What's to understand? She was dressed like this priestess but with an over jacket.
She obviously can't go by the title 'Father' so she uses 'Mother'.
Posted on 06/08/2006 10:00:40 AM PDT by NYer
LONDON (CNS) -- A Vatican cardinal has warned the Church of England that a move to ordain women as bishops would destroy any chance of full unity with the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said that if the Church of England adopted such a resolution the "shared partaking of the one Lord's table, which we long for so earnestly, would disappear into the far and ultimately unreachable distance."
"Instead of moving toward one another, we would simply coexist alongside each other," he said.
His remarks came in a speech to a private meeting of the Church of England bishops in Market Bosworth, England, just four months after the bishops agreed to set up a working group to outline a process through which women might be consecrated as bishops.
Although three of the world's Anglican provinces have already agreed to consecrate women as bishops, Cardinal Kasper said decisions made by the Church of England had a "particular importance" because they gave a "strong indication of the direction in which the communion as a whole was heading."
Saying that he spoke with "pain and sadness," the cardinal warned the bishops of their historic decision's grave consequences, both to ecumenical relations and to the interior unity of the Anglican Communion.
Among the most serious of these, he said, would be that the goal of restoring full church communion "would realistically no longer exist" because it could not exist "without full communion in the episcopal office."
A decision in favor of women bishops made broadly by the Anglican Communion, he said, would also represent a turning away from the "common position of all the churches of the first millennium."
He said this meant that the Anglican Communion would no longer occupy "a special place" among the churches of the West but would align itself closely to the Protestant churches of the 16th century.
Cardinal Kasper said that although ecumenical dialogue would continue the loss of a common goal would "rob such encounters of their elan and their internal dynamic."
He said a further consequence of a resolution in favor of women bishops would be that the Catholic Church would inevitably continue to refuse to recognize the validity of Anglican orders.
He said that ecumenical discussions between the churches on "Apostolicae Curae," the 1896 papal bull that declared Anglican orders "absolutely null and utterly void," had "justifiably aroused promising expectations" of a change in the Catholic position. But he said that the growing practice of the ordination of women to the priesthood had since led to an "appreciable cooling" of such discussions.
The ordination of women bishops, Cardinal Kasper added, would "most certainly lower the temperature even more; in terms of the possible recognition of Anglican orders, it would lead not only to a short-lived cold, but to a serious and long-lasting chill."
Addressing the subject of the interior unity of the Anglican Communion, the cardinal said that the episcopal office was essentially one of unity and, therefore, any consecration that either caused schism or blocked the way to full unity would be intrinsically contradictory.
He criticized a proposal by the Church of England House of Bishops to remedy such divisions by allowing parishes that rejected women bishops to choose to be cared for by a male traditionalist bishop.
"Where mutual recognition and communion between bishops does not exist or no longer exists, where one can therefore no longer concelebrate the Eucharist, then no church communion, at least no full church communion and thus no eucharistic communion can exist," he said. "Arrangements like those I have referred to can only cover over the breach superficially; they can paper over the cracks, but they cannot heal the division; one can even go one step further and say that, from the Catholic perspective, they are the unspoken institutionalization, manifestation and virtual legitimating of an existing schism."
Cardinal Kasper said that Pope John Paul II had made it clear that the church's position on women's ordinations "in no way rose from a denial of the equal dignity of men and women ... but is based solely on the fidelity to apostolic testimony as it has been handed down in the church throughout the centuries."
Cardinal Kasper was among a number of speakers invited to address the meeting by Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, head of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
In a statement June 6, Archbishop Williams said nothing was achieved by avoiding hard questions and that he appreciated the spirit with which the cardinal had shared his concerns.
"As we consider whether women should be ordained as bishops in the Church of England and what shape any possible legislation should take, it is important to have this kind of honesty and clarity about how changes made here might impact upon the common commitments of our two communions to the search for full visible unity in Christ's church," he said.
The archbishop is scheduled to go to Rome in the fall for his second meeting with Pope Benedict XVI.
What's to understand? She was dressed like this priestess but with an over jacket.
She obviously can't go by the title 'Father' so she uses 'Mother'.
We just call the ones in our church "Reverend".
If you haven't noticed O'Malley walks around in a dress himself.
Thank you for making this point. It's not well enough understood nor often enough repeated.
I prefer the term "priestettes," myself.
Be that as it may, I think that by "ordaining" women, the Anglicans have already gone a little too far for reunion. Cdl. Kasper, who is quite liberal, is actually being rather conciliatory by saying that we'll draw the line at female bishops. The line is already drawn at female priests. (Although I will say that he touches on this matter in his statements.)
I would argue that the line was actually drawn at Lambeth in 1934 when the Anglican Church became the first Christian denomination to approve artificial contraception.......
. . . of course I was thinking of celibacy. Women's ordination is completely off my radar . . .
< smacks head on keyboard > . . . there, I feel better now.
You are welcome. I strongly believe that they who control the language control the argument. That is why it is so important to remember that words do matter.
Who was John's wife? Who was Polycarp's wife? Who was Ignatius of Antioch's wife?
Dare you say that all of the bishops of the first two centuries was married? Your understanding of this passage seems to be belied by the lives of the men who actually held the office.
Amen. Thirty lashes with a choir cincture . . .
Ummmmmm.....
Not goin' there.
Wouldn't be prudent.
Shoot, back when I was an Episcopalian and HAD a cincture with my choir robe, I would accidentally smack myself with it if I was sprinting to my place in the processional or even if I turned around in a hurry.
( . . . and don't get me started about smacking the pew in front of me with my cross pendant . . . I still do that all the time when kneeling or standing back up . . . it's very loud when it's a quiet moment in the service . . . and dropping my music or the missalette . . . or my reading glasses . . . )
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Is that supposed to be funny?
If sex is not a product of God's own creative will its physical expression can no longer be limited to the Biblical and/or traditional moral view. But all forms of physical expression are valid since their very validity comes from our selves.
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Excellent post.
"Hard to be the "husband of one wife" if you're a female."
Not if you're an Episcopalian.
That's true. I recall reading something before about the Lambeth decision's being the starting gun in the process of the unravelling of the Anglican church. The decision seems to have affected the rest of the Protestant chuches fairly rapidly, too.
There were married bishops during the first four or five centuries, and Pope Hadrian VI was married in the 9th century.
I'm posting this, not because I belive the practice ought to be revived, but as a historical point.
"Not if you're an Episcopalian."
:>O
Now thats hitting below the belt!
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