Catholic News Service reports:
Citing Bourgeois’ participation in the invalid ordination in Lexington, Ky., Aug. 9, 2008, the Maryknoll statement said, “With patience, the Holy See and the Maryknoll Society have encouraged his reconciliation with the Catholic Church.”
“Instead, Mr. Bourgeois chose to campaign against the teachings of the Catholic Church in secular and non-Catholic venues,” the statement said. “This was done without the permission of the local U.S. Catholic bishops and while ignoring the sensitivities of the faithful across the country. Disobedience and preaching against the teaching of the Catholic Church about women’s ordination led to his excommunication, dismissal and laicization.”
The Maryknoll statement said, “Mr. Bourgeois freely chose his views and actions, and all the members of the Maryknoll Society are saddened at the failure of reconciliation. With this parting, the Maryknoll Society warmly thanks Roy Bourgeois for his service to mission and all members wish him well in his personal life.
We may want to ordain women, but the teaching of the Church is that we cannot. In this lies a lesson on humility that extends to mattes well beyond women’s ordination into the whole of the Christian life. We are sometimes called on not to reform society but instead our minds, submitting them even to teachings we struggle to understand.
November 19th, 2012 | 6:00 pm
We may want to ordain women, but the teaching of the Church is that we cannot.
It is really difficult to believe that the Church wants to ordain women, whether it can or not. Look at the whole history of the Church, and also look at the fuss over female altar servers between the 1960s and 1990s.
I am no expert on the arguments against ordaining women, but what I know does not seem to be all that convincing. I would like to hear Benedict on the matter rather than John Paul II.
It does seem to me Bourgeois basically dared them to oust him, which I don’t think really helps the cause of women’s ordination (if anything can help it but the passage of about a hundred years).
What about the power to “bind and loose” (as understood by the Catholic Church)?
November 19th, 2012 | 6:34 pm
It’s funny that you think 100 years will see women ordained when 2000 years has not. A church may ordain women in 100 years, but it will not be the one holy apostolic Church
November 19th, 2012 | 9:21 pm
From Pope Benedict’s Holy Thursday Chrism Mass:
“Recently a group of priests from a European country issued a summons to disobedience, and at the same time gave concrete examples of the forms this disobedience might take, even to the point of disregarding definitive decisions of the Church’s Magisterium, such as the question of women’s ordination, for which Blessed Pope John Paul II stated irrevocably that the Church has received no authority from the Lord. Is disobedience a path of renewal for the Church? ”
Seems pretty clear.
November 19th, 2012 | 10:06 pm
“I am no expert on the arguments against ordaining women, but what I know does not seem to be all that convincing. I would like to hear Benedict on the matter rather than John Paul II. ”
And yet, with that admission you cannot even imagine that the issue isn’t any deficiency of arguments against, rather the absence of an argument in favor thereof (other than theological neophilia).
November 20th, 2012 | 12:08 am
I like the collage behind his head in the picture, made with Elmer’s glue and felt, thumbtacked to the wall. It is of the “People without Faces” genre of liturgical art.
November 20th, 2012 | 9:25 am
I found it sad but predictable that my estranged brother turned his attention inward, toward remaking the Church in his own image –away from his longtime focus upon US foreign policy– right around the time Obama entered the Oval Office. But the ‘progressive’ members of the Church have always been selective in their indignation, seasonal in their Gospel, and ideological in their faith. What should be a prophetic voice has become an echo; what should be a ‘leaven’ has become a rubber-stamp. When it comes to issues approved by the secular left they wrap themselves in the mantle of Franz Jagerstatter; but when, for example, the State intrudes upon traditional faith and society, they don the uniform of Vidkun Quisling. Is it any wonder our numbers are in such decline, that few would follow such an uncertain trumpet?
November 20th, 2012 | 9:54 am
Roy Bourgeois was given every chance – and more – to demonstrate obedience to the vocation he took vows to uphold. His dismissal to the priesthood is a sad occasion, but an overdue one.
We doubt this will cause him to change his mind, or that of any of his progressive supporters at NCR. They’re not convinced because, for the most part, they really won’t listen. But failing that, they could at least ponder the rapid disintegration of Christian denominations that have embraced ordaining women. Judge them by their fruits, as would Gamaliel. You will find them wanting.
November 20th, 2012 | 9:55 am
It’s funny that you think 100 years will see women ordained when 2000 years has not.
Chris,
Having gone to Catholic elementary school in the 1950s and been taught the nearly 2000-year-old Catholic position on the Jews, I would never have guessed that it would change so dramatically in my lifetime. Likewise the Catholic position on freedom of religion. And if you read the article Woman in the hundred-year-old online Catholic Encyclopedia, I think you may agree that the attitude of the Church has changed so much in the past hundred years that it is impossible to predict what it will be in another hundred:
November 20th, 2012 | 9:57 am
Hello David Nickol,
“I am no expert on the arguments against ordaining women, but what I know does not seem to be all that convincing.”
Well, for starters, have you read Inter Insigniores, issued by the CDF under Paul VI’s imprature?
The power to bind and loose does have limits, and it does not extend to overturning the teachings or precedents of Christ.
November 20th, 2012 | 10:15 am
Hello David Nickol,
“Having gone to Catholic elementary school in the 1950s and been taught the nearly 2000-year-old Catholic position on the Jews, I would never have guessed that it would change so dramatically in my lifetime. Likewise the Catholic position on freedom of religion.”
Might I suggest that the nature of the priesthood entails irreformable dogmatic teaching in a way that our interreligious attitude toward the Jews, or the relationship between Church and state, do not?
Much less was changed in Nostra Aetate about the Church’s position on the Jews than meets the eye, in any case. And as for Dignitatis Humanae, it explicitly affirmed that the Council left “untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.”
If you think otherwise, it turns out that you may have something in common with the SSPX after all.
November 20th, 2012 | 10:44 am
David, I’m sure you’re aware that the Catholic Encyclopedia is not an exercise of the Magisterium, whereas the doctrine of a male-only priesthood is.
It may be that women have a greater role to play in the temporal governance of the Church. However, they must find another way to do so aside from the priesthood.
November 20th, 2012 | 7:50 pm
Hey, David.
A good book to read re: the Church’s teaching on this issue is Sara Butler’s The Catholic Priesthood and Women. She was asked by John Cardinal O’Connor to write it even though at the time she was sympathetic to women’s ordination and thought it best that he ask someone else to do the project. He persisted and while doing the research she came to see why the Church reserves priestly ordination to males. The book has a great bibliography, too.
November 21st, 2012 | 9:40 am
Elizabeth,
Thanks! I always appreciate book recommendations.
November 21st, 2012 | 1:15 pm
Maybe I am too simpleminded, but I don’t understand why people find it so hard to believe that God didn’t just happen to create us male and female. Assuming He did have specific reasons for it, then is it hard to think the roles we assume in the Church are part of it? And do folks really think that men willing to die for the faith were too chicken to ordain women for fear of cultural backlash?
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact