mocking women is funny. wait, no it isn’t.
I happened upon this article about women who are ordaining themselves as Catholic priests, completely by accident. I was researching Jean-Baptiste Dumas, who was a famous Catholic and scientist, and there was a link to this article from one of the sources I was using. The link also included this parody of the event, which is so bizarrely specific that many of the references are lost on those who aren’t completely engrossed in this controversy. I got the basic gist of it, but it frankly isn’t a very effective metaphor.
I’m always surprised that Catholic dogma really still thinks that women are men’s property, and subordinate in every sense. But what surprises me even more is the fact that women still choose to be Catholic in spite of this. But the problem with dogma is that you have to either accept it or reject it, or else it loses all of its power. These women are trying to reject a major part of Catholic dogma while still operating within the framework of that dogma. They are not basing their arguments on Catholic values, but on secular ones.
If you are going to commit yourself to every word of the Bible, you really can’t ignore the misogyny. To try to make Catholicism fit a secularly-derived conception of what is right completely misses the point; by accepting that secular morality is the more just of the two, you must necessarily reject Catholic morality, and you can’t really do that if you’re going to be a priest.
I agree that women shouldn’t be priests, and neither should gay men, and not because I think they have done something wrong by being women or being gay. But the Church is so fundamentally prejudiced against women and gay people, that having either one in a position of power is obviously contrary to both the aims of the person and those of the organization.
If a woman managed to rise to power in a club called “Women are Evil and Should Be Controlled,” she isn’t advancing the cause of her fellow women. Quite the opposite, in fact: she is becoming a tool of that same unjust organization, an enemy to herself as much as to her fellow women.
It seems obvious to me that if you think a group you belong to discriminates against your kind, you leave the group, rather than take a role that allows you to continue passing that message of discrimination to others. But tradition, especially personal or familial tradition, is a difficult foe.
science triumphs again! almost.
Today’s op-ed piece in the New York Times makes a good point about the whole stem cell debate, namely that is no different from the many, many times that scientific breakthroughs have challenged church teachings in the past. As Ms. Blum points out, science eventually won out in these debates as the more rational decision. What she fails to mention, however, is whether the Church had the power to actually stop what it saw as immoral scientific experiments. Based on the example of Edward Jenner, it sounds as though their only weapon was censure.
Eventually, of course, even the Church came to accept innoculations as useful and necessary. But we aren’t dealing with the Church in this instance, at least not directly. Though his decision is backed by Christian leaders, President Bush is the one blocking the path for advances in stem cell research. And unfortunately, he does have power.
As I have said before, the danger of religion comes not from the beliefs themselves, but from the actions predicated on those beliefs. George Bush claims that he answers to a higher power. The truth of the matter is that, by deferring to the Bible, he is answering to no one at all.
