Bucks County Herald – July 29, 2010

Vatican Pedofile Women Priests

Dear Friends,

Good morning. When I read the New York Times story about the Vatican revising its sex-abuse laws and the furor it caused, I thought about Alice O’Neill. The Montgomery County Catholic was excommunicated because she attended the ordination of seven women. I wrote about her last year (Dec. 10). “Keep the faith, change the Church,” her car’s bumper sticker says.

Here are the crucial NYT paragraphs, which addressed the Vatican’s recent edict.

“The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia,” the NYT article began (July 16). “The decision to link the issues appears to reflect the determination of embattled Vatican leaders to resist any suggestion that pedophilia within the priesthood can be addressed by ending the celibacy requirement or by allowing women to become priests.”

The NYT included these paragraphs. “The Catholic Church through its long and constant teaching holds that the ordination has been, from the beginning, reserved to men, a fact which cannot be changed despite changing times,” U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Arch-bishop Donald Wuerl stated.

I spoke to two Catholic priests about the brouhaha. One was critical, the other was not. Father Bernie O’Connor is the President of DeSales University in Center Valley. He was quick to remind me that the Vatican had issued a follow up story about the new sex-abuse rules. “The Vatican is not equating pedophilia to the ordination of women,” he told me.

But another saw the story differently.

“The Vatican is shooting itself in the foot,” one of my Catholic priest friends began. “I was surprised because it just wasn’t very smart. No matter what you say, you look horrible.”

“It’s like waving a red flag at a bull,” he told me. “You shouldn’t be surprised when the bull charges.”

“I was surprised [by the Vatican’s new rules about sex-abuse],” he continued. “It was terrible public relations. The Vatican has its back up. It issued this deliberately.

“ But you won’t get many priests to say this for the record,” he added. “The problem is that most will be critical because it’s a matter of fairness [to women]. The Church needs as many friends as we can muster. There’s a gulf between what is newsworthy and what is real.”

I asked the priest whether his parishoners were upset with the Vatican’s rules which appear to put pedophilia in the same category as ordaining women?

“There are more pressing issues than the Vatican,” he replied. “Jobs and the war in Afghanistan and Iraq…that’s what my people are concerned about. My parishioners worry about the security of their jobs…will they be let go tomorrow?

“I’m concerned about our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Still, the Vatican story is fascinating. Not being Catholic, I should probably keep my thoughts to myself. That’s what Mighty Betsy advises. But you readers know that I can’t help myself.

The priests that I’ve known agree that celibacy rules will change long before women’s ordination. Celibacy in the priesthood is a recent rule when you consider several millenniums. “The Synod of Pavia insists on celibacy of higher clergy,” the Timetables of History states in its section about the year 1022. You can conclude that it took several hundred more years before the lower clergy followed suit. Further, Catholic priests in the Ukraine marry to this day…with the Vatican’s approval.

But I stray.

Is the Vatican out of touch with its parishioners? “For more than two decades, polls have shown that large majorities of American Catholics favor allowing women to be ordained as priests, despite the lack of support among church leaders,” the NYT reported. “The latest poll of American Catholics by the New York Times and CBS News, released in May, showed that 59 percent favored ordaining women, while 33 percent were opposed.”

Will the Vatican change its rules about celibacy and women’s ordination? Time will tell of course. Elderly men run the Catholic Church hierarchy. The College of Cardinals is filled with men in their 80’s.

A woman who was excommunicated because she presented herself for ordination viewed the Vatican’s decision with venom. “The Church’s male hierarchy was persisting in its folly that women are second-class in order to preserve its power,” Eileen DeFransisco stated in the same NYT article.

As Alice O’Neill told me last year, “The Catholic Church should either ordain women or stop baptizing them!”

Sincerely,

Charles Meredith