Is the male-only priesthood a discipline or essential to the nature of being a priest? Sr. Vassa (again unflinchingly taking up a contentious topic by climbing up the ladder to the highest platform and then jumping into the deep end head first) dives right in and says there is no reason beyond personal preference to not have female clergy. You know, when people ask me about women in priesthood, they say, 'Sister, why can't women be priests?' And I say, 'Women CAN be priests. We don't WANT them to be priests.' Because you see, God can do anything, and the Church, by divine authority, uh, can do anything, but, the Church doesn't want to - and that's a legitimate reason. What I don't like is when we TRY to pretend that there are other reasons for this, because it's legitimate not to want something, and there are reasons not to want this - right? - but, we shouldn't pretent that there's some... reason, that, for example, the maleness...
How is it possible to hold a council of bishops including a large proportion of either defrocked or consecrated-by-defrocked bishops? Doesn't there have to be some kind of canonical step prior to this?
ReplyDeleteClearly canons don't seem to matter to these people.
DeleteJust like canons didn't mean much to the Serbians, Greeks, Georgians, etc...when they decided on their own to become autocephalous.
DeleteAutocephaly is taken or recognized. Nobody recognizes the USA's autocephaly, because its Church is young and fractured and the US is a secular propositional nation, not a traditional nation-state or empire (some might debate this). The Churches in Serbia and Georgia have sufficient gravitas to be regarded as autocephalous. Nobody seriously questions their status.
DeleteCyprus, Jerusalem and Alexandria are autocephalous because of historical import, like Constantinople. Antioch is autocephalous, and floats around between Damascus and Beirut after being evicted from Turkey.
Ukraine is a provincial area that's existed as an independent country only since 1991 and previously was passed around between empires. It's one of the most corrupt places on earth and would probably be better off under Russian administration. Not fertile ground for a Church that wants to be taken seriously as a Patriarchate.
Well Georgia relieved its autocephaly in the 5th century from Antioch and there's no indication that it self-declared uncanonically. Likewise for the Patriarchate of Pec (Serbia) in the 14th century from Constantinople. That Moscow and Constantinople uncanonically recended, respectively, Georgia's and Serbia's autocephaly in the 18th and 19th centuries is neither here nor there. Greece did take autocephaly into it's own hands, but it's bishops were not at the time defrocked or consecrated by defrocked bishops. This is before we get to the self-consecrators at the origins of the UAOC.
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