<p>I have no problem with anyone in my parish. I think you might perhaps go into allergic shock were you a member. As a matter of fact, I have served as part of the RCIA team in the past and have been asked to do so again in the future.</p>
<p>TheMom said I should simply tell you that I would pray for you. I told her that was really offensive. She said, “Exactly.”</p>
<p>Mini, one of my favorite proverbs is of Quaker origin: Thou may not attain perfection, but neither are Thee excused from making the attempt. </p>
<p>It took the Roman Catholic church a few centuries to get it right…or almost right…on Galileo. I don’t think it will take as long on women priests. Everyone I talk to is in agreement that it will take married male priests to open the door first. It will come.</p>
<p>Well, you mean “re-open” the doors - there were married priests until 1022, until banned Benedict VIII. To be fair, B-VIII was one of the six openly gay Popes, and, it is said, turned the Vatican openly into a homosexual brothel, as a way of raising funds (and to satisfy himself.) Some have gone on to believe that he openly practiced bestiality, and was known to “sacrifice” women during orgiastic practices. Luckily, we don’t still consider him infallible.</p>
<p>Innocent II finally got around to forcing the divorce of married priests more than a hundred years later. He had a problem, too - he was never elected Pope at all. A follower of the anti-Pope Clement II, he lost the Papal election decisively to Anacletus II and fled to France.</p>
<p>Say, did anyone realize that the Anglicized form of Giordano Bruno is Gordon Brown? How’s that for correlations between Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy?</p>
<p>Mini, many American Catholics are stuck in a mindset of 1955 and see things as unchanging from that perspective. Fortunately, Vatican II opened the windows if not the doors. The Curia and their fellow travelers are doing their best to bang them back shut but I think it’s too late.</p>
<p>I watch the quiet civil war in the Episcopalian church over gay clergy with great interest. The conservatives there still have a humbug about women and a couple of dioceses still refuse to ordain women but they’re in a losing rear guard action.</p>
<p>Prairie, are you in the diplomatic corps? Seldom have I seen a more adroit change of subject, complete with word play. But are you sure that Giordano doesn’t translate to “Dan”? “dano”? Think about it…LOL.</p>
<p>I’m surprised that you would want to be offensive to anyone. But I accept any prayers for me that come.</p>
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<p>You’re wrong. It will never happen. The Vatican would rather people stop coming to Mass at all than ordain women, have no doubt.</p>
<p>The difference is that celibacy is disciplinary while gender-based ordination is a matter of faith and morals. Priestly celibacy does not change anything ideologically, women’s ordination does. It will literally never happen. You can claim that it will as much as you want (just like I am claiming my point as much as I want).</p>
<p>But literally nothing suggests that women priests are ever going to happen. It’s a lost cause. Move on to the next hopeless battle – Pope Benedict XVI is so conservative, and is spreading this on a diocesan level by appointing ultraconservative bishops. Mass attendance at Latin Masses is up, attendance at others are down. The greatest areas of growth are the Southern Hemisphere and other very conservative places. The hippie Catholic era is over.</p>
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<p>That’s not true – the Catholic Church has never gone back on an infallible teaching because it cannot. Please, provide an example – ex cathedra statements can never be construed as anything other than infallible. Similarly, male ordination is infallible and therefore never subject to change on any kind.</p>
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<p>He was never infallible. But, like all Popes, his ex cathedra statements were.</p>
<p>“Mini, many American Catholics are stuck in a mindset of 1955 and see things as unchanging from that perspective.”</p>
<p>Well, the Church’s hatred of women became a significant part of policy as a result of the sick mind of a gay pope who didn’t mind killing them to feed his lusts. If God decided to dispense Her teachings through this infallible agent, She either has a sick mind or quite a corrosive sense of humor.</p>
<p>Whoa, guys, I do not mean to offend anyone, but could you calm this argument down? I address all of you so as to not target particular users. It is disappointing to see the regression of what began as an intelligent and civilized discussion.</p>
<p>Aw, phanatic, you’re no phun. I was really enjoying this debate. And…I was waiting to hear from some innocent prospective Smith student or parent getting their first intro to Mini and The Dad on this thread…</p>
<p>The sharpness of some of the exchanges in this thread should remind us that religion is an area where intelligent people of good will have profound differences of outlook on matters that they regard as vitally important. Learning to deal gracefully with religious difference is one of the most important lessons one can learn, and I believe is an essential part of becoming an enlightened person. A college like Smith, that draws its student body from all points of the religious compass, can be an ideal place to gain experience with faith systems other than one’s own.</p>
<p>In this connection, the elimination of the chaplains is dismaying to me because the message it communicates is “we don’t do religion here.” The experience of encountering other faiths will be diminished if the campus atmosphere is dismissive of religion in general. The fact that none of the chaplains happen to represent our family’s religious tradition (Unitarian Universalism) doesn’t make the chaplaincy “unfair” to us or to our daughter. Its elimination removes a resource that Smith has historically provided to the thousands of young women under its roof who are trying to figure out who and what they will be in the world.</p>
<p>Well-stated, Randomcoolzip. Would the public reaction to Smith’s decision in this case be more positive if Smith admitted that its decision was based on financial considerations, rather than trying to claim it as a move toward multiculturalism?</p>
<p>^ Well I think Smith was open about it being done for financial considerations. TD asserts that in fact it wasn’t the financial consideration at all but some other drive to get rid of chaplains generally that pushed it. But the official word is that all the departments had to make cuts, the chaplains were only benefiting a small and declining group of students who were attending chapel services & events/using the services of the chaplains regularly, so that was where they chose to make the budget cut. </p>
<p>The fact that many Smith students were members of religions not represented in the chaplaincy also has played a role, but according to the college, the decision was primarily financial in nature. Andwhile TD disputes this and I respect that he probably knows more about it than I do, I’m inclined to accept that. Smith weathered the budget situation better than most colleges, but every department had to make cuts. Spending even a shared portion of a chaplain’s salary to benefit those few students who utilized the facility seems to not being doing the greatest good for the greatest number with the available funds. Nor do I think it’s neccessarily a bad thing that the school is responding to the new patterns of religious and spiritual life on campus with new ideas for how to meet those needs, outside of the traditional chapalin/flock structure.</p>
<p>The ball is in Smith’s court, then. How is Smith “responding to the new patterns of religious and spiritual life on campus with new ideas for how to meet those needs”?</p>
<p>I should be clear that by “Smith” I didn’t mean just the college, but also the students. It was declining student interest that paved the way for this change, as well as changing religious habits, so it’s the students that have to be a part of crafting the new solutions. </p>
<p>There’s a really interesting article on exactly this topic in the recent Alumnae Quarterly. It interviews the heads of the student religious organizations and Dean Walters about what they’re doing in the absence of chaplains, and it clearly shows that this is still an ongoing conversation, but they’re talking about a lot of intereting ideas such as: Making Smith a field site for visiting divinity students, having pre-orientation sessions on religious spaces in the five college area, holding an FYS on pluralism in AMerica, working with the religon department, having services sponsored by the student religious organizations, doing more multi-faith programming, having a student peer religious advisor program. All of these things could have been done with the chaplains of course, but in their absence, it doesn’t mean that religious life at Smith stops. For the vast majorit of students at Smith, religious life never involved the chaplains to begin with.</p>
<p>S&P, I’m so glad to hear there are a lot of ideas being generated! They sound wonderful! Is there any way you can provide a link for the article so we all can read it?</p>