Posted on 04/12/2007 10:42:39 AM PDT by Antoninus
“I didn’t realize how much pain I had from growing up in a church that did not permit women as pastors,” said Melanie Donohoe in an interview published March 22 in the Oakland Tribune. Donohoe was talking about growing up Catholic.
“I was not one of those girls who wanted to be a nun,” said Donohoe. “I always loved the spiritual, the mystical, and the sacramental, but I did not sit around dreaming of being a priest.”
But, today, Donohoe is a priest -- or what some would call a priest. She is an Episcopal minister and associate rector of Transfiguration Episcopal Church in San Mateo. “I'm really happy being a priest,” she said, “and I love my parish.”
Twenty-five years ago, Donohoe joined the Episcopal Church because it has, since 1977, allowed women to be ordained. Even as an Episcopalian, she, a television producer, was not interested in ordination. But her “call” became more apparent. “It was a call I could no longer refuse,” she told the Tribune. She was ordained in November 2005. “I asked God to drop the two-by-four, and she did. Being able to help people celebrate their most holy and sacred moments within the ritual of the church is very much what I felt called to do by God and by people.”
The number of female clergy in the U.S. is steadily growing. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau counted 53,000 female clergy nationwide. They make up 15 percent of the clergy in San Mateo County, according to the Tribune.
Some have said a disproportionate number of Protestant female clergy are made up of former Catholics. Do they leave because the Catholic Church forbids women’s ordination? Examining this question, Paul Perl, writing in the Dec. 22, 2005 edition of the journal Sociology of Religion, said, based on the statistics (and the latest were from 1994), it is impossible to judge why, but a significantly larger percentage of female than male converts from the Catholic Church entered the Protestant ministry -- 5.1% as opposed to 2.5 percent.
But the percentages for the Episcopal Church are significantly higher. From 1980 to 1994, 13.7% percent of female clergy were former Catholics as opposed to 9% of male clergy. Over the years, the percentage of formerly Catholic Episcopal priestesses increased: 1980-84, it was 10%; 1985-1989, 13%; and 1990-94, 17%. This, coupled with the fact that the percentage of formerly Catholic Episcopal female converts did not grow in like proportions, led Perl to conclude that “it is plausible that the all-male priesthood has caused some Catholic women to convert to the Episcopal Church to be ordained.”
Though Donohoe said of the Episcopal Church, “we’re a really cool church,” she admitted, “We’re not perfect.” For instance, “there’s still a couple of dioceses that won’t ordain women,” one of those being her neighbor, the Diocese of San Joaquin.
Once she was Roman Catholic. Now she is a feminazi heretic who thinks that women need a goddess, since our Trinune God is too "sexist"!!!!
The Episcopal "church" is not a church, but a CLUB, "cool" though it be. And Jefferts-Schori made it official by sayng that its purpose is the UN Millennium Development Goals, not God's Kingdom!!!!
I'm afraid the situation is worse than you just described: Katherine the Great has equated the MDG's with God's Kingdom...a breach of the First Commandment like none other since the Golden Calf!
So this was her reason to join the church? Obviously the WRONG reason to join a church.
Good point. I was thinking more of the “Aztlan” aspect of his leadership.
Good point. At least she had the decency to leave, and not try to wreck the Church from within.
Unfortunately, as a Republican Episcopalian, my biggest problem with priests in general is that they are liberals.
I once thought like you - when I was young and uninformed by scripture. While women in the Bible (both New and Old Testament) had significant roles in the unfolding of History and the birth of the church, nowhere do they usurp the role of priest, which is a type of Christ. Women in those days were basically content to live in their assigned roles and many of them did splendidly at them. The example of Mary, the mother of Jesus is the prime. Others include Deborah, Elizabeth, Hannah, Ruth, Dorcas and Priscilla.
What most feminists today can’t stand is that there are many roles they are not equipped or designed to fulfill - the priesthood being one of them. Neither can a woman be “pater familia,” but that hasn’t kept the feminists from trying. The results have been devastating, especially to children who grow up confused about who is their Daddy. Their image of God as a woman may well come from the fact that their fathers were banished from their families - excluded as irrelevant by discriminatory divorce laws. (just conjecture here)
All that aside, there is a Divine order that is perfect and when it is adhered to that pleases God. I believe the fundamental problem is that people have stopped caring what pleases God and are all about what pleases themselves. Emotionality has usurped rationality in ECUSA (and other denominations) and therein lies the problem. “I feel” this and “I feel that” is denying the God given mandate to use one’s intellect to accept, comprehend and to communicate the truth. Emotions only lead one astray. “The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked; Who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17: 9) It may “feel” good, but it is still W R O N G.
I, too, have known some faithful, orthodox, and caring women pastors in the ELCA and its predecessors. The most notable was the interim pastor a few years ago at my present congregation, who acted as a spiritual mother, not trying to play "father". Unfortunately, she passed away with ovarian cancer a few years after she completed our interim pastorate. May her memory be eternal!
Then there is one of the ELCA's women bishops, who is a leading defender of the apostolic faith, as all bishops should be.
Nevertheless, I have also known many, many more women pastors and "theologians" who are total feminazi heretics, "gay"-enablers, lesbians, and/or gnostics. And nearly every other woman "bishop" in the ELCA is a total disaster of heresy and liberal faddism!!!!
Moreover, just as soon as women's ordination was allowed in the Lutheran church, feminazi ideology and "gay rights" infected our church, and soon became dominant. Now we have a bogus feminazi/peacenik/heretic new hymnal/liturgy book, a growing number of "gay" pastors, and mis-leaders who tell us that we have to "live with our differences" rather than teaching and defending orthodox catholic Christianity.
On balance, I strongly believe that allowing women's ordination in the Lutheran and Episcopal churches was a fatal error, which is responsible for 95% of the decline of our two church bodies!!!!
Yes, God is calling you to a deeper relationship with him, and some sort of spiritual leadership. But why serve a spiritually dead "church" that has become a liberal social club for MDG (i.e., New World Order) supporters and "gay"/feminazi activists?
I believe that God is calling all of us Lutherans and Anglicans to lead the way back to restoring the Orthodoxy that we in the West lost so long ago. Why not investigate the Orthodox church (especially including attending Orthodox worship) before moving any further with ordination? Seeking ordination will certainly involve attending a liberal seminary and jumping through the hoops that revisionist mis-leaders set before orthodox candidates for ordination.
Why not be a leader in the return of Anglicans to our mother church instead, even as a laywoman?
But I used to belong to a parish where everyone was liberal. They were also among the most anti-Semitic people I'd ever come across. The Rector was heard to use a foul term for Jews, and one vacation replacement gave a sermon on how evil and fascistic Israel was and how good and peace-loving the Arabs were. This sermon was given in August of 2001. In New York City. I switched soon afterwards and haven't looked back.
PS — those two priests were men.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic Ping List:
Please ping me to all note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of interest.
I’m sympathetic, but with all due respect you have the wrong idea about what church is. Phrases like “I never felt like...” and “a much more emotional experience...” and “I feel like” lead me to believe that your conception of worship is based around feelings — a serious error. Worship is not about your feelings, your enjoyment, “passion”, or even having a “spiritual experience”. It is about forgetting yourself and concentrating your entire mind, soul, and spirit upon Jesus Christ. Ideally, one forgets one own existence entirely when one worships. When worship is a matter of feelings it is not worship, because it is centered on you and your feelings rather than on God.
With all due respect, your feelings in terms of worship are unimportant. The only thing matters in worship is Christ. I, too, enjoy the emotional high of being near God, but it’s important to remember that any such emotions are a happy side effect of worship, not its raison d’etre. When feelings are #1, then it is YOU who are #1, and not Christ.
Please don’t think I’m picking on you personally. It took me years to realize this stuff. Most Americans are trained from birth to “trust their feelings” a la Star Wars, and thus find it only natural to equate feelings and faith. The result: a proliferation of “churches” carefully calculated to cater to the WorshipTainment crowd who don’t feel like they’ve been to church unless they’re having fun. But, as with any chemical dependency, eventually one needs a stronger and stronger “dose” of WorshipTainment to get the same satisfying high. “Oh, I don’t feel the way I used to feel when I started going to church here. Maybe God has deserted this place. Maybe the snake-handlers have the Real Thing.” I went through this during my years as an Evangelical, so I know the syndrome well.
The same goes for lady priests. “This woman has such passion for worship! She must be close to God!” As if passion were the point of worship! In reality, the priest’s passion or demenanor are completely irrelevant; what matters is the Body and Blood he is holding in his hands. What matters is the fact that God Himself is really present.
My advice: ignore your feelings. They wil deceive you. Instead, do your utmost not to think about yourself at all when you go to church. Concentrate totally on the Lord and forget that you exist. I know it’s hard. There are Sundays when I really don’t feel like being there. There are Sundays when I hate being in church, God help me. In such cases all I can do is to keep reminding myself that whether I feel like being there or not, I AM THERE, in the Presence of God, and offer myself to Him, bad feelings and all.
Again, I sympathize, but don’t let the Enemy snare you in an emotional trap! Stick with Tradition; you can’t go wrong.
Please pray for me as we journey through this battlefield together.
Did she refer to call God "she."
As a former Episcopalian, who got a great deal from that Church before I became a Catholic, I find it sad that they would welcome in this Gaia-worshipping creep and put her in charge of a congregation. This is no great triumph for the Episcopal Church.
If there was ever a case of “It’s all about me,” this is it.
Good grief! Oh well, I've met Republicans who think Giulani is a Conservative.
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.