Heading toward Excommunication

From Pittsburgh:

On July 31, [Joan Clark Houk]...will join 11 other female candidates in an ordination ceremony aboard a rented boat here -- the first ceremony of its kind in the United States. Eight are seeking to become women priests and the other four, deacons.

The event, a public challenge to the Roman Catholic church's teaching that only baptized men can be priests, will disturb traditional believers.

It will only disturb "traditional Catholics" if the Church fails to publicly and swiftly declare that these 'disturbed' individuals are excommunicated.

Mrs. Houk believes the best way to spur the church to ordain women is to violate what she believes is an unjust law.

"The church has to take a stand for women ... that they are the image of God and are to be respected and treated on an equal, human level. This is really why I have to do what I am doing," she said in a recent interview.

So she "believes", not what the Church believes and professes, but what her own erroneous intellect suggests. This is not much different than that position of Father Lucian Pulvermacher who has declared himself to be Pope Pius XIII or of the other 18-20 other self-appointed popes in the world, nor is it any different than any of those who choose to reject other teachings of the Church, either because of pride or from have malformed consciences.

"I believe the ordination will be valid and part of the apostolic succession," said Mrs. Houk, who earned her master's in divinity on a full scholarship at the University of Notre Dame in 1996.

Maybe she learned this from the good Fr. Richard McBrien, another whose rejection of numerous Church teachings is without question, yet who has yet to be disciplined.

"We do not promise obedience to our bishop. We promise obedience to Jesus and the Gospel," Mrs. Houk said, adding that each candidate will receive a glass chalice engraved with her name and the date.

She and others promise obedience to themselves alone - to claim obedience to Christ is to perpetrate a falsehood since our Lord, himself, said to his Apostles, "Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me." 9Luke 10:16)

She and her cohorts are openly and publicly rejecting our Lord, yet claim, in union with and deceived by Satan, to be ardently following in the footsteps of Christ. How sad and pitiable these confused souls are.

But such is result of a failure of Church leaders to adequately discipline those who promote heresy and dissent. By failing to act against the venemous and deadly poison of dissent, heterodoxy and heresy, some bishops have permitted the wholesale death and destruction of untold numbers of souls. Many, lacking the courage necessary to defend Christ and His Church, are more concerned with being "liked" than with being spirtual fathers.

May God grant our bishops the courage necessary to address these issues quickly and decisively so as to spare the faithful from being misled further from Christ's Church. May God grant them the ability to understand that authentic love for the children of God demands that truth cannot be compromised and that discipline is required when dialogue fails to address unbridled disobedience.