FUSsa-talk Mailing List: Fwd: [Hidisc] Vatican Scrambles to Clarify Church Laws on Women Priests - The Daily Beast

[Robert Tapp (tappx001]

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> From: Robert Tapp <tappx001 [at] umn.edu>
> Date: July 18, 2010 10:17:54 AM CDT
> To: Humanist Institute Discussion Group Discussion Group <hidisc [at] 
> humanistinstitute.org>
> 
> 
> Useful summary by Michelle Goldberg, a major researcher on the rights of 
> women.
> 
> Bob
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-07-18/vatican-scrambles-to-clarify-church-laws-on-women-priests/?cid=bs:archive1
> 
> Vatican Scrambles to Clarify Church Laws on Women Priests - The Daily Beast
> 
>                                                                       The 
> Right Reverend Kay Goldsworthy, one of the first women bishops. (Photo: Paul 
> Kane / Getty Images)Rome's scrambling to undo damage from changes to church 
> law that lumped ordination of women priests with child sex abuse. Michelle 
> Goldberg on the church's other shameful legacy.
> 
> The Vatican has now clarified—ordaining women is not quite as grave a crime 
> as raping children.
> 
> On Thursday, the Vatican issued revisions to church law making it easier to 
> punish pedophile priests, a welcome development. Yet it shocked much of the 
> world by including, in its list of “more grave delicts,” not just the sexual 
> abuse of children and the possession of child pornography, but also the 
> attempted ordination of women priests. At the same time, the new rules have 
> nothing to say about priests who fail to respond adequately to reports of 
> sexual abuse. (If they did, writes Thomas Doyle in The National Catholic 
> Reporter, they “would obviously nail the majority of U.S. bishops, both 
> retired and active.”)
> 
> The church treated protecting its own norms about sex and gender as more 
> important than protecting the children under its care.
> 
> On Friday, amid widespread outrage, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who helped 
> formulate the new rules, tried to walk back any suggestion of equivalency 
> between female ordination and pederasty, telling Reuters that while both 
> canonical crimes are listed in the same document, “this does not put them on 
> the same level or assign them the same gravity.”
> 
> Hidden in all the uproar was an unfortunate truth. It would actually be a 
> step forward if the church were to assign the same gravity to the sexual 
> violation of children as it has to violations of its rigid doctrines on 
> gender. Compare the church’s sluggish, defensive, obfuscatory record on sex 
> abuse with its zealous prosecution of dissent against the all-male celibate 
> priesthood. It’s been quite clear for a long time where its priorities lay.
> 
> Throughout the last two papacies, even as pedophile priests were coddled and 
> protected, clergy and theologians who drifted away from church orthodoxy, 
> particularly on sexual matters, have been hounded. “From the very beginning 
> of his pontificate John Paul II decided to systematically crush dissent by 
> Catholic theologians and to marginalize critics so they would no  longer stir 
> up unwanted discussion within the Church,” wrote Carl Bernstein and Marco 
> Politi  in their biography of Pope John Paul II, His Holiness. “With the 
> appointment of Joseph Ratzinger”—the current pope—“as prefect of the 
> Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in November 1981, it became clear 
> that this was official policy.”
> 
> Father Charles Curran, a professor at the Catholic University of America, was 
> removed from his post and barred from teaching theology as a result of 
> questioning church teachings on contraception, divorce, and homosexuality. 
> Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle came under investigation for 
> allowing the gay Catholic group Dignity to celebrate mass, among other 
> infractions. As Bernstein and Politi reported, Hunthausen was subjected to a 
> two-year investigation, which included interviews with 70 witnesses from his 
> diocese and a 13-hour interrogation. He eventually retired early. The 
> Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is currently engaged in a sweeping 
> investigation of American nuns, apparently because they’re seen as 
> insufficiently conservative.
> 
> Had similar inquisitorial energy been spent on rooting out abusive priests, 
> far fewer children’s lives would have been blighted. But it wasn’t—perhaps 
> because conservatives worried that sex abuse scandals would call priestly 
> celibacy and the exclusion of women into question. As the historian Garry 
> Wills wrote in his book Papal Sins, “For a priest to be a pedophile raises 
> the question whether the celibate discipline for a whole class of men (not 
> just for the spiritually gifted individual) is a false, because unrealizable, 
> ideal.” Thus the church treated protecting its own norms about sex and gender 
> as more important than protecting the children under its care.
> 
> Though the church denies it, the ban on women priests is deeply rooted in 
> misogyny. “Since any supremacy of rank cannot be expressed in the female sex, 
> which has the status of an inferior, that sex cannot receive ordination,” 
> declared Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century Catholic theological giant. Women, 
> Wills reminds us, were long seen as too profoundly impure to come near the 
> church altar. Hence the tradition of castrating boys to sing soprano in 
> Catholic choirs, a tradition that lingered into the beginning of the 20th 
> century.
> 
> The case of the castrati is instructive, since it demonstrates the Vatican’s 
> historic willingness to sanction true perversity in the interest of male 
> supremacy. There is, as yet, not much indication that that has changed.
> 
> Michelle Goldberg is the author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and 
> the Future of the World and Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian 
> Nationalism. She is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and her 
> work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, 
> Glamour, and many other publications.
> 
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