by Susie
A man who wears a gold dress warns priests they should support whatever he says without question.
There were no laws about clerical celibacy until the 12th century, when church officials drew up such restrictions – mostly because they were worried about the legal claims of priests’ bastard children. If the church was wrong before they made those rules, who’s to say they’re not wrong now?
One of my aunts was complaining about women wanting to be priests. “Jesus only picked men to be apostles,” she told me. “Well, Aunt Aggie, if you really want to be accurate, Jesus only picked Jews to be apostles. So maybe you should have to be a Jew to be a priest.” She was speechless.
Aunt Aggie’s dead now, and soon the rest of the people who think like her will be gone, too. So if Benedict wants a smaller, purer church, he’s going to get one.
I think the ‘baby boomers’ who grew up going to parochial schools with nuns are the last of the ‘cultural Catholics’. I see this in my family, my nieces get their kids baptized and maybe other sacraments, but church just doesn’t influence their lives at all. I can’t imagine where the Church will be in 20 years. I think they’ll have a lot of real estate they can’t maintain. Oh well. They had their chance with Vatican II and blew it.
Yeah, I grew up as one of the “cultural Catholics” as mary puts it. Starting around the 4th grade I began to realize something was really fishy with the theology. For one thing, the nuns were telling us that only Catholics would be qualified to get to heaven, which pissed me off(most of my cousins and close friends were not Catholic because the tuition was prohibitive).
And then we were taught that the Pope had the final word, that he couldn’t make a mistake on issues of dogma and theology. When I first heard that, I was like, “Oh shit, I must already BE in heaven if this guy can’t make a mistake”.
If Aunt Aggie was still with us, you could have added the tidbit that in the early days of the Church, when the Apostles and others fanned out beyond what is sometimes called “The Holy Land” to convert people to Christianity, non-Jews were required to convert to Judaism first before they could become Christians.
So which came first, the boys only club or Pope Joan?