Category: Women’s Ordination

Do you say this to yourself when you see another blog from me about the Synod? I have to confess I think that myself. What you need to know is that Southeastern Pennsylvania Women’s Ordination Conference, myself included, has demonstrated for forty years outside the Cathedral. While we know that we have caused some people…
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As I sit down to write this, the Queen of England dies. On the BBC, I hear first a comment from the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and then one from the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. How ironic. What does this mean in the long history of the monarchy, even as the Boleyn family…
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Two Vatican documents from the past half-century form the basis for the Church’s official stance on women’s ordination today. The first, a declaration from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Inter Insigniores, was issued in 1976 with the approval of Pope Paul VI. The latter of the two documents is Pope John…
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OK. You’ve been waiting for it. What have the US Bishops done with the Synod reports from 95% of the dioceses in our country? We need a text! According to Brian Fraga in NCR, in early August the “synod team” held a “writing retreat” after “regional reports” had been prepared. I suppose some rubric is…
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Last week no new article appealed to me. This week, the results of the Irish Synod came out, and WOW. Literally, Women’s Ordination Worldwide! After Australia and Germany, here we go again. In contrast to the Australian kerfuffle over the role of women, the Irish are not afraid to say what they really want. Mary…
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Do you find yourself in E. B. White’s quandary? It’s hard to know when to respond to the seductiveness of the world and when to respond to its challenge. If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning…
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Despite the tremendous appeal of Pope Francis’s trip to ask for forgiveness from the indigenous peoples of Canada to the media worldwide, I am going to write about the Synod Process again. If we are to effectively advocate for people of all genders to be ordained, we have to understand what is happening around the…
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Be honorable yourself if you wish to associate with honorable people. -Proverb I am not a big sports fan as such, but while away visiting relatives, I caught a bit of the televised Tour de France cycling race. It happened to be the segment of the race in which the two lead cyclists vying for…
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I’ve seen this painting many times at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and each time it has enthralled me. I look at it and think, this is my church – unsteady, twisted, constricted, shrunken, tired. Then I come another time and think, this is my church – quietly beautiful, a refuge and sanctuary, and, if…
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Saturday a week ago was “Ordination Day,” for males only, of course, in our archdiocese. A group of us supporting women’s ordination in the Catholic Church always attend these yearly ordinations – oh, not inside the basilica where we are patently not welcome (by the Archbishop and his minions at least) but outside, always outside.…
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