Posted on 05/22/2014 3:22:11 AM PDT by markomalley
And P.S. – You’re not a priest.
That pretty much sums up Bishop Paprocki’s response to a local Catholic woman’s recent attempt to get ordained.
The woman in question is Mary F. Keldermans of Springfield. Bishop Paprocki wrote to her last month asking her to reconsider her plan, but evidently she ignored him and tried to be ordained a priest at a Unitarian church on May 5.
Bishop Paprocki promptly issued a decree of excommunication (and if you’ve never seen one of those before, they look like this).
The bishop also issued this statement to his diocese:
Please be advised that Ms. Mary F. Keldermans of Springfield, Illinois, has attempted to be ordained a priest for “Roman Catholic Womenpriests, Inc.” in a ceremony at the Abraham Lincoln Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Springfield on May 5, 2014. As a result, she has incurred an automatic excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See.
That is what you call a bishop who’s not afraid to bishop.
At the same time, we should be careful not to tout this as some sort of righteous smack-down or triumphant display of authority. Bishop Paprocki is much too holy and charitable a bishop for that, and I have no doubt that his declaration of excommunication was issued with sorrow, not pleasure.
But he didn’t hold back from issuing the decree of excommunication either, or from publishing it prominently on the diocesan website.
This is one of the things I love about Bishop Paprocki. Whether it’s standing up for the unborn, for marriage, or for Holy Orders, he doesn’t shy away from confronting those who threaten his flock, nor from explaining his position to them with charity.
He prays intensely, he acts decisively, and he teaches clearly.
Lord, send us more bishops like this one!
I concede your point. Still a mystery how the dour Puritans became so Liberal but the primitive Baptists didn’t. The Puritans/Congregationalists where the moral foundation of America’s values at the time of the declaration of independence, and now their theological descendants somehow degenerated into moral relativistic liberal quasi Marxists.
I’m guessing no, she wasn’t ordained by the UUs, that this organization just borrowed, rented, or otherwise obtained the use of the church building from the UUs as the venue for their rite.
“My understanding is that the sin of abortion is reserved to the local Bishop, if a priest hears it in confession he will ask the woman to return after he has gotten leave from the bishop to absolve. The procedure varies by diocese.”
I don’t know the process, but the person involved with the abortion is excommunicated at the time of the killing; no Church authority needs to make it happen.
Ping!
The Episcopagan church will take her.
That is a mystery of the ages which I, an admirer of Traditional New England and the Puritan/Federalist heritage, have often wondered about.
By 1701 Harvard had already become unorthodox (which is why Yale was founded). John Adams was already a Unitarian, and Benjamin Franklin has been accused of everything from deism to satanism.
It is also true that the radicals of the early federal period (radical abolitionists/women's rights/free love advocates) were of old Puritan stock (though there were Jacksonian radicals as well). Such figures as William Cullen Bryant and William Lloyd Garrison actually started out as conservative Federalists, and anti-rationalist Fundamentalist Presbyterian Lyman Beecher begat a whole family of unorthodox radicals.
What is even more confusing is that the Republican Party was originally the organ of these people (to the extent that neo-Confederates accuse it of being "red from the beginning" and a tool of German Marxists and home-born radicals, and Horace Greeley is often considered an Insider by JBS types). Then it gets even weirder. Some of these really radical types then turned against the Radical Republicans for being corrupt and began calling for leniency toward the South (Charles Sumner was actually one of these people, believe it or not). They wound up allying with ueber-conservative Democrat Grover Cleveland, and later in life some actually became more radical than ever. BTW, would you believe that America's oldest radical publication, The Nation, was originally founded by conservative Grover Cleveland Democrats?).
The history of American ideology is truly a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside and enigma. My own personal position is that much as I admire the Puritan/Federalist tradition (and defend it from neo-Confederates and Jeffersonians), I don't get my ultimate beliefs from them.
Ultimately, the United States was a product of "enlightenment" thought. It was inevitable that some of this stuff would begin to happen eventually.
I forgot to mention that if you go to ultra-fundamentalist Primitive Baptist web pages (yes, they do exist), you will still see them invoking the Puritans and even Oliver Cromwell on some issues (though they disagree on others, such as church and state).
Yes EXCOMMUNICATED,,,
Don’t know if you have already read it (you sound like you are already well read on the subject) but I’m reading a book called “The Cousins Wars” by Kevin Phillips. The basic premise is that The English Civil War, American Revolution and US Civil War were all different stagespart of a contiguous Anglospheric Civil War in which the combatants shared a similar religious, political outlooks and even, to a certain extent, shared ehnicity (Parliamentarians, Patriots and Yankees being disproportionately of East Anglian stock and Puritan/Conregationalist), and the Cavaliers/Loyalists/Confederates being disproportionately High Anglican or even Catholic, and descended from Scottish, Irish or settlers from the North and West of England. In other words, those parts of the British Isles most prone to Tory and Jacobite sympathies. Interesting stuff, and of course, the “same side” ended up losing all of those wars (including the Jacobite Uprisings).
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