WOMEN'S ROLE IN THE CHURCH
DID YOU KNOW...?
DID YOU KNOW...?
Here are the bulletins, I encourage everyone to look at them. At the bottom there appeared this:
"Prompted by an awareness of these and many other facts, four members of STM decided for their final Diocesan 2008 Lay Ecclesial Ministry Program's project, to investigate women's roles in historical, biblical, and theological traditions of our Church."
The bulletin also included contact information for those who wanted the full paper. So I contacted the authors and received the paper. Here is the paper I received. The paper is a little lengthy, but from the thesis alone (page 21) you can get an idea of what this paper was trying to accomplish:
"Biblical, historical and theological considerations converge not only to allow, but indeed, to insist that women serve as full partners with men in all dimensions of the church’s life and ministry. To categorically deny women the opportunity to obey the Spirit places us in the position not only of acting unjustly toward women but, more important, of standing in opposition to the work of the sovereign Holy Spirit."
If it wasn't enough that the paper, which was advertised in a Catholic church's bulletin, was making a case for women ordination, it becomes quite clear from some of the sources used and directly quoted to compile the paper (page 66), such as the womenpriests.org website. Their agenda is right in the name of their website. It doesn't get more obvious than that.
Now you might be wondering what the LEMP program is. It stands for the Diocese's own Lay Ecclesial Ministry Program.(L.E.M.P.) In addition to training lay ecclesial ministers, it is also the required first two years of the five year program for becoming a permanent deacon.
Now the Holy Father has spoken clearly on the topic of women ordination. In Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis he states:
“I declare that 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.”
And in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis Responsum Ad Dubium, Pope Benedict XVI , then Cardinal Ratzinger and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, clarified and confirmed this by stating:
Dubium: Whether the teaching that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, which is presented in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis to be held definitively, is to be understood as belonging to the deposit of faith.
Responsum: In the affirmative.
Responsum: In the affirmative.
So who was responsible for allowing this heresy to take place? According to the LEMP website, the person directly responsible for all academic aspects is Felix Just, S.J., Ph.D. Well, he is actually a priest but for some reason they dropped his title of "Fr." or "Rev." He had to approve this paper as a final project for the LEMP program. He not only allowed this heresy to be written but to be propagated to the whole community at St. Thomas More. So who is Fr. Just? Well, here is his bio from his website:
"Fr. Just is the Director of Biblical Education at the Loyola Institute for Spirituality in Orange, CA. He is also the Academic Coordinator of the Lay Ecclesial Ministry Program and the Deacon Formation Program for the Diocese of Las Vegas. After receiving his Ph.D. in New Testament Studies from Yale University, he taught at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles), the University of San Francisco, and Santa Clara University. He is past director of the Center for Religion and Spirituality at LMU. He now regularly teaches courses, gives public lectures, and leads biblically-based days of prayer, parish missions, and retreats. Fr. Just also maintains a large internationally recognized website of “Catholic Resources"."
I would think that with a PhD and teaching appointments in various notable institutes of higher education he would have read the Pope's Apostolic Letter stating that the Catholic Church has no authority to ordain women. So either he is so ill-informed that he should not be leading this type of program in the dioceses of Las Vegas, or he is purposely allowing heresy. I pray for the former because the latter is the work of the devil.
The Bishop was made aware of all of this. He neither made a statement in the St. Thomas More bulletin, clarifying the Church's position on women ordination, nor did he remove Fr. Just from his position in the LEMP program.
I am one of the authors of that paper and it was placed in the bulletin to enlighten people to the roles of women in the early church. It is my belief that the Vatican is the hetetic in this ordination controversy. The position of the Vatican is totally contrary to the teachings of Jesus. First of all, Jesus did not ordain anyone, ordination is a "man" made position. Jesus, on the contrary, harshly warned the Priests, Scribes, an Pharisees of his time because they were "blind guides". They were hard of heart, just as the Vatican is today. Jesus did not come to create a new religion to be named after himself. He did not come to create a whole new set of Scribes and Pharisees. He came to show us a way to live with one another in love, compassion, foriveness, and acceptance. The current priest scandal has made it abundently clear that a change in the ordination process is long over due. If Jesus were to be asked today if he would allow women to be priests in the Catholic Church, I am sure that his answer would be "only if they want to be priests".
ReplyDeleteThe current priests shortage and the problem of Roman Catholics leaving the church in droves is an indication that the Roman Church has failed in its mission to spread the love of Jesus.
I don't know who you are, you have hidden your identity in your blog, so I can only assume that you are afraid and you are hiding behind the devil's tail. I pray for you that you will learn the love of Jesus. Instead of spouting the rules of the Roman Church, why not visit a blogspot that is committed to the love of Jesus; that is committed to helping others to see the love of Jesus rather than the "hate" of the Roman Church. The Roman Church could be a great organization if the Vatican would take the spotlight off of themselves and place it where it belongs on Jesus Christ. Visit my blogspot.
letyourlifesing.blogspot.com.
By the way there is more than one Catholic Church. That is why I have left the Roman Church for the National Catholic Church and will be ordained in January as a priest; a woman priest. May Jesus show you the way to love.
I think you'd better give your intellect an upgrade and recognize that narrow, frozen scholarship on the issue of women in scripture and the church's dread of women on the altar are cultural, self-justifying positions. Think Galileo.
ReplyDeleteI read the paper and it squares with current scholarship regarding the early church's position and practice on presiders at Eucharist and the place of women as presiders at the celebration of Eucharist.
ReplyDeleteThis scholarship is relatively new, and not favored by those who want only self-justifying, perpetuation of the status quo. The church's gradual development of "ordination" was just that----a church (men) invention.
Fr. Just is a learned man, who has a tradition of respect for honest scholarship.
ReplyDeleteBecause something is new should not cause fear; open your mind to well-supported evidence.
Why are we all surprised at the prevalence of feminists pushing the absurdity of women priests. The Church is in serious danger of being overrun by the ideology of feminism and its four headed beast of contraception, abortion, homosexuality and pornagraphy. Sadly, the Church hieirachy in America has done little to mount a serious defense of western civilization against feminisms continuous and multi-faceted attacks. Over the past 50-years the very ideology of feminism has become ingrained in in the minds of many church prelates so much so that they have become unwitting cooperators in the destruction of the family, society and the institution of the priesthood. One needn't be a philosophy major to understand the conenction between feminism and homosexuality. The depravity of homosexuality follows as the logical consequence to the acceptance of feminism.
ReplyDeleteFor this topic, please refer to THEOLOGY OF THE BODY, excellently and truthfully presented by Christopher West/ The GIFT FOUNDATION website has a CD set of 12 for 10.00. (I am not an employee, affilliate or anything of the sort.
ReplyDeleteThis JPII's teaching on sexuality will clarify the holiness of celibacy and the priesthood, as well as the irreplicable role of women in the church. Women can't be priests and priests can't be women. Holy Obedience is what Christ taught... are we willing to follow? Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. Amen.
Church Militant,
ReplyDeleteI know this is a very old post about an even older paper from the LEMP, but it seems to me that this is the only place where this situation has been addressed and is the only place on the internet where these four authors' work has been published to a wider audience. Since one of the authors, Bill McManus, has since been ordained a deacon, and that his association with this poorly researched, poorly reasoned and poorly written little piece of heresy (yes I read the whole thing - it was painful) is a source of embarrassment for him and the Diocese, it would be charitable of you to offer Deacon McManus the opportunity to publish on your website a repudiation of this nonsense. He is assigned to St. Thomas More, so I doubt you would have any trouble reaching him.
As an ordained deacon in the Church, I'm sure that Deacon McManus would be anxious to distance himself from his prior indiscretion and confirm that he believes all that the Catholic Church holds to be true, including the teaching that it is impossible to ordain women to the priesthood.