Friday, July 16, 2010

Women Clergy as bad as Child Rape Sez Vatican

Yep, that's right, allowing a woman to be a priest is as bad as raping children, or so says the Catholic church. I guess that means if they catch any ordainers, they'll just move them around instead of punishing them or bothering the proper authorities about it.

6 comments:

GeorgeG said...

>> "allowing a woman to be a priest is as bad as raping children, or so says the Catholic church."

I find it ironic that the article you link to links to another Guardian article which talks about spin.

"One thing in favour of organised religion is that it could be used to to drive spin doctors insane. Suppose you were charged with PR for the Vatican, and learned of an upcoming revision of the code of Canon Law, which would make plain that child abuse is classified as amongst the gravest offences a priest can commit – that's the good news. Then you read on, and discover that the same revision will add to this list of dreadful offences the attempted ordination of women. Really.

One can see how this happened. The serious offences here being classified are divided into moral and sacramental ones; roughly speaking those which anyone might commit, and those which only a priest can, by virtue of his office. So the moral offences include child abuse, the use of child pornography, and so forth. The sacramental offences are things like violating the seal of the confessional, desecrating the eucharistic Host – and taking part in a ceremony where a woman is ordained. The sacramental offences are only of concern to the Catholic hierarchy, whereas the moral ones are almost certain to be crimes under the civil law as well. But the important thing from the point of a Vatican lawyer is that the most serious of all these cases, of whatever sort, are dealt with in Rome.

Obviously, if what you are trying to do is to maintain a functioning priesthood, then ritual or sacramental crimes are just as capable of destroying it as moral ones. So from that perspective it is makes perfect sense to have a list which combines the two, and I don't think (though I may be wrong) that any official Catholic would maintain that assisting at the ordination service of a woman is morally comparable to child abuse. It's just that both are absolutely incompatible with the Catholic priesthood.

Still, it's a conjunction that really isn't going to play very well in the outside world. A body which had any grasp of public relations would publish the revisions in two batches."

Miranda said...

ScienceAvenger, you do realize, don't you, that GeorgeG was slamming you and your spin, not the article's? The bold words above, (though not the clever "though I may be wrong"), represent the non-spin version.

ScienceAvenger said...

Since I didn't spin anything, and since his post was a conjecture attached to a bunch of religious babble, I really couldn't be less interested.

David said...

So, you are not interested in any distinctions that excuse the people you are complaining about? Only distinctions that - in your mind - condemn them?

If you are not interested why did you post?

ScienceAvenger said...

I'm not interested in semantic games or pragmatic political arguments that try to excuse the Church's position. It's preposterous to have ordination of women priests and child molestation even remotely near each other morally, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

GeorgeG said...

A July 16 Reuters story
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66E2C620100716
quoted Monsignor Charles Scicluna's clarification: "Scicluna, an official in the Vatican's doctrinal department, said there was no attempt to make women's ordination and pedophilia comparable crimes under canon...law....While sexual abuse was a 'crime against morality,' the attempt to ordain a woman was a 'crime against a sacrament.'"