“If we truly love our neighbor, we shall without doubt tell him the Good News of Jesus. But equally, if we truly love our neighbor, we shall not stop there.”
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, while he was a senior official for Pope John Paul II, envisioned a leaner, meaner church, one with conservative doctrine and compliant faithful. Now that he is Pope Benedict XVI, his dream is coming true.
Catholic women priests are an oxymoron for the Vatican. It considers them automatically excommunicated before the holy oil is dry on their hands. Other Catholics accept them as sacramental ministers and are delighted with the innovation. Still, others, myself included, want far deeper structural changes in the Catholic Church such that priesthood loses its baked-on charm and ministry becomes the expected task of adult members. This is an important theological conversation that the Vatican wishes would go away. Memo to them: it is just starting.
This Sunday, an 80-year-old woman in Ireland, Jennifer Sleeman, won’t be attending church. She hopes that other Catholic women in Ireland will join her: “Stay at home and pray for change.”
While Protestant churches like the Presbyterian Church USA have their annual gatherings in the summer, the institutional Roman Catholic Church, with no such meetings to worry about, uses the season to issue documents from on high. According to
For progressives in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the wider Christian church and society at large, the vote was a thrilling victory after decades of struggle and setback. For conservatives, the vote signaled a decisive break with scripture and tradition and called the orthodoxy and orthopraxy of the this denomination into question. Almost one year later, we can take a step back to consider what happened in Minneapolis and to map some of the trajectories of this historic vote.
