Posted on 05/02/2009 7:10:09 AM PDT by Behind Liberal Lines
A woman ordained in July at a ceremony the Roman Catholic Church considers invalid will celebrate a Mass Saturday at a conference in Liverpool.
The Rev. Gabriella Velardi-Ward, a member of RC Womenpriests, an international group of Catholics who advocate women's ordination, will lead a 2:30 p.m. liturgy at the Upstate New York Call to Action conference at Le Moyne Manor in Liverpool.
The conference will also include presentations by the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, who has been criticized by the Vatican for participating at a Womenpriest ordination; and Mary Hunt, a native of Syracuse and a feminist theologian who is co-founder and co-director of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual.
The event is Call to Action's sixth statewide conference. The theme is "It's a Question of Conscience -- Re-examining Conscience and the Doctrine of Reception."
The Catholic Church has consistently taught that only men can be ordained as priests, and church officials have typically said that women participating in what the group calls ordinations automatically excommunicate themselves from the church.
Danielle Cummings, assistant chancellor and director of communications for the Syracuse Diocese, said the ceremony Velardi-Ward will lead is not a Mass since it is not celebrated by an ordained Roman Catholic priest -- a baptized male who has received the ordination validly.
"If Mass is being celebrated by a non-ordained individual, the Mass would not fulfill the Sunday obligation of Mass for Catholics," Cummings said.
Womenpriests and its supports say its ordinations are legitimate because Catholic bishops in good standing ordained their first members to become female priests and bishops.
Bob Dugan of Liverpool, a leader of the local Call to Action chapter, said the church should begin ordaining women. "They are shutting down parishes all over the country, not just in the Syracuse Diocese," said Dugan, a member of St. Lucy Church in Syracuse.
"The reason they are shutting down churches is there are not enough priests to go around," he said. "Every member of the church has been called to priestly ministry by virtue of their baptism."
Bourgeois, who has spoken in Syracuse several times, is a Maryknoll priest and the founder of the School of the Americas Watch, which hopes to close the military training school renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
Bourgeois was to talk about the School of the Americas on Friday and his support for women's ordination today.
After he preached the homily at an Aug. 9 Womenpriest ordination, the Vatican gave him 30 days to recant or be excommunicated. Bourgeois has continued to speak publicly about his support for ordaining women.
"Sexism, like racism, is a sin," he said in a letter to the Vatican. "And no matter how hard or how long we may try to justify discrimination, in the end, it is always immoral."
Dugan said Call to Action planned the woman-led service to show its support for women's ordination.
"We're not trying to provoke anything," he said. "We're trying to recognize that women are called to priesthood."
The way the Catholic Church works, is that doctrine is handled by the Pope. It is in no way a democracy. Any Catholic who does not wish to accept the Pope's authority, while intending to remain Christian, is by definition now a Protestant.
If all Scripture is given by God, which the book itself attests, why do you reject the portions in Acts and Timothy that describe the qualifications for deacons and elders, that talk about needing to be the ‘husband of one wife.” Women cannot be husbands no more than they can be fathers.
She wasn't.
...to celebrate Mass in Syracuse suburb
It won't be.
It is truly none of your business.
Published: October 16, 2003
ATLANTA—An Atlanta judge has issued a permanent injunction barring the non-Catholic “Capilla de la Fe” network of Hispanic churches from portraying itself as Catholic.
Its leaders and those speaking on behalf of the group also must inform anyone who asks that neither they nor the organization are Catholic or associated with the Catholic Church; that they are not ordained Roman Catholic priests; and that any religious ceremonies or rites they perform are not authorized by the Roman Catholic Church.
The order was issued Oct. 3 by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Alice D. Bonner. It came in response to a civil complaint lodged by the Atlanta Archdiocese and Archbishop John F. Donoghue.
Archdiocesan attorney David Brown had said in an interview Aug. 27 with The Georgia Bulletin that the group, which has a network of nine churches around North Georgia, was calling itself Catholic and misrepresenting itself to unsuspecting Hispanic people as Catholic through its use of the Mass, the sacraments, clerical dress and observance of other Roman Catholic traditions...
The malcontents want to destroy the Catholic Church just as the Anglican church was destroyed from inside. All this was done while the secular media cheered it on as an advancement into modernity.
The conference will also include presentations by the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, who has been criticized by the Vatican for participating at a Womenpriest ordination; and Mary Hunt, a native of Syracuse and a feminist theologian who is co-founder and co-director of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual.
The heretic Gabriella Velardi-Ward is a former Catholic who now has her own denomination, along with her friend, fellow heretic Roy Bourgeois. I pray that these demented people fail to lead many misguided, heretical members of their new congregation, away from the mother church. I pray that they all repent for the sake of their members, and for their own sake.
Great-- ordain a bunch of shrieking feministas and send them out the hector and scandalize unsuspecting parishes. Tell people how abortion is "a blessing." Yeah, that will solve a lot of problems. Just look at how well it has worked for the Episcopal Church and the UCC.
Any Catholic Bishop who ordained a woman priest would get booted quicker than jump-jack-flash.
People (and the liberal MSM polls) have been saying “In due time, the church will accept women priest” for years now. It’s been 2000 years and the dogmas are well entrenched....and for good reasons. To simply fold to every fad, fashion or whim and you won’t have a Catholic Church anymore.
Funny, they don’t say this for Islam. (sarc)
It is the people who are attending these fake services who ought to be ashamed. Play-acting at worship, receiving a wafer that is not the Body of Christ, as it has not been consecrated, this is worse than an ignorant non-Catholic receiving Communion because he is simply following what the others are doing. This is KNOWINGLY PERPETRATING A FRAUD, that they do it in His Name is just so bad, it breaks my heart.
One more step in the destruction of basic morality.
It was made up by the men in charge at the time and aftr Chruist was around preaching, as it has been for the last 2,000 years. What you have to decide is, if the change comes in your lifetime, will you accept it or judge the church’s decrees with your own God given brains and judgement just as I am now.
She ain’t a priest.
However, your comment about Christ's intentions and his apostles is specious.
Christ had many women disciples: the Magdalene woman, Martha, Mary, Salome, etc. He used some of them to announce the greatest news of all time (His resurrection) to his doubting and fearful male disciples.
That the women didn't get equal billing in the New Testament story tells more about the facts of society in that era and the authors than Christ's intention. In fact, St Paul lauded the Christian ministering of some women in his letters.
It was not “made up” by men. You either are not clear about, or do not believe that, Scripture is inspired by God, written through men, but given to them by God, to be written down and preserved.
Worldwide the RC Church is growing vigorously. Only in the "postchristian" West is a shortage of priests a problem. The real solution to that seems empirically to be to encourage a conservative theology from the top down. It would be devastating to give in and surrender to "progressive" elements who are committed not to the gospel but only to themselves and their self-aggrandizement.
Of course, because there are many positions of ministry that ARE open to women. Being church leaders are not. There are many kinds of ministries that women, and men who do not fit the qualifications to be church leaders, can do.
It’s not so much who he traveled with that’s the issue. It’s who he *ordained*—who he consecrated and set up as leaders of the Church. Jesus picked only men like Peter, and those men picked only men like Linus, Cletus, and Clement. Then those men picked only men. Then those men picked only men. And on and on to today.
Meanwhile nobody among all those men seemed to care about nationality. Peter was a Jew, but he ordained Clement who was a Roman. There were Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, and later on Gauls and Ethiopians. If Thomas indeed made it to India as tradition states, he probably appointed an Indian. You’d think that if there were a problem with nationality, it would have come out somewhere along the line. But it didn’t. So it must not have been a problem.
It’s Jesus’s Church, not ours, and while He gives us liberty in a number of different areas, no one ever thought, for 2000 years, that anyone had any liberty to ordain women to the priesthood. And this was, mind you, smack in the midst of pagan cultures who had priestesses, so I don’t think the opportunity wasn’t there.
“I ordained myself President and Supreme Leader of the United States.”
Are you a natural born US citizen?
There are some things that are against G_d's teaching, and having a woman lead the church is one of them.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.