Wymyn "Priestesses" Challenge Tradition

Women priests challenge tradition

At 11, Kathleen Stack Kunster felt a strong pull to the priesthood. When the 61-year-old Emeryville woman was finally ordained July 31 in a riverboat ceremony in Pennsylvania she cried for an hour and a half.

How about a little arithmetic and history lesson? This woman is 61 but claims to have been called to the priesthood when she was 11...50 years ago...in 1956...Vatican II was not yet on the horizon...Latin Mass, girls wore head coverings at Mass, priestly vocations were thriving, women religious orders seemed to be growing, and we had yet to hear of such a thing as priestesses or women ministers. Yet this this woman claims to have been called to the priestesshood in 1956...The calling, needless to say, was not from God.

Sherry LaVars/Contra Costa Times
Kathleen Strack Kunstler reads along the waterfront in Emeryville.
Kunstler is risking ex-communication from the Cathlolic church
after she became ordained as a priest.

Kunster is part of a ripple of women who have decided to stop waiting for the Vatican to ordain female priests and go it on their own. Twelve women joined the priesthood with her last month.

Uhhh...no they did not join the priesthood - at least the ordained priesthood of the Catholic Church. Obviously, they joined something, but whatever it was, it was n;t Catholic.

Now, as long as you are sitting, let's read what Rebecca Rosen Lum, the writer of this article, presents to the readers as factual:

The Catholic Church has not permitted women to be ordained since the 13th century. In a 1994 papal letter, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the rule. The church "has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful."

Since the 13th century? Really...? Perhaps, the writer has chosen to dispense with fact checking, since she is simply offering as fact, that which was given bto her y the coven of priestesses.

But some scholars say they have found evidence that ordained women routinely performed sacraments up until the 13th century . Those scholars include former priest John Wijngaards, who has dedicated himself to helping women enter the priesthood.

This looks to be a perfect example of the logical fallacy known as the appeal to authority...

Wijngaards, is an Dutch theologian who left the priesthood over his "conflict of conscience with the supreme authority of the Catholic Church in Rome." Yet, he is touted as a scholar who claims to have evidence which refutes the doctrinal teachings of the Church. And it makes no difference that he started the website www.womenpriests.org. So who is it who speaks with authority in these matters, we might ask, Winjaards or the Pope? I don't recall our Lord gracing Winjaards with the charism of infallibility.

Some may wonder why the women fight so hard to belong to a church that does not want them in its highest ranks.

"That's an excellent question, and a lot of women waiting have become ordained in other faiths," largely Episcopal, said Sharon Danner, spokeswoman for the Virginia-based Women's Ordination Conference, a support organization. "That's a very common thing. Their faith is so important to them. They won't give up hope."

Faith? Faith in whom? Faith in what? Sadly, they certainly do not have the theological virtue of faith.

[Victoria] Rue said her point is not just to break into the priesthood, but to recraft the church as less hierarchical and more inclusive.

"I do not want to be part of a club that is exclusive," she said. "We are very, very concerned about returning the church to the way it was when Jesus founded it, with all people welcome at the table."

Isn't heaven exclusive? Isn't heaven hierarchical? So much for all of their intense theological training...

Anathema Sit!