This one is titled Lack Of Women Will Irreversibly Harm The Church. Man, sounds like she's issuing a threat, doesn't it? Or a dire warning. Either way, it's over-the-top hyperbole and completely ridiculous - and all it's lacking is a soundtrack.
Until now... (click the green arrow)
| Dorian Kelly - River of Blood - eerie beginnings; a menacing chase, leading to a gruesome and sinister end. Dorian Kelly, PRS. .mp3 | ||
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 | Found at bee mp3 search engine |  |
Joan needs to get over herself. The Church isn't erasing the women in its midst - it's merely ignoring the ones who have convinced themselves they can do a better job of running the Church than Christ Himself. And that's what has her, and those in agreement with her, angry.
[...]
What bothered them was their 4-year-old daughter. She was a quick-minded child. Precocious. Persistent. Confident. They knew...she would question the difference between what her brother could do in the church and what she could do. That would be years away, of course, but still... they were struggling, to no avail, to find a reason good enough to appease her, they said. Then, suddenly, one Sunday morning after Mass as they sat at the family breakfast table, it happened."Mama," she said suddenly, "why don't we have any girl priests at our church?"
They looked at one another, dumbstruck, unprepared. Too late. There was nothing left to do now but be honest.
"Because, darling," the mother said, "our church doesn't allow girl priests."
The little girl pursed her lips and frowned. "Then why do we go there?" she demanded.
With the retreat to Vatican I in full force, this question and its answer get closer and closer.
Feminine language is fast being cut from the very prayers of the church. The invisibility of women is official policy again. Women have been removed from various church boards stealthily but steadily.
All talk of the restoration of the diaconate has been suffocated.
"If the diaconate is restored for women," an official spokesperson is reported to have said, "they will assume they can then be ordained to the priesthood."
It has not occurred to the spokesman, it seems, that the restoration of the diaconate for married men did not launch an assault on the chancery doors to require a married priesthood. Either that, or the old "you know how irrational women are" argument is being dusted off again, too.
And now, in places even in this country, some dioceses are denying girls the opportunity to become altar servers, despite official church acceptance of female servers since 1983 and the long-established practice in churches everywhere.
The idea that women are to be "seen and not heard" is fast becoming "neither seen nor heard."
Here and there, little by little, the hoary head of chauvinism, of patriarchy, of sick and petty and adolescent sexism is making one last desperate attempt to make us a totally male church again.
Correction: To make us a serving female church, a parading male church again. And all of it, as usual, in the name of God. In defense of the faith. In imitation of the church of Christ.
...But when a church can simply erase the women in its midst, refuse to discuss the subject and attempt to go on calling itself church, Christian and holy, that is another matter entirely....From where I stand, it is clear that the church already lost a good proportion of one generation of women in the last 25 years and is now willing to lose the next one to reassert its maleness. The question rises again with new and demanding urgency for many: Why do we go there?
The answer to it will not only affect the women and their children for generations to come. It will affect the church in ways no number of male altar boys can begin to heal it.
