Okay, so I was mistaken about there not being anything particularly note
worthy today. While not hugely significant, I realized as I was
inserting this into the previous post that I have more to say than I'd
initially thought, and thus that it should be in its own post so that I
can cleanly refer back to it if I want to.
"Dozens of Episcopalians Follow Leader into Catholic Church" and "Married Priests? The English Experience" are a pair of articles from the National Catholic Register on married priests in the western or Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Much food for thought, I can't quite make out where the first article is coming from, the second one I think the author is reluctantly coming down against it. This is one of the more controversial topics in the Church right now, and it kind of relates to Ederlyn's "Attempted virtue is its own punishment, I think.." Specifically she links to "What Is the Vatican Saying About Women?" which is an odd run down of some of the things the Vatican is currently saying about women. I have no clue how accurate it is, so I'll take it at its word for the most part for now. But towards the end I do take issue with it, and thus with the one line of comments on Ederlyn's post. There seems to be a prevailing thought that Pope John Paul II's apostolic letter, "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis," is not in fact the final word on the subject of the ordination of women, but is only the final word of Pope John Paul II's pontificate. I suppose people either have trouble grasping the idea of infallibility, which I could sympathize with, or they find the language at the end of the letter to be less than the bar for infallibility to be invoked. I'm really rather curious which is the case, but not sufficiently so to come out and ask directly. It seems rather to make the doctrine meaningless to require more than he has said:
Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.
And I know that there is a tendency to raise the bar so high it cannot
be met, in part because of our own unwillingness to accept it, and in
part to make reconciliation with the protestants easier. For they should
have no trouble accepting a doctrine that in practice never comes into
play. And how much easier it would be to invent our own morality, to
decide for ourselves what is right and wrong, acceptable and
unacceptable, possible and impossible, if there is no one who can
absolutely say "this is what is." Not that I think such thoughts are in
the forefront of people's minds when they ignore infallibility or make
it impossible to invoke, I doubt they are consciously denying the
existence of absolute right and wrong at all. Rather, I would tend to
think they are simply subconsciously denying their own error,
and thus if they are not in error, the contradicting statement must
be.
All of this most likely sounds incredibly haughty on my part, as if I were full of myself and my own correctness. I do not, however, mean to sound that way. Perhaps it is I who am wrong, and the bar to infallibility really does require more. If so, I'd question why our Holy Father worded his statement the way he did, but there could be other reasons for having done so. Perhaps the Holy Spirit intervened so far and no further, a just-enough intervention. It is certainly one conceivable explanation. Perhaps it is a bad translation, or my own misuse of language that leads me to read an absolute meant as such in that paragraph. I do not think so, but I accept the possibility, and if you want to argue otherwise, I'd be curious to hear your rationale (so long as it is rational ;-). I promise to try my best not to bite your head off if you, whoever you are reading this, choose to email me over it.