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Friday, April 10, 2020

Women deacons again


- the risen Jesus greets Mary M

I see that the pope has created another second commission to study the idea of women as deacons (the first one created in 2016). In case you haven't noticed, commissions are where topics the pope doesn't like go to die (think of his sex abuse commission).

The members of this new commission seem mostly set against women as deacons and I don't doubt they will decide against it. After all, if you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a glass of milk, and if you let women be deacons, they will want to be priests too.

This is one of the reasons I've given up on the Catholic church - the way women are treated. It's not just church leaders who are to blame. They couldn't get away with this if Catholics themselves didn't accept the inequality. I've known Catholics who expect fairness and equality for everyone in all other realms of life, but who just shrug about the church's discrimination, saying "Oh, it will happen someday, probably in our lifetimes". Justice delayed is justice denied.

Thought experiment. Would you be so sanguine if the church wouldn't let people of different races be priests? Jesus didn't pick any Asians to be his apostles, so that must mean God doesn't want Asians to be priests in the contemporary church. No kidding - that's the official argument against women priests (the actual reason appears to be sexism). And then there's the condescension. Pope Francis has made a ton of objectionable remarks about women (Pope Francis' woman problem). Would it be ok with you if he spouted racial tropes instead of gender ones?

As we near Easter, I recall that the first person the risen Jesus revealed himself to was a woman, and the first person he deputized to spread the good word of his resurrection was a woman. The church has utterly failed to exemplify his faith in women.

1 Comments:

Blogger Jana said...

Hey Crystal, your phone has been busy for an hour -- are you okay?
Jana

5:47 PM  

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