God Is Not 3 Guys

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...