If a woman is a priest, she can also be a bishop: if she’s not, she can’t. Either way, there is now only one way out for Catholic Anglicans: it’s over the Tiber

My understanding is that in Canada there seem to be internal fights over property and power among the TAC! So it’s not about doctrine or whether women can or should be priests? It’s about secular stuff.

For both, actually.

For ecumenically-minded Catholics this is all very depressing.  Churches should not be trying to poach each others’ members, they should be working together to reach out to the unchurched majority.  An issue like women bishops should not be decided by a parliament or synod, where passions are hurled to and fro.  The objection of many (most?) of the Anglo-Catholics is that Rome does not do it.  Well, let’s set up a small group of theologians, from both factions of the Anglican Church AND the Catholic Church, and anyone else who cares to join (the Orthodox perhaps?) to study the actual pros and cons, setting aside as far as possible one’s own personal prefernces.  And the Roman theologians should not be restrained by the notion “if we change our practice, this is an admission that we were wrong in the past”. 
Just a thought. 

 ”Gender” is often a giveaway word, implying that the writer thinks that sex is a  secondary characteristic. The subject is not “masculine or feminine” but “male or female”.

You beat me too it Alan!

Because they aren’t priests. You’re missing the point: it’s not that women can’t be priests because they can’t do anything in particular that men can do, it’s that they (and un-ordained men, for that matter) can’t do some things because they aren’t priests.

Again, the priesthood – while conferring certain duties and allowing one to do such things as consecrate the Eucharist – is not about, on this most basic level, what you do at all. it’s about what you are.

Perhaps we are fighting for the wrong reason…trying to gain more and worried about territory…based on Metaphors and Myths…we call creeds, dogmas, and beliefs. We are so worried about our Walls, when the world out there are building walls..around, with and without our Great myths. We are busy collecting stones, that we forget the diamond…We fall victims like those dynasties and gods who quarrelled in the old kingdoms of Egypt, where are they now after so many Millenia?  Maybe a better Myth will unite the world.

Equal in dignity, but not identical. An orange is a good as an apple, but only an apple can be made into apple pie. Granted, you can do all kinds of awesome stuff with oranges. But you can’t make apple pie out of em.

It’s a stupid analogy, but as you keep saying that God made us equal as if that is relevant to the argument, some sort of stupid analogy was necessary and this was the best I could do in 7 seconds.

Fortunately there’s no need as Rome has already spoken quite clearly in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis 
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_22051994_ordinatio-sacerdotalis_en.html

If the Roman theologians are not restrained by the notion “If we change our practice, this is an admission that we were wrong in the past” then they do not have the courage of their convictions: which they hold not from the mutable secular politics of contemporary culture, but from Divine Tradition inspired by the Holy Spirit. 

Should they change their practice and thereby declare they were “wrong in the past”, then they would be saying that the Holy Spirit was wrong, and therefore taught them wrongly in the past. (Recall St Paul: “God is not ‘yes’ and ‘no’, but “yes, and yes”.)  You cannot call the Holy Spirit–the Spirit of Truth– a liar, and still call yourself a Christian –. If they should do so, then these “theologians” would be hypocrites who misconstrue and compromise the meaning of “ecumenism” to care more for the good opinion of well-meaning but muddle-headed heretics (let’s call a spade a spade here) than adhereing to the truth which they are obliged to teach by word and example.  (As a wag once observed, “Ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free– but it will make you damned uncomfortable first.”)  That the tradition of celibacy differs from the Eastern to the Western Church matters not– the charism and discipline of priestly celibacy was a Divine gift to the Western Church which was not needed by the Eastern Church. (Why this should be is a theology in itself, and another discussion.) What is relevant is that both Eastern and Western Churches have never been able to justify, by the inspiration and teaching of the Holy Spirit, women priests or bishops.  

For anyone who holds that it is against the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to ordain women priests and bishops, it is not only illogical but cowardly and morally wrong to remain in a heretical denomination which endorses female “ordination.”  

If the shoe fits, then put it on and walk around in it.   I can respect anybody who does not wish to become part of the Anglican Ordinariate, but prefers to join the Orthodox Church, schismatic as it is by not recognizing the primacy of the see of Peter; The Orthodox have valid sacraments. But to decry female ordination and yet maintain communion –however reluctantly –with those who endorse it is to approve it.  

 ”The essence of wisdom is:  having it, –to put it into action.” –Confucius

Hello, the Ordinariate was a response by the Pope to an approach made by many high ranking  Anglicans wanting communion with Rome while retaining their cultural patrimony.  That’s not “recruiting”, that’s an invitation.  Big difference.  

Christ is the image of the Father.  The difference between a Father and a Mother is that the Father is “active” (initiates) in paternity, and the Mother is “passive” (receptive) in maternity. The priesthood is a vocation which is God’s gift, not an office delegated by democratic decision.

 It’s about recognizing the reality that God has power, and man participates in God’s power by his gift, on his terms, and not by “right.”  This whole thing about women priests is about the pride of wanting power on feminist rather than Divine terms.  Humility  accepts the gift of vocation on God’s terms–and the same God who gives the gift of gender, gives priestly vocations to males; so however much a woman desires to be a priest, she can be sure that if she had been intended for the priesthood, God would have created her a male.  The priest is the image of Christ, who is the image of the Father.   

Having the Pope as the vicar and symbol of Christian unity makes things so much simpler, and makes so much sense !

Amen!

Gaudete In Domino Semper!

I’m perfectly happy with “male or female”.  And there are of course very pronounced male and female characteristics.  I just don’t see, however, the case for imposing a blanket ban on at least half the Catholic population.  I accept that change in this area is most unlikely in the forseeable future; I heard one of my heroes, the scripture scholar the late Fr. Raymond Brown, who probably privately favoured women’s ordination though he would never have said so publicly, say it would not happen for the simple reason that it would split the Church.

I am one of three ex-anglicans being received into the Ordinariate on Friday 17th February in response to that “great, imaginative act of kindness” which you speak of. We were at the 1st anniversary celebrations of the formation of the Ordinariate  on 15th January at St James, Spanish Place.  There is no other choice.

The thing is that the Levitical model was one based on sacrifice. Just like the priesthood is. 

Jesus is the only true priests, others are his ministers who make present his sacrifice for the world.

The difference here is that the Mass is not a bloody sacrifice.

I was received into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil 2011 (without the protection of the Ordinariate) – best thing I have ever done! As Sister Anna of the Salvation Army sings “Come and join us, come and joins us).

Alan, you mean perhaps the formula, Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus (“Outside the Church [there is] no salvation”). I do not agree that this received a different meaning. I would say that the understanding of this dictum has become more nuanced, but not in such a way that it contradicted the less nuanced interpretation. That is organic development or evolution rather than modernist transignification.

“A mother or nun by definition are female. However monks and fathers are their male equivalent and it can be argued that they can do just as good a job.”When I held my cousin’s baby once in my, man’s, arms, the poor hungry tot started looking for a full tit but alas, could not find it. I do not know if you will believe this but nursing is a mother’s “job” and more to it, the fathers, by design, are not good at it. Here is something to ponder about – babies taken care of by the “male equivalent of mothers” have higher mortality rates [and I am not hinting at "the shaken baby syndrome"]. I could say that fanatical “egalitarians” [you as well ?] have been guilty, by their accomplishments of the social re-engineering, of countless deaths of babies. Even a hardcore feminist, aside from the infernal case of a jewish radical marxist feminist, once she has a baby and the reality of it hits her, will say that she is more “in tune” with her child and can see and hear and feel what her male partner does not; she would even say can not. It is a catholic, “thomist” teaching that human reason can discern, from the nature and the world, the work and the mind of the Creator. For as long as mankind existed there existed also “the natural knowledge”; it was commonly obvious that men and women are different from each other, that they have different roles within families and societies. The ancients would laugh at our stupid ideologies of equality. They would see us as deranged, as those who do not see the plain truth.
A woman cannot be a priest, if you deny this then you deny her femininity, you deny that she has the right to be in her role as a woman, that she has her own mental world and her own psychology of being. On the other hand a woman can be a priestess [but she would be in a pagan error], or a witch [the same as the previous and worse]; the history is full of the ancient examples of the priestesses of this or that goddess.
“Equality for women” is the devil’s advocacy for the blowing up of the Church. Their “cause” goes hands in hands with the bombs of the infanticide/abortion and of the “way of Sodom”. 
The fuses of the bombs underneath the protestant structures are already lit. They were built on sand and not on the rock and so will not withstand the blast.

In case any Catholic Anglican wants to cross over the Tiber, I would suggest to him to cross it over through Ponte Milvio.