Women Priests

[the 13th papist]

i must submitt, you are correct, married priests is the small "t" tradition. I apologize.

[Spamity Calamity]

[quote name='carrdero' post='1430886' date='Dec 7 2007, 07:24 PM']You have my premission to add these other organizations to my list.[/quote]

I was actually hoping someone would answer my question.

[prose]

For a friend looking for information.

[Snowcatpa]

[font="Book Antiqua"][color="blue"]Hi prose,

This is a more personal response from when I didn't understand this issue from a few years ago. I thought explaining it in a more nuanced way than just "because it's sexist" may be more helpful to you from the way you were responding to posts.

To be honest, when it came down to it, because women couldn't be priests, I truly felt like less of a human being than a man. That might sound strange to most guys and even some girls, but I was so hurt and let down by God at the time. A man gets to image God, but I cannot? I'm the "helper girl", but I can't "really" image God?

Seriously, I felt like carp.

It is very, very difficult to understand this complexity of imaging etc. not because we don't have the intelligence to understand, but because it goes against the very positive (or so we assumed) type of equality we had been raised in. We, as 21st century women, have never seen how "separate but equal" actually successfully works. I remember thinking, It didn't work for race (see Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of Education), so why would it work for gender?

The entire world balance would be thrown off if any facet of people were still allowed to discriminate so unilaterally!

This type of reasoning is not far off, as many of us have argued before on the other side that any acceptance of the contraceptive culture profoundly effects a million other decisions including abortion, in vitro, embryonic stem cell research, harm minimization in prostitution, and the death penalty. It was a HUGE deal to me. HUGE. I'd be in tears over it.

If women can't be priests, then our presumed idea of equality as was mentioned before, can never exist. This throws off your entire world view, one that you had thought was so positive, that helped you be able to vote and go to school with the men - who had previously tried to prevent you from doing something you were most certainly capable of and called to do. This subjective feeling of rejection is not to be underestimated in favor of trying to reason out in cool logic "why it's a big deal." Women are emotional creatures, and I was upset over female priests because I felt hurt, and betrayed when the Church that I loved could seemingly treat me like second class, like I'd never be good enough for it, for Christ, for anyone.

Philosophically speaking, the feminism of equality that we had been subconsciously raised in told us that our bodies didn't really matter - it was what inside that counted. Were we good people, who tried to improve the world? Then what did it matter what sex we were, or if there really was a "sex" and not just culturally influenced "gender"? Souls bounced from body to body in this shell of whatever, and the shell has no impact on what we should be able to do. To say that sex DOES matter merely repeats the abuses that led to so many more abuses for us.

I think that may be very similiar to what people with same-sex attraction must feel when they try to understand the Church's teaching, but have a hard time doing so. Like they'd never be good enough because they seemingly don't love in the way they're supposed to.

It was terrifying to think that people still didn't accept that a woman wasn't capable of being a priest, or, even WORSE (to me at the time), that she somehow, metaphysically speaking, just... didn't measure up.

A woman couldn't measure up to what God wanted as a priest, and He intentionally designed it that way. Where was room for me?

How can any role as helper ever [i]begin [/i]to make up for not getting to image God like men do?

All of this meant, on a personal level, a very, very great deal.

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Now, I just wanted to add at the end here that I no longer think this way AT ALL, and am a huge supporter of John Paul the Great's New Feminism and the feminine genius etc. I really don't want people to feel like they have to correct why I was wrong before, even though I may have stated it very definitively for effect. I know dozens and [b][i]dozens[/i][/b] of reasons why everything that I said above is:

a.) factually incorrect
b.) guilty of completely simplistic understanding
c.) based on emotions alone and not a thorough investigation of the matter at hand.

But this forum is about why it was a big deal, not whether I was right or wrong.[/color][/font]

[jeffpugh]

Great response... btw, the specific term would be "this thread", opposed to forum, which is the term for the general debate table!

God bless,

SMM