I know he means well and he's trying to remove a hurdle that too often separates Catholic women from their church. And so Pope Francis has decreed that the priesthood should pardon women who have had an abortion but repent the deed.
You don't have to excommunicate them. You don't have to deny them communion or the other church rites. You just have to shame them a bit, get them to repent their sins - "go forth and sin no more" will do it.
I get it, he's the Pope, the Holy Father of the Roman Catholic Church. He can't just do whatever the hell he wants and this is probably about as good a compromise as he can manage. Still I'm not convinced that this business about requiring women to seek pardon before reinstatement cuts it.
Oh well, fortunately I'm not a woman and I'm not a Catholic. Pardon me. Just kidding.
"No kidding" aside you are fortunate that you are not a woman and/or a Catholic. Not special just fortunate.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you addressed this Mound.I found the edict coming from Pope Francis to be condescending and presumptuous.This just seems to be another example of dictating to woman, what they can or cannot do with their bodies. I realize that Pope Francis is working within a sin driven context, but reality dictates abortion as a womans right,not a sin to be forgiven by a catholic priest.
ReplyDeleteOr is this just a PR stunt to allow the RC Church to claim that "all these women" are sorry they had abortions.
ReplyDeleteOh, this is going to hurt me to write, but I have to say this is actually impressive to me. I grew up RC, a decade as an altarboy (and perhaps one of the only ones never to even have a pass made at by a priest...*droll tone*), and seriously contemplated whether I had a calling to the priesthood, wight up until the oath of celibacy clashed with my innate slutdom, and the latter won. I left the Faith in my late teens, but my parents to this day have remained, and are Irish Catholics without the rigidity (although I maintain that is an oxymoron, how can you be Irish Catholic and not rigid), so I still hear a lot from within the Church and care about it because of how it matters to my folks. So I recognize just how much of a major progressive leap forward within the RC this truly is, as offensive as it may sound to others/outside. Given how pronounced the doctrines of life and patriarchy within the Catholic/Christian faith truly are, this is a major move for a religion as conservative as the RC truly is in nature.
ReplyDeletePersonally for myself I find the idea more than a little shall we say old fashioned, but then isn't that almost the very definition of the RC in the first place? This is a tectonic reverberation for within the RC, and further evidence that this Pope is nothing like his predecessor, and clearly far more open minded to change than JP2 was. It is going to be interesting to watch the reaction from the Opus Die end of the Faith in the US conservative movement given what this does to their slut shaming approach, because this clearly weakens it from their POV even if for those outside the faith or even within it but much more progressive in nature it seems like it continues to strengthen it.
I have to admit, I am slowly being convinced that maybe this is the first Pope since John 23 who really is truly to modernize the RC in truth, and not just trying to do superficialities for image/PR purposes. I have to wonder just how happy Ratzi the Nazi is with his successor given what kind of hard core conservative even for within the RC world he was. My mother has never been so happy with any Pope since John 23 as she is with Francis, and I am beginning to think she may have been right about him being the real deal.
For an institution that historically was used to being able to manage internal change in not just decades but centuries in terms of revising itself he is operating at breakneck speed, and within that context this is clearly a significant act towards bringing the RC into the 19th/20th century, which for them as I noted is fast.
There were reasons I left the faith when I was in my late teens, a lot of it was on truly spiritual grounds, but a part of it was this tendency towards hyperconse4rvativism, and failure to reinterpret core teachings and new knowledge became available. I also had issues with the core patriarchal/paternalistic nature within too many old fashioned RCers too, but that was not truly the core of my schism, but it was a contributing factor.
Anyong said......Here we go again. It's women who are being called upon to do the correct thing and they need forgiveness to boot. The RC establishment needs to shake its head and realize, if they don't, the world is in this mess due to many religions fighting to again the most populated religion through births. The RC Church needs to be addressing over population for what it is, overpopulation. There is something to be said for..."God takes care of those who take care of themselves".
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