MGB:_Revelation comes whenever the Spirit of Prophesy prompts someone to challenge a conservative cleric saying ”Are you kidding me?” John the Divine was not the last Apostle. Any who witnessed the Resurected Lord, with the bishops carrying on for them and through the Sacrements any who speak in the Holy Spirit or with the Lord in Communion. Public revelation may be ended, but only a certain type. Truth still flows through people who have faith in God, usually challenging those who prize faith in the human Church as the way to obey God. Weigal is almost first among the latter and many of us wish you would simply ignore his nonsense.
Amoris is not a paradigm shift so much so much as recognizing the shift that has been occuring in parish life since at least the mid-80s, if not before, when priests quietly absolved people in irregular marriages and welcomed them back to Communion. It has continued since then, just ask my former mother-in-law who was troubled by people who talked like Weigal and whose second marriage was blessed (her ex-had died, her current husband’s ex had not).
Anyone who has taken a high school or college history of the Sacraments course knows there are paradigm shifts in the Church. Weigel won’t admit to a paradigm shift because he won’t acknowledge the counter-revolutionary nature of St. John Paul II’s papacy or that Pius IX and X were abberations of authoritarianism in the life of the Church. You can be a hierarchist, but despotism goes too far in the name of Pope Rocky (see Wills on the joke in the name).
Humanae Vitae simplyh reveals the crisis of asexual clergy in the Church that goes back to Augustine’s Neo-Platonism, which admittedly traces to the sexual piety of St. Paul, who was readying us all for the Parousia that may never come except as a personal revelation in the Sacraments and at death. Until we ordain married men and women, both gay and straight, the peculiar sexuality of the clergy will contiue to infect the Church with a bad paradigm.
That Jesus was an Asexual is a neo-platonic myth. While the Church hierarchy of asexuals disputes this, the likelihood was that he was either a Pharisee or Galilean Rabbi. Being either requires marriage, just as modern priesthood requires celibacy. Both requirements are cultural, although the Catholic/Orthodox requirement has to do with the assumption that sex with one's spouse makes one impure to offer Mass, which is the bacbone of the whole misogynistic mess the culminated in Humanae Vitae and Evangelicum Vitae.
ReplyDeleteI did not bring up ordaining women to say anything about the past , although it is clear that "Apostles" were not pastors in the early church, they were the witnesses to the Resurrected Lord and many of these were female. We name the Twelve as Apostles because they were, but so were a great many. The twelve were symbolic of the twelve tribes, even though a great many of them were relatives, probably actual brothers, of Jesus. Indeed, James the brother of Jesus, who was the martyred leader of the Jerusalem Church, was an apostle because legend has it he and Joses were the two disciples who encountered Jesus on the road to Emmaus, but neither were among the twelve. Simon the Zealot and Thomas (originally Jude) were likely sons of Mary. (The cult of Marian perpetual virginity is also a denigration of marital sexuality).
My point was, however, to say that the Church needs shock treatment and the way to do that is to initiate a married, poli-sexual (we already have asexuals and celibate gays - you could call it the Fire Island Church) multi-gender priesthood.
That we have never done this before is a plea for being allowed to be an undistrubed REACTIONARY. It is not an argument with any merit about what can be accept a complaint about your own comfort levels. We have pandered to the latter long enough.