Where are we coming from? This Invitation to Catholic Men to apologise to the Women of the Church
came as a spontaneous reaction to an article about a religious sister
in the USA who was barred by her bishop from any longer teaching in the
diocese. "After serving as a voice for justice for 40 years in the
Archdiocese of Cincinnati and beyond, Sister of Charity Louise Akers
has been told by Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk to publicly
disassociate herself from the issue of women’s ordination," the article
said. (See references to these articles below***) In spite of
her long years of service and effective leadership in the diocese,
because she was supportive of the idea of women being ordained priests
she was silenced. In her response she declared that women's ordination is a justice issue. At
the time this struck me as clearly true. We have been unjust to women.
As long as we exclude women from certain roles in the church we are
oppressing them. To treat them as human beings who are less than men,
less competent, less honourable, less than equal, is to perpetrate a grave injustice against them. In every area of society the world over the principle is accepted that women must have equal opportunity with men in all domains. Only in the Catholic Church are women excluded from leadership by prejudice encased in law, in doctrine, and in our catholic culture. In all
honesty, trying to accept that the Church must be correct in this, I
went along with it most of my life until that moment when I realised
this simple truth. It is a matter of justice. My response to the dawning of this awareness was to admit my blindness, and immediately to post an apology on the website Catholica. Not surprisingly a number of people agreed with the idea, and asked: Where do we sign? A little later I assembled a team of three men and three women to clarify my original idea. We have put a lot of work into making this statement both clear and genuine, and now we are in a position to invite catholic men everywhere to recognise the injustice we are all involved in, and as a necessary first step to say sorry. As one person has responded on reading the Apology: "I don't
think it goes far enough. Discrimination spreads its tentacles very
widely. The discrimination women are subject to in our church pales
into insignificance when viewed beside the level of violence and
exploitation suffered by women on every continent. This violence is
deeply embedded in the sin of discrimination. Our church which could
be a shining beacon of anti -discrimination to the world instead
implies that to discriminate against women and homosexuals will give
one free passage to full communion with the Church. The perceived
message then must surely be that discrimination is not only o.k. but
desirable." Clearly, discrimination is not desirable. It is a sin. It is a surprise to me every day to see the strength of feeling expressed by those who sign the petition. This is a crucial issue and a real cause of pain in the church community, and IT IS TIME to confront it. Tony Lawless.
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