He argued that the training could lead to more boys becoming Catholic priests, bolstering dwindling numbers in the clergy. Training for girls was halted.
Fr. Taylor doesn't argue it at all. Christ is the person who started this "argument". All Fr. Taylor is trying to do is take full advantage of the gifts and fruit of altar serving foolishly wasted on soothing the egos of women in the pews with low self esteem and a chip on their shoulder.
Frankly, it's a bit like tying up a delivery room with men who feel like God cheated them because they can't get pregnant and deliver children but want to go through the motions. There might be hospitals foolish enough to let them, but we all know what delivery rooms are used for, and men will never get a crumb of the real fruit.
When weighing the balance of the mystical power, mentoring and fruit that feeds priestly vocation against the hostility ignorance breeds in women, most priests will simply buckle. Even the ones who know they are tempering vocations and would be inclined to do it, don't have the back up from the buffoon bishop in charge of the See. But the reality is, canonically, short of removing a priest who decides to do it, there is little the bishop can do.
I wonder if groups of orthodox women got together and started the initiative in a parish, educated other women on the mystical power and fruit of reserving altar serving to boys, encouraging the pastor to take full advantage of it, could we help spread Fr. Taylor's fire?
We'd have to choose the priests carefully, get the support of a few wealthy people in the parish and choke off the Chancery with threats over their precious money, put up with the cad priests like Garrity and Unni who will grab the opportunity to characterize themselves as doing Christ and His Church a favor by discarding the mystical fruit for the adoration the daffy women will give them, etc., but I bet we could.
BTW - here's how Catholics are voting in the poll:
Should girls be allowed to be Altar servers:
Yes: 32%
No: 66%
Got to love that!
Cast your vote. Circulate it to your friends and encourage others to do so.
9 comments:
"No question that bishops have tremendous power, and as we know, and this is a pattern for over thirty years, in one country after another, the bishops take it upon themselves to jump the gun, to approve what is not approved by general law for the Church, and then, post factum, after a practice has become widespread, then they appeal to the Holy See to approve what they had been doing without even consulting the Holy See, as, for example, Communion in the hand".
--John Hardon SJ
God love Fr. Tayor!
The small church where we go half the time (the other half is FSSP) has an older pastor in his 80's. No girl altar servers allowed. No one says a peep - at least to his face.
Annnnnnnnd his boy altar servers are so well trained they can actually become a distraction and make you realize how awful most altar servers really are.
No girl altar servers allowed.
How wonderful!
Don't get me started at female table servers!!
By the way, I am glad to see that the poll turned around. The day I voted, it was 18% no and the majority yes.
I'm a priest. One year in a certain parish in a certain diocese, I admitted 12 men to the washing of the feet on Holy Thursday. A liberal dissident priest was livid that I did that. But many women in the parish specifically thanked me for that. They said, "It's good to finally see men there."
Good for you Father.
Of all nights and rituals, the washing of the feet on Holy Thursday,should be all men. Preferably young, single men with possible vocation that could be cultivated and men who serve the parish and community in other ways. Wouldn't it be spectacular if women who knew the community well made the suggestions to the priest?
The overwhelming majority of women would be supportive if they were educated on the the mystical happenings and mentoring. Women of good will want our Lord served. They are disinterested in using their service as some kind of trophy they have achieved through and for their own merits. But there will always be women who misunderstand. I used to be one of them. Rock on.
But many women in the parish specifically thanked me for that
I would have been among them, Padre! I thank you now :)There are a fair number of people who don't understand. or accept, the priesthood, as Christ gave it; that it was a Sacrament instituted by Christ on Holy Thursday. If Christ had wanted women to be priests He would have made them so. He didn't. I love what Fr. Hardon SJ had to say about the ordination of women:
"..suppose we took the opposite position, advocated by proponents of women’s ordination. If the choice of men by Christ and by the Church has really been only time-conditioned and changeable, then indeed very unpleasant consequences could be drawn.
This attempted solution proceeds from the idea that Jesus, if He had lived in another time and in another land, could have also chosen women. This theory thus grants that there could be another time (or place) in which women could be completely appropriate for the fullness of the hierarchical and sacerdotal office.
But then what follows? It follows that the Catholic Church and its supposedly divine office of mediation of grace stand fixed in a social ethos—that of the first century—which stands diametrically opposed to the ethos of the century in which the Church now lives.
Grant this hypothesis and no single teaching of the Christ or the apostolic Church remains normative for all times. Instead of transcending time, Christianity would become the slave of time. The Beatitudes and the whole Sermon on the Mount, the precept of monogamy and the prohibition of adultery would become –as not a few are now urging—moral archaisms that had meaning and relevance in former days but are no longer meaningful and certainly not mandatory in our day.
If someone objects that the ordination of men by Christ and the early Church was simply a contingent fact; that it could have been otherwise, I grant the observation. But since when are Christians to stand in judgment on why God did what He did, like become man, when the world could have (absolutely speaking) been redeemed without the Incarnation; or why God does what He does, like nourish us with His own Body and Blood when our spiritual life could (absolutely speaking) be sustained by other means if He had so chosen?
One of the great blessings I see coming from the present discussion about the ordination of women is our deeper realization of God’s wisdom in providing for a variety of ways He can be loved, and a bewildering diversity of ministries by which He can be served.
It is for us to stand in awe, and not in judgment, on the ways of God who chose a woman and not a man by whom to enter the world. If this was selectivity, and it was, it was not discrimination. God never does things without good reasons, even when these reasons escape or elude us who—would you believe—sometimes want to instruct God".
Belatedly, a great post, and the delivery romm analogy is very apt.
I heard of a C. of E. vicar who enthusiastically adopted Holy Thursday foot-washing. All the feet he washed belonged to attractive young women.
Hmmm....
Chris, Ewww, that's kinda creepy!
Maria - great quote from Hardon, btw. Loved it.
Post a Comment