Browsing articles tagged with " Priests"
Religious-based bigotry eviscerates women’s human rights the world over, and God doesn’t like it one damned bit.
Today at the grocery store, I overheard a mom telling her little girl, “Of course you can be President of the United States!” It seems a boy at school said girls were not good enough to be president because they weren’t boys. Even though I had heard such things before (I am the youngest of six with five older brothers), this particular conversation stopped me dead in my religious tracks.
Catholicism decided I wasn’t good enough to be a leader in the Church about 2,000 years before I was born. I couldn’t be its president (aka “pope”) or a priest or bishop or cardinal because I happened to be female. Not knowing any better, I accepted my Catholic less-than-ness as a fact of life, like when the Little League in Wheaton, Ill., said I couldn’t play because I was a girl. I didn’t organize sit ins on the pitcher’s mound or walk outs from the pew. Like other girls, I simply accepted the adult-dictated view of things.
The Catholic Church believes the Bible (a document written, translated and almost entirely interpreted by men) establishes that men are, quite literally, born leaders. The Church claims that women can’t be priests because Jesus wanted it that way. Really? A man didn’t play any role whatsoever in Jesus’ conception (from all accounts, it was sperm-free). Christ came out of a woman’s uterus, which seems to be a pretty important part of the birth story. Jesus’ most trusted disciple was arguably Mary Magdalene. The risen Jesus didn’t show Himself to the fellas at the local mens-only oasis. He first appeared to Mary. Experts believe it was Mary at Jesus’ right in DaVinci’s Last Supper. She wasn’t doing dishes in the back or filling the wine glasses for the boys, she was right next to Mr. Equality Himself.
The wildly dangerous and incredibly pathetic part of religiously based gender bigotry is the critical role it plays in legitimizing the horrific treatment of women in societies throughout the world. Women aren’t equal in the eyes of God, Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, etc., therefore: Cover your face and body or be whipped. You’re forbidden to drive or vote or hold a paying job. Don’t speak, as you are not worthy to be heard. You deserve to be treated like objects or property or animals. It is justified by God that you be beaten or stoned to death simply for being the victim of your own femininity. Face the cold, brutally hard fact that all of your human rights are dependent on what men, not God, feel they should be.
In the Catholic “faith,” women are told to accept that our own religion utilizes every political and legal channel known to man (aided by the money we put in the Sunday collection basket) to prevent us from controlling what happens in our bedrooms or to our bodies. Using God to control women is what we in marketing might call a “Top Down” strategy. Find an expert and leverage his/her position to convince consumers of a “truth.” Unfortunately, God isn’t around to verify the man-made claims in support of gender inequity, or to expose it as the load of crap it most certainly is. I believe God made us equal. We may be different physically, but God sees us as His children. Not as His sons and those other ones, but as His children. Precious. Made in His image.
By attending Catholic mass, I’m tacitly endorsing women’s inequality within the Church. Through my silence, I am agreeing with its calculated discrimination against females. I am supporting a Church that fights to control women’s reproductive choices and is hell bent on ruining the lives of my God-loving gay brothers and sisters. And at the end of the day, I’m going to have to explain to Jesus why I would patronize any organization that doesn’t treat His children equally.
I believe in exacting change from the inside out by trying to make things better rather than abandoning them. However, unless I can find a way to express my opposition to all forms of bigotry within the confines of my Church (wearing a sandwich board, neon sign or set of very large buttons to Mass being viable, short term solutions), I’m going to have to stick by the teachings of my God and sit that pew out.
Sarah O’Leary is a writer, marketing expert and licensed minister. She encourages you to share this and all of her Huffington Posts. Sarah answers all comments made herein, and may be reached via email: sarahathuffpo@gmail.com.
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Last weekend, we attended the ordination of the young man we have been supporting with our prayers as he moves toward the priesthood. He was ordained a transitional deacon, along with nine others. The liturgy was absolutely beautiful and it was very impressive to see the strong faith and dedication of these fine men.
Ed and I were “matched” with Lenny only a few months ago, but we have been praying for him much longer—ever since we signed up for an archdiocesan “adopt a seminarian” program. We didn’t know who we would be matched with, but we knew that the Lord did, so we began praying immediately. Finally, we had a chance to meet him, and we could tell right away that the Holy Spirit had a plan for this connection.
This program matches families with one of the 100 seminarians in our archdiocese; the families commit to following the seminarian through his discernment process with prayer and friendship—including him in our family events, and getting to know one another. We look forward to attending the milestones as he journeys toward the priesthood, and hope to continue beyond that, through prayer and friendship in his ministry. Priests need our prayers all through their lives.
On Sunday, we attended his first official Mass as a deacon. There were twenty children making their First Communion in that parish, and as such he geared his first homily to the kids, but he did a great job in reaching the adults as well—that’s not always easy to pull off.
Our seminarian has a Masters degree in education and taught math before entering the seminary, and it showed; he invited the kids to come up to sit on the top step so that he could talk with them as he explained the Gospel and how the Scripture related to making their First Communion.
The Gospel was John 15: 1-8, where Jesus says, “I am the true vine and you are the branches . . .” Lenny pointed out to the kids that Jesus says over and over, “Remain in me, and I remain in you.” He emphasized the word remain—stay with me . . . stay close to me.” Bringing out a vine he had dug up that morning to use as a concrete visual, he explained the Gospel in simple terms and involved the kids in a conversation that circled in to what they were doing in receiving communion that day, but the lesson had application for the adults as well. We were impressed; Lenny will make a fine priest one day, following the example of the Lord who taught in simple examples his listeners could relate to.
I prayed for the First Communicants that their day would be as powerful as mine was. If there is one day in my personal life I can point to as the first moment that it all came together for me in my relationship with God, it was that day. It was the day I knew that I knew, and I have never doubted. It is hard to explain how I felt, but at one moment I knew God was with me. Over the years, I have had been “pruned,” but each time it has only brought me closer to him; it has been necessary for growth and for the production of fruit in my life.
Last year at this time, we were in Rome, and it was very special for me to be able to receive communion and to attend Mass at the Vatican on the very anniversary of my First Holy Communion. I remember that day in a special way each year, but that was a real gift to me.
On our wedding day, besides the wonder of exchanging our vows, a most special moment came when Ed and I gave each other communion. The priest placed the host in each of our hands and we gave communion to each other. He then gave Ed the chalice, and he presented it to me; I did the same in exchange. It was a profound moment for us; it proclaimed that our marriage wasn’t just between Ed and me, but that the Lord was with us, and we always could count on Him to remain as a partner with us in our marriage. Whenever Ed and I walk up to receive communion together, it reminds us of the sacrament of our marriage and the gift of the unity with the Lord as we receive Eucharist together.
I am terrified that I have become that crabby lady.
In church, a toddler cries throughout much of the Mass. This is not unusual, but this day she is more strident. She is so loud that the priest stops not once, but twice, looks unusually on edge, and must repeat what he is attempting to say three times. His voice has no chance against her.
Both of my kids went to Mass from an early age. Neither was close to perfect. But they were disciplined in church, and if that didn’t work, I took them outside. And if they settled down, we went back in. And if they didn’t, we didn’t return. Some days, we went back and forth, worrying about the traveling being disruptive to others.
Back in the day when we wore dresses and covered our heads, the three stairstep redheads were bookended by the parents in the pew. Peggy Jane the Mom had the magic way of thumping her middle finger against the pad of her thumb and right into the backs of our heads from close range. That meant turn around and face the altar. Too much loud whispering from us would get the signal of the index finger on her lips the first time, followed by the stare of death, and then, if needed, the yanking of the closest elbow.
Now, when all or most of the family worships together, it’s like a big party in the pew, a continuation of the constant high jinx and fun that marks our time together. A couple of years ago, we all left the pew to receive Communion while my sister’s youngest, who had not yet made his First Communion, remained behind. And because we were all gone, he thought it would be awesome to hurdle into the next pew, so that when we returned and used him as a marker, we all filed blindly into the wrong pew.
Only when others started piling in on top of us did we figure out his prank.
When I commemorated the half-century since my birth by writing my 50 favorite things, I was chided by priests from throughout my life for not including Mass. But I did include an empty, quiet church early on Sunday morning.
Some go for community, I go for quiet.
At large parishes, there are youth masses, teen masses, contemporary music masses that occasionally resemble a concert more than Mass, sometimes even “pageant” masses with every last detail choreographed and lots of participation from the parishioners.
For a time, the church I attended had a contemplative mass with low light, more somber music, and more periods of quiet. I loved it, but few went and it was quickly discontinued.
My prayer this week is that I remember the most important part of being at Mass, and become more tolerant of crying kids and parents who let them.
I do not want to become that crabby lady.
A priest in the Belleville Diocese at odds with his bishop over the wording of the Catholic Mass said Belleville Bishop Edward Braxton told him in a meeting Tuesday that if he refused to resign as pastor of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Mount Carmel, Ill., the bishop would use canon — or church — law to remove him.
Braxton did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The priest said he had been told he could appeal to the Vatican. But he said prospects for a reversal are grim.
“The understanding (in Rome) is that I’m done,” Rowe said.
In December, the Vatican introduced a new English-language translation of the Roman Missal — the book of prayers, chants and responses used during Mass. Last June, Braxton sent a letter to all the priests in the Belleville Diocese warning that “it will not be acceptable for any priest or any parish to refrain from using the new prayers due to their personal preference.”
For decades, Rowe has deviated from some of the language of the liturgy’s prayers to better convey the point of his sermons. He offered to resign last year after Braxton told him he could no longer improvise parts of the Mass. In a February letter, Braxton said he’d accepted the priest’s resignation because he ‘simply would not and could not pray the prayers of the Mass as they are translated in the new Roman Missal.” Rowe has since retracted his offer to resign.
He said Wednesday he was meeting with a group called the Southern Illinois Association of Priests to get a sense of his legal options.
A priest in the Belleville Diocese at odds with his bishop over the wording of the Catholic Mass said Belleville Bishop Edward Braxton told him in a meeting Tuesday that if he refused to resign as pastor of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Mount Carmel, Ill., the bishop would use canon — or church — law to remove him.
Braxton did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The priest said he had been told he could appeal to the Vatican. But he said prospects for a reversal are grim.
“The understanding (in Rome) is that I’m done,” Rowe said.
In December, the Vatican introduced a new English-language translation of the Roman Missal — the book of prayers, chants and responses used during Mass. Last June, Braxton sent a letter to all the priests in the Belleville Diocese warning that “it will not be acceptable for any priest or any parish to refrain from using the new prayers due to their personal preference.”
For decades, Rowe has deviated from some of the language of the liturgy’s prayers to better convey the point of his sermons. He offered to resign last year after Braxton told him he could no longer improvise parts of the Mass. In a February letter, Braxton said he’d accepted the priest’s resignation because he ‘simply would not and could not pray the prayers of the Mass as they are translated in the new Roman Missal.” Rowe has since retracted his offer to resign.
He said Wednesday he was meeting with a group called the Southern Illinois Association of Priests to get a sense of his legal options.
Since June 2002 in the printed pages of America magazine and here on its blog (such as, more recently, here and here), I have tried to make occasional theological sense of the unfolding sexual/managerial abuse crisis in the U.S. Catholic Church. As someone who works in the area of practical theology, the lived experience of faith, critically and appreciatively understood, is an important consideration for me in trying to do any theological work.
Reading today’s newspaper made me wonder anew at what Catholicism is facing (or not facing). Like some other commentators, I believe that this scandal is as much about the fundamental terms of the church and theology as it is about problematic “accretions” to an otherwise unproblematic ecclesial-theological substructure.
In today’s New York Times, I read about the response of Bishop Michael J. Bransfield to allegations made in the current trial in Philadelphia exploring sexual abuse and coverup at allegedly high levels of the Catholic Church there. According to news coverge, Bishop Bransfield was refuting claims that he himself was guilty of sexual abuse and that he also knew of abuse by another priest.
Of course, I don’t know what the truth is in this particular case, and as much as anyone, I hope for a fair trial and a just verdict in every aspect and for everyone affected.
But my point concerns the highly visible, public proliferation of these disputes, reports, and trials regarding abuse in the Catholic Church over the past decade in the United States, and what they might mean for the ongoing and unfolding experience of Catholic identity in this country. Again and again for ten years running, the press has been filled with testimonies, accusations, and sometimes denials, concerning abuse of young men, teenagers, or children by priests. A great many of these testimonies and accusations have proven true. This is so much the case that, as I argued in a recent book, the sexual abuse of minors is the awful lodestar for all future Catholic theology in the United States. It is a call to a major theological rethinking of the church in practice. Moreover, these crucial matters are so frequently on the radar for so many baptized Catholics that I wonder whether, ten years into the latest ecclesial convulsion, Catholic identity in the United States is being marked anew by the crisis — in a way that will and should change the sorts of questions that students of theology ask about what it means to be Catholic.
Here is more of what I mean: about fifteen years ago, theologian Kathryn Tanner (now at Yale) wrote a deeply reflective book called Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Augsburg Fortress, 1997). While not itself a work of Catholic theology, Tanner argued that developments in cultural studies, including theories of ordinary life and everyday experience, could help theology understand that religious communities are rarely joined by consensus on normative beliefs or practices.
Rather, she suggested, theologians should study religious identity as a matter of proximity to some “common stake” about which members disagree and about which they care. In other words (and Tanner is not the only one to argue something like this), religious identity is usually more a matter of where one stands with regard to matters on which people take sides than with regard to some presumed essential, ahistorical essence like the way “principles” or “values” are often portrayed.
What holds people together in a “shared” religious identity is not that they have basic agreements, but that they have “common stakes” on which they take up varying tensive perspectives. For many Catholics, I think, a rough and ready sketch of those common stakes would probably include: teaching authority, mass, priesthood, Eucharist, the body, women, divorce, sexuality, and more. Many Catholics disagree on what these “matters” (symbolic while always tied to real persons/experiences) mean in Catholic life, yet the felt significance of these stakes helps make up the core of Catholic identity. I am here applying Tanner to Catholic identity; Tanner herself does not do this. Moreover, her argument is more subtle than I can render in a brief blog post. If you are interested, I suggest you read it for yourself.
With apologies for lack of nuance, what I am wondering here is whether sexual abuse has now become, or is in the process of becoming, one of those “common stakes” for Catholic identity in the USA.
That is, whether a felt response to clerical sexual abuse (and various items related to it) is now what is “called up” in people’s minds and hearts when they picture what has to be accounted for when talking about Catholicism. This is not to suggest that baptized Catholics (whether they identify as practicing, non-practicing, post-practicing, or something else) all agree on the causes, course, and consequences of the sexual/managerial abuse scandal, but that sexual abuse is inching its way upward into the lived palette of colors available for public discussion of Catholicism.
We will have to await future studies to see if this is indeed the case, but how Catholic identity is interpreted today will set up the very frameworks for the studies that will be undertaken tomorrow.
Tom Beaudoin
Church investigation into Father Martin McVeigh now under threat after theft
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Church plans to investigate how a priest showed gay pornographic images to a young child have been thrown into disarray – after his laptop was stolen.
Father Martin McVeigh projected 16 indecent images of men during a First Communion meeting with the child and a group of parents in Pomeroy last month.
At the time Fr McVeigh said: “I don’t know how it happened but I know what happened.
“There are people making innuendos who weren’t even there but in this day and age these stories grow. All I can do is let the incident be investigated and be open to that investigation so that what happened can be legitimately explained.”
Now plans to investigate the incident have been seriously hampered by the theft of the computer from the priest’s house.
The Irish Times reports that the computer is believed to have been the only item stolen.
Police have made a public appeal to help solve the crime.
The priest has also told police that he has ‘no idea’ where the images came from and that the memory stick on which they were placed was used by a ‘number of people’.
The diocese of Armagh has established an internal enquiry but the theft may detail their investigations.
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Irish columnist: Catholic theology causes abuse
March 21, 2012
From Our Store: Essays in Apologetics, Volume I (eBook)
An Irish political columnist has made the charge that Catholic theology causes to sexual abuse.
“Clerical sexual abuse is inevitable given the meaning system that is taught by the Catholic Church and to which many priests adhere,” writes Vincent Browne in the Irish Times. His column breaks new ground in suggesting that Catholicism is a danger to the public.
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Maybe I’m being overly optimistic. Still, I can’t help but think it’s kind of a big deal that the Catholic priest who denied a lesbian communion (at her own mother’s funeral) is getting suspended. Even if the Catholic Church insists they’re not suspending him for that particular incident — according to a letter from an archdiocese official, “Rev. Marcel Guarnizo was placed on leave for engaging in intimidating behavior.”
Sure, sure. Whatever you say, guys. Of course the Catholic Church can’t admit to suspending a priest specifically for denying a lesbian communion. Given their whole stance on homosexuality and the like. I mean, we can’t expect them to come right out and say, “Hey, even we think it’s messed up to be mean to a lesbian at her mother’s funeral.” Can we?
Well, perhaps we can!
I’m convinced Father Guarnizo’s suspension is a small (okay, very small) but significant step toward something that might almost resemble progress. Seriously! Especially considering that before they suspended him, the archdiocese actually apologized for the funeral incident.
Honestly, I still can’t get over the fact that a priest said the word “lesbian” out loud.
I know, this doesn’t even begin to approach the territory of tolerance. But let’s say you’re looking at a timeline of the history of the Catholic church. On one end you’ve got the Crusades. Then all the way on the other end you’ve got a priest getting suspended for being mean to a lesbian!
See, progress! So what if it took hundreds upon hundreds of years?
Who knows, in another eight or nine centuries, the Catholic church might decide to let women become priests!
Why do you think the priest who denied a lesbian communion really got suspended?
Image via Rhian/Flickr
The 72-year-old priest felt so strongly about his ad-libs that last October he offered to resign as pastor of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Mount Carmel, Ill. Belleville Bishop Edward Braxton eventually accepted Rowe’s offer Jan. 30.
But now Rowe has retracted his offer to resign, citing canon law to assert that Braxton’s acceptance came too late.
Canon 538 says that to be valid, a pastor’s resignation has to be formally accepted by his bishop. And canon 189 says any resignation “which requires acceptance lacks all force if it is not accepted within three months.”
By that standard, the priest’s resignation would have lost validity on Jan. 12.
Rowe’s original offer to resign came on Oct. 12, two months ahead of the introduction of a new, Vatican-mandated English-language translation of the Roman Missal, the book of prayers, chants and responses used during Mass.
Last June, Braxton warned all priests in the Belleville Diocese that “it will not be acceptable for any priest or any parish to refrain from using the new prayers due to their personal preference.”
Rowe said Braxton had warned him five years ago to stick to the words written in the missal. In a Feb. 14 letter to leaders of the diocese, the bishop said the priest “simply would not and could not pray the prayers of the Mass as they are translated in the new Roman Missal.”
In his newest letter to the bishop, Rowe said he originally offered to leave St. Mary’s because of the “heavy burden I seemed to be placing on you.” But Rowe had since become aware, he wrote, “that there are many … who would judge a resignation out of proportion to making the liturgical words more intelligible.”
Rowe suggested that the bishop allow him to remain pastor of St. Mary’s, even “while at the same time expressing your serious disagreement” with Rowe’s improvisations.
“With this statement you can show your faithfulness to church law,” Rowe wrote. “But it will also be a great pastoral opportunity to show your appreciation of the many voices of your faithful in the diocese and of your efforts to deal with the serious shortage of priests.”
(Tim Townsend writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in St. Louis.)
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