes me wonder - if he's not listening to God, then who exactly is he listening to? And if it's not God's Word he's proclaiming, then whose word is it?
Mt 7:15 - "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." (1899 Douay-Rheims)
