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Mount St. Agnes Center Pushes For Female Priests

The Catholic Church’s refusal to ordain women priests is based on false assumptions and erroneous theology, according to Brenda Johnson, a member of the Board of Trustees for the Mount Saint Agnes Theological Center for Women.

Ms. Johnson read her research paper, “A Wake-Up Call for Women’s Ordination,” on May 5 before a dozen attentive women at the center, on Poplar Hill Road in Roland Park.

The paper, which traces the historical development of the Church’s rationale for women’s non-ordination, was the result of the “shock and betrayal” Johnson experienced over the pedophile priest scandal, she said.

Johnson traced “the presumption of female inferiority” to two root sources:  Aristotle, who said that the female has no active role in conception, but merely supplies material, and the story of Creation found in the second and third chapters of Genesis, which says that woman was created from man’s rib, and that she was the first to be tempted and to disobey God.

In spite of such attempts to disparage women, the leadership role of women in the early church was egalitarian, with women serving as deaconesses, Johnson said.

But various Church documents and “the vitriolic indictment of women” by Church Fathers such as Tertullian and Augustine succeeded in restricting women’s role.

By the 5th Century, theologians had created “a caricature of women” that effectively prohibited their ordination, said Johnson.

In the 13th Century Thomas Aquinas replicated many of Augustine’s arguments, blaming women for original sin and temptation.

Woman is naturally subject to man, said Aquinas, because in men, reason predominates.

“Male-advantage dogma” on women’s ordination continues in modern Church documents such as Inter Insigniores (1976), which states that even if the Scholastic doctors often presented arguments that modern thought would have difficulty in accepting, the male-only priesthood has enjoyed universal acceptance, said Johnson.

The document declares that Christ only called men to the priestly order, and that the priest must look like Christ.

But, said Johnson, “Nowhere in the Scripture does Jesus ordain priests; there is no rite of ordination.”

It is quite possible that some of the 70 disciples He called were women, she added.

Finally, John Paul II’s 1994 letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, “attempts to silence the debate” by saying that the Church has no authority to confer priesthood on women.

“The Vatican is scared,” commented the center’s associate director, Diane Caplan, after Johnson’s talk.

The Ordinatio Sacerdotalis “was the first time in history when the Church claimed not to have the authority to do something,” she noted drily.

“We must work on this—what do we do about this?  It’s absolutely untenable!”

Dr. Caplan and Sr. Mary Aquin O’Neill, RSM, founded the Mount Saint Agnes Theological Center for women in 1992 as “a community center where women safely and freely study, interpret, formulate and teach Christian theology,” according to its website, www.msa.women.org.

The “mission” of the center, which is sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy of Baltimore and St. Louis, “is to design strategies and develop a language for realizing equality and fullness of life for women in church and society.”

The center was the subject of a warmly favorable article, “Theological Center Nurtures Women’s Faith,” in the June 29, 2000, Catholic Review.

Documents on the center’s website, however, offer abundant evidence that the center opposes, and works actively to undermine, Church teaching and dogma on faith and morals.

One of the books listed under “Reader’s Corner,” for example, is Sacred Choice:  The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions, in which author Daniel Maguire argues that the world’s religions are open to contraception, and to abortion as a back-up when necessary.

In “Ecclesial Challenges for the Sisters of Mercy in the 21st Century” (Aug. 3-4, 2000) Sister O’Neill says that “many of us are reacting with anger” after the “silencing” by the Vatican of Sr. Jeannine Gramick for her dissenting teaching on homosexuality.

She approvingly quotes former Archbishop Rembert Weakland, one of the most scandalously liberal bishops in America, who resigned in 2002 after the revelation that he paid $450,000 in hush money to an apparent former male lover.

A “Holy Week 1999 Service” contains a litany of invocations to God under the names of pagan goddesses such as “Isis, Giver of Wisdom and Fertility,” “Gaia, Spirit of the Earth,” and “Ishtar, Goddess of Death and Rebirth.”

At an April 21, 2002, “Town meeting” on the pedophile priest scandals, according to the Baltimore Sun, Sister O’Neill, a panelist, received “a thunderous round of applause” after she said, “This crisis offers the Catholic community an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the priesthood” and “to purge our church of a clerical culture which has become dysfunctional at best and scandalous at worst.”