Posted on 07/28/2006 6:45:14 PM PDT by sionnsar
For those wondering what inspired the Episcopal Church's newly-elected, female presiding bishop to refer to "Mother Jesus" during the General Convention, the answer might be found on the "Office of Women's Ministries" (OWM) page on the official national church website.
Indeed, this is not the first time that the OWM has gotten into liturgical mischief.
The phrase used by Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori appears in a "Eucharist Using Female Nouns and Pronouns" on the OWM's section of the Episcopal Church (TEC)-sponsored website. The rite is accompanied by "Morning Prayers to the Lady" - and this does not mean our Lord's mother. Both services offer worship to "Our Lady" and to the "Holy Mother," and end with the salutation "Blessed be" - a common statement of farewell among Wiccans.
The author of the services, Sandra Thomas Fox, wrote them in 2001, five years after she had a feminist epiphany during her first walk in a labyrinth - a spiritual exercise that actually has New Age roots - at the National Cathedral. There, she became sensitized to "the misogyny in the liturgy."
The webpage that leads to the two feminist liturgies has an all-capitalized disclaimer for each: "NOT AN OFFICIAL LITURGY - FOR USE IN DISCUSSION." Nevertheless, the pages from which each of the services can be downloaded invite readers to use them as well in "gathering communities of worship." Therefore, these services can be used anywhere.
The feminist "Eucharist" invokes God thus: "Blessed be the Lady who births, redeems and sanctifies us."
The threefold Kyrie Eleison becomes this: (Celebrant): Loving Lady, have mercy; (People): Mother Jesus, have mercy; (Celebrant) Loving Lady, have mercy" - thereby giving Jesus both a sex change and children.
The prayers of the people - addressed to "Mother" - include the request that "every member of the Church may be your handmaiden" - thereby praying that all men in the church get a sex change.
The prayer of confession is addressed to "Most Merciful Lady."
The Great Thanksgiving begins, "May the Holy Mother be with you," and continues: "It is truly right, Mother, to give you thanks; for you alone are the I AM, living and true, dwelling in light inaccessible from before time and forever," and adds: "Blessed is she who comes in the name of Love."
With the prayer "Mother, you loved the world so much that you sent your only Son to be our Savior. Incarnate by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary," the consecration prayer claims that Jesus has two mommies - and no Father.
Immediately after the consecration of the bread and the wine, the celebrant says, "Mother, we now celebrate this memorial of your redemption." (A Freudian slip, perhaps?)
Oddly enough, the Lord's Prayer is unchanged - so this is the only spot in the service which addresses God as "Father."
The "Mass" ends when the celebrant tells the congregation, "Let us go forth empowered by the Love of our Lady," and the congregation replies, "Blessed be."
THE FEMINIST "MORNING PRAYER" service is similar in spirit. After the confession of sin (again addressed to the "Most Merciful Lady"), the celebrant says, "Nurturing Mother, have mercy on us; forgive us all our sins. Through your beautiful Son, Jesus Christ, strengthen us in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit sustain our eternal life."
Before the psalms, the celebrant says, "The mercy of our Lady is everlasting: come let us adore her." After the Psalm readings, the celebrant sings a new age Gloria Non Patri: "Glory to the Mother, and to her Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever."
In this service, too, the Lord's Prayer was unmolested - but the celebrant precedes it with "May our Holy Lady be with you...Let us pray the words of her beautiful Son, Jesus Christ."
The prayers of the people include "Keep your example of Motherhood ever before us; Let us see in all our children a sacred trust from you" - an invocation that seems out of place here, since the Women's Ministries site lists the pro-abortion Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice among "social justice" groups.
The General Thanksgiving at the end of the service starts, "Most merciful Mother, we your handmaidens give you thanks for your great love for us and for all you have made." The service ends when the celebrant says, "Let us give thanks to our Lady;" the congregation replies, "Blessed be."
AS EARLIER NOTED, this all began with Ms. Fox's first experience with walking the labyrinth at the 1996 Sacred Circles conference at Washington National Cathedral. That day, "during a guided meditation led by Dr. Sarah Fahy, I had met the wise woman who had told me, `Women are beautiful. You are beautiful,'" Fox wrote. "Immediately after I...walked one of the labyrinths set up in the nave. To my surprise, as I entered the path I dissolved into tears. Questions welled up inside of me. Why had no one ever told me I was beautiful? Why did I need to be told that women were beautiful? I sobbed my way into the center, where I sat until I was once again composed. As I began my walk out, the Eucharist was being celebrated at the high altar. I decided I would silently say these comforting, familiar words as I walked...But on this day, to my horror, these words I loved turned to dust and ashes in my mouth. All I could hear was `He, Him, Lord, Son, Father'...I had heard the misogyny in the liturgy, and there was no going back."
Fox continued, "I realized that I did not see my mother, my two daughters, or myself as made in the image of God. When I looked at the liturgy I discovered there are 195 male nouns and pronouns in Rite I and 145 in Rite II. In both cases, there is one reference to a woman - the Virgin Mary in the Creed. If our liturgy is our story, the telling of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, where are the voices of the women that Jesus loved, respected, and held dear? Where is an understanding of the holiness of being a daughter, wife, or mother? Wondering what it would be like to have a service to the Divine Feminine, I used Rite II, Prayer D [from the 1979 Prayer Book] as a starting point and wrote such a Eucharist in 2001.
"If one feels that reading this service is blasphemous, I can only say that writing it felt even more so. Yet I felt called to continue, for what else would allow us to see the narrowness of our current liturgy?...My hope is that this Eucharist will begin a dialogue about the ways in which language affects the quality of our worship, our feelings towards God, and our sense of being created in God's image."
As earlier indicated, this was not the first foray into the bizarre for TEC's Office of Women's Ministries. In 2004, there was an outcry over two other offerings on OWM's section of the official church website: "A Women's Eucharist: A Celebration of the Divine Feminine" and a "Liturgy for Divorce." The Women's Eucharist made no mention of Christ, nor of his Body and Blood, but gave thanks to "Mother God" for things like menstrual blood and breasts.
It emerged that the Women's Eucharist had been on a Druid website since 1998. What's more, it had been penned by "Glispa," who turned out to be part of a husband/wife Episcopal clergy couple who up until a short time earlier had also been involved with and promoting modern-day Druidism, including nude mating rituals and invocation of the "Horned God." Once exposed, Pennsylvania clergy Glyn Ruppe-Melnyck and her husband, W. William Melnyck, repented of their Druidry; Mr. Melnyk lost his parochial job over the issue but Mrs. Melnyk kept hers.
The two offending services, which were removed from the OWM website in the 2004 controversy, were part of OWM's "Women's Liturgy Project" to collect worship resources written by women for women - an initiative that, given the latest from the OWM, is evidently ongoing.
*Sources included: Sandra Thomas Fox, "Reflection on the Holy Eucharist,"
Women's Ministries, http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/41685_60499_ENG_HTM.htm;
Women's Ministries, "Liturgies Using Feminine Images," http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/41685_60497_ENG_HTM.htm, a page that links to texts for the two liturgies;
Women's Ministries, http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/41685_31001_ENG_HTM.htm, a blurb for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
***Sorry. But I have many RC friends who tell me forthrightly that they do worship Mary in a way with their prayers because they see her as being worthy of worship due to her supposedly sinless nature.***
Sorry dangus, whatever you want to call the role of Mary in the RC church, it certainly looks like worship to Proddies and to many people inside the RC church.
If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck....
This is Wicca, pure and simple.
Wicca worships the female trinity - Maiden, Mother, and Crone. The phrase "Blessed be" is the dead giveaway - it ends most Wiccan "prayers" and is the more formal form of bidding farewell. This alone should be enough to expel the US Episcopalians from the worldwide Episcopalian church.
"Do you really believe that Mary, a godly woman, would accept any such title that draws attention to her and away from Her Son, her savior and the Savior of all whom the Father shall redeem thought His sacrifice, sanctification, intercession and merit?"
Very good question.
I have one observation: the majority of threads by Catholics are about Mary or the Pope or something other than scripture and Jesus. I find that interesting.
These poor souls are lost.
I live in San Francisco (born and bred AND Catholic) and have watched Grace Cathedral descend from its lofty position as THE Episcopalian center in the Bay Area to the Labyrinth of the Lost.
It started back in the 80's, if I recall correctly, with the "inclusion" of homosexuals into their fold as normal people. There have been a series of openly homosexual pastors (both genders, some living with same sex partners) there who have enlarged on that theme ad nauseum. Added to that was the woman-thing, where God is "She" and such.
Their latest silliness is a meditation liturgy.
It's hard to miss it. They have a LARGE banner (in the traditional Episcopalian colors) advertising their latest silliness strung across the church. I go to my club six times a week and see it as I drive past.
Sidenote: one of our traditional Lutheran Churches is in the full God-is-a-woman thing, offering all (also a big banner with a www url address) to worship Her with a she-rosary.
Too many nouveau San Franciscans worship at the House of Relative Morality, eating their Sunday Bread of Life at the House of Bagels, drinking the Blood of Salvation from Starbucks -- Cafe Latte. I have watched this descent for four decades.
I attended a Bat Mitzvah once where the ritual was NEW Jewish, with all latest non-sexual nomenclature ruled. Two examples: God was not the Father but a neuter force ("Cosmos") and the words "right hand of the Lord" were eliminated because it shamed left-handed people.
It's ESPECIALLY sad to see the Episcopalians and Lutherans stray so far from the path of Christian worship. They were the closest to the Catholic faith.
Martin Luther must be rolling in his grave. What havoc he wrecked with his protests. What hell he started. Same with Henry VIII. Both were simply too arrogant to do it any other way, one supposes.
Pardon my butting in.
Good observation, at least on the free republic.
What you say is probably true where there are mixtures of Christian denominations. The Pope and Mary USUALLY are the greatest sources of disagreement between Catholics and Protestants and therefore are the source of the majority of threads -- discussion/disagreement.
There aren't too many disagreements on Jesus or Scripture, thus, few threads on them.
Back in Marin Luther's and Henry VIII's days, the sources of disagreement were, no doubt, different. Since then, many differences have been ironed out or become moot, so what remains are those sticky matters of Mary veneration and Papal authority (Upon this rock I will built My church).
I was at St. Peter's this summer. His bones are there. The small casket is right there for all humans to see. Hard to fathom -- the bones of the first pope, Simon Peter, the man who knew Our Savior so well. It was very moving.
A "she-rosary"??? Just when you think they can't get any more ridiculous. And of course they obviously have no idea what the Rosary is, anyway, or they'd know how silly they were being.
Yes, SF is in very sad shape spiritually. Unfortunately, the Catholic churches got pretty flaky too, and having the confused Archbishop Quinn in charge certainly didn't help. Levada didn't seem to accomplish a lot, either.
Do you think the new Archbishop is going to improve things?
(When I am in SF, I often go to Our Lady of Fatima, the Byzantine rite Catholic church on Lake Street, just to avoid the flakiness.)
>> It was unnecessary because scripture did not declare it despite considerable other info about Mary. <<
"Who am I that the mother of my LORD should come to visit me?" -- ELizabeth, in the Gospel of St. Luke.
The word, "LORD" here is even capitalized in many bibles, because it was understood that LORD=YHWH,
>> But the first great wave of heresy had already passed before this Mother Of God business was promulgated. <<
We know it was already promulgated by the latter part of the 2nd century. We also know that we would only SEE it AFTER the heresy was dealt with. We also know that without having access to a 2nd century lexus/nexus database, decades could pass after promulgation before we saw it. Lastly, we know that counter-trinitarian concepts popped up freuqntly until the end of the 5th century, and are still quite common in Pentecostal churches.
"BTW, my Catholic neighbor mentioned to me on the phone that she got more rain than me a few nights ago by going out and shaking her rosary beads at the storm clouds. I retorted that this was unfair to us humble Baptists and we might retaliate by buying ourselves some groovy "love beads" so we wouldn't be defenseless when Rome's followers try to hog the rain."
____________________________________
Boy, that's great!
I needed to start the day with a smile.
Our former priest went to seminary with a lot of women in the early stages of the push for women priests (I have no problem with women priests but all of the early ones seemed to be more political and feminist than they were spiritual or with any kind of real calling.)
Anyway, he really disliked them...they had a lot of man hate. I told him they would probably remove Jesus from the church if they could because he was a man.
Apparently, they did. They gave him a sex change.
The daily Mass readings threads have Scripture in them. Any article about the Eucharist mentions Our Lord, since Catholics believe that Christ's Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, is present in that sacrament. Any article about the Pope is likeley to mention the Pope talking about Our Lord. Finally, any article that mentions Mary is in all liklihood going to mention Jesus, because she is His mother.
Jerimiah 7:17 Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem?
18 The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink-offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger.
With all due respect and sincerity, I'd bet that, if given twenty-four uninterrupted hours, I could find at least one Catholic FReeper who has publicly said/done otherwise, in the last year alone.
I know what you're trying to say, and while I still strongly disagree with the practice overall, those distinctions are not lost on me, and I will be mindful of what you've described regarding your own practices. Yours would be the route I'd follow should I ever swim the Tiber. But in mine and others' experiences, not every Catholic is as cautious as you are. Some practice, and even encourage, full-blown idolatry and IMO blasphemy re Mary, while remaining in full communion with Mother Church.
Sorry dangus, whatever you want to call the role of Mary in the RC church, it certainly looks like worship to Proddies and to many people inside the RC church.
Ditto. What would Moses say?
The Pope and Mary USUALLY are the greatest sources of disagreement between Catholics and Protestants and therefore are the source of the majority of threads -- discussion/disagreement.. . .
Back in Marin Luther's and Henry VIII's days, the sources of disagreement were, no doubt, different. Since then, many differences have been ironed out or become moot, so what remains are those sticky matters of Mary veneration and Papal authority (Upon this rock I will built My church)
Uhhh.... the justification by faith thing?
You probably can, but what would this prove other than that there are Catholics who misunderstand what the Church teaches? The Church is quite glad to correct those who promote the excesses and outright idolatry that you mention. (The now-suspended Fr. Nicholas Gruner of The Fatima Crusader fame is a fine example.) And good, knowledgeable Catholics should do likewise in correcting their brethren.
The differences between dulia, hyperdulia, and latria have been explained on these forums numerous times. I'm glad that you acknowledge that you understand the distinctions (even if you don't necessarily agree). I just hope that others do likewise.
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