God Is Not 3 Guys

Half  the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn has more practical suggestions for transforming the world than any other book I know. It is painful to read. The first chapters are so packed with excruciating information, “the brutality inflicted routinely on women and girls in much of the world,” I could stand to read only small chunks at a time. Its detailed evidence of sexual violence against women and girls—honor killings, bride beating, bride burning, genital cutting, forced prostitution, rape as a tactic of war, acid to disfigure, and selling of 7- and 8-year-old girls into sexual slavery—tells us that gender violence and discrimination is the paramount human rights problem of our time. Indeed, it tells us that nothing would do more to ameliorate the problems of the world than raising the status of women. I say it’s painful, but you will read Half  the Sky easily, with absorbed attention, because thes...

We got into a discussion about church-going at my writers group meeting. Like Jean ( scroll down 2 posts ), my writer friends are comfortable calling themselves “cafeteria Catholics” and the Presbyterian-Lutheran talks about “Presbolutheranism.” Another self-description I heard is “free thinkers.” Most of us continue going to church despite having grown past the childhood beliefs taught in church-talk. We do it because we have a spiritual orientation and Catholic services are “home.” Among my closest Catholic friends and acquaintances, what a priest, bishop, or pope says gets the same critical scrutiny as the words of a politician. My son and daughter left the church during their last years in high school, and I never had any qualms about it because I could see that their spiritual journey didn’t require it. In fact, my respect for them and for other young people rises if they ask intelligent questions about religion and leave the Church. But once in a while I meet parents who feel ...

When I was in third grade I wanted to be a third grade teacher. In fourth grade I wanted to be a fourth grade teacher, and so on up the grades. The top grades of high school were as far as I dared go with these aspirations. College was a must for me in spite of the fact that my oldest siblings weren’t allowed to go to high school. In retrospect, my matriculating for college seems almost unbelievable. Where did that daring come from? At the time I couldn’t imagine life without college; it would have been the end of life for me. Young people will not understand what a big deal this was. It was 1961, before the counter-cultural revolution; the only post-college careers for women were teaching and social work. In my totally-Catholic world, the only women in college got there by joining a religious order. My dad, a farmer born shortly after the turn to the twentieth century, was certain that his children didn’t need more education than he did—eight grades. Because he did well, didn’t he? ...

I obtained permission from Judi to quote her. Jeanette, It was great to read the article about Mary [ in previous post ]. I have heard that we have women presiding at masses somewhere here in Milwaukee. I am open to male or female and never quite understood how we got to where we are. We had popes with children, priests with children, and yet some say we need to go back to the early church. Which early church was that? Judith Kittleson Kearney Judi asks a shrewd question. Going back to the way things were might mean going back to a church so corrupt that Martin Luther was forced to take a stand against church authority. It might mean having 3 popes or having popes direct wealth to their children or having popes with armies. It might mean most priests openly having sexual partners and having children. The Church didn’t get serious about celibacy until after the first millennium. Campaigns against women have risen and fallen throughout Church history but always there were the underly...

Our womanpriest community, Mary Magdalene, First Apostle was covered by the St. Cloud Times today. The article does a good job of laying out the issue to people who know nothing or very little about it. I like the quotations he chose to include by Mary Smith, our pastor, and Kelly Doss, one of our planning group. In previous posts I’ve refuted the hierarchy’s false, tired, sometimes amusing, arguments against womenpriests. The funniest argument against ordaining women is explained by Florian: Women are not valid "matter" for the sacrament of holy orders to begin with, at least in the eyes of the church. So, ordination of women priests is not valid, even if "ordained" by bishops who are intending to properly administer the sacrament, because no sacrament takes place anyway without the proper matter. The valid and proper matter must be the penis. The hierarchy claims that our Catholic tradition does not include women’s ordination. Wrong. Archaeology reveals th...

The history of Christmas should make us ponder. Christians had no Christmas for more than 200 years after Jesus was born. The origin of the feast had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus because no one knew when he was born. Bible scholars inform us of contradictions and impossibilities in the biblical accounts contributing to the myth, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (the authors actually are unknown, but that’s another story). Rev. E. J. Niles, a scholar quoted in Unity magazine, says, I love how Joseph was said to take his pregnant wife Mary 94 miles to Bethlehem to fulfill a type of civic duty (a census) that most women would never have even participated in during those times. Also factual nonsense are the genealogies in Matthew and Luke, which disagree with each other, as do their implied dates of Jesus’ birth. Quirinius was governor after Herod died, not before. But we don’t need Bible scholars to tell us that the manger myth lacks facts; any intelligent reader can infer its d...

Back to being sheep , December 8, 2011 The overthrow of ICEL The new Mass language produces more than a few ripples of indignation, but only in people who know what took place. Ordinary people in the pews, unaware of the history preceding this change and oblivious to the implications of language, accept it without question. All Catholics who attend Mass, however, will be affected negatively, especially those unaware of what happened. A reader asked me to comment on the new translation, and I am happy to comply, but first I expose the conspiracy. Yes, conspiracy. An International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) produced its first Vatican II-mandated English translation of the liturgy in 1973 and continued its work to improve the first hastily-wrought translation. Liturgical, biblical, and linguistic experts—even poets—from around the world contributed to a new translation, finished in 1998, that focused on beauty of phrase while accurately translating the sense of the ...