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...
"Hot air" just about sums it up, I think.
ReplyDeleteThere's so much wrong with this I don't know where to start.
ReplyDeleteFive will get you ten this guy is a materialist. So why the ceremony? The water dried up ages ago, the wet skin and hair long ago replaced by new growth. There's nothing to dry up. It's nothing more than a temper tantrum by a child mad at his Father.
"I was born atheist, and they were forcing me to become Catholic."
Alrighty then, but why stop there? I was born un-vaccinated, and they forced me to get shots. I'm going to start leeching people to symbolically remove the vaccines.
Which saint was it that basically said "we don't ask kids' permission before we feed them, so why would we wait till they can choose to be baptized?"
This is somewhat of a pet topic for me. The misunderstanding about the role of parents in caring for their child by children who think parents doing their responsibility is something being done to them and not for them is all too common. I posted on it way back here:
ReplyDeletehttp://byztex.blogspot.com/2009/04/story-of-de-baptism.html
To quote from Schmemann:
If the Orthodox Church remained alien to the long Western debate on infant versus adult Baptism, it is because she, in the first place, never accepted the reduction of faith to "personal faith" alone which made that debate inevitable. From the Orthodox point of view, the essential question about faith in its relationship to the sacrament is: what faith, and even more precisely, whose faith? And the equally essential answer to the question is: it is Christ's faith...