They’re having Masses on the campus of San Jose State University. But despite appearances, they’re not really Catholic Masses.
A female priest and married male priest presided over a Catholic mass in the Spartan Memorial Chapel Sunday. The purpose of the gathering was to create awareness of a renewed Catholic community that is inclusive to people from all faiths regardless of their gender or sexual orientation.
“The goals of our New Catholic Community are to reverence persons who seek authenticity and inclusion in the worship ceremony, who have experienced divorce and remarriage, who are diverse in sexual orientation, who seek progressive exploration of ideas, who want imagination and daring, who are concerned deeply about God’s creation and how to preserve it and who seek personal and spiritual integrity,” said San Jose State University Professor and female priest Victoria Rue.
Rue claims that they’re not starting a new church: “We are Roman Catholic.” That’s not for you to decide. The very nature of the Catholic Church is such that individuals don’t get to decide what being Catholic means. The Church is a top-down organization starting with the Revelation of the Deposit of Faith by the Trinity. Our personal impulses and thoughts are the very bottom rung of the ladder.
Although she is a professor of religion, Rue seems to be clueless: She claims that female deacons, priests, and bishops were common before the 12th century (what is it with people saying that century was a turning point? I hear that for married priests too). She also claims that the female “bishop” who ordained her was herself validly ordained and thus even though she’s in violation of canon law, she is a valid priest, but only illicit. Um no. See, that female “bishop” is not validly ordained since it is not just canon law that says women can’t be ordained, but infallibly defined dogma.
I’m curious what the local diocese or the Catholic campus ministry has to say about this or what they’re doing to respond to this heresy and faleshood? Anyone want to ask them?
Technorati Tags: Catholic, dissent, doctrine, heterodoxy, liturgy, Mass, ordination
I think this line from the article
Rue, who is a lecturer in comparative religious studies and women’s studies, said she had always wondered why the mass was inclusive only to men.
needs a bit of clarification.
Let’s start with Rue’s book:
Acting Religious: Theatre As Pedagogy in Religious Studies
She is also a playwright.
She teaches theatre.
She participated in the Exploring Religion Through Ritual event in 2001, where she followed a presentation on self-mutiliation described this way:
Preceding the performance was the keynote speaker Richard Schechner, whose address “Self-Inflicted Wounds: Masochism, Art, Religion?” seemed to shock much of the audience.
Schechner, a professor of Performance Studies at New York University, showed a series of graphic slides and video clips of performance artists who bled, punctured, shot or cut themselves. Many audience members left the room during the presentation.
Freshman Kelly McCabe, who attended Schechner’s address for extra credit in her Intro to Modern Western Religion course, described one of the subjects in the video.
“[He] gave himself a crown of thorns by sticking large needles through his entire scalp,” she said. “Nine minutes after he took out the needles and cleaned himself off, he went and gave a sermon explaining his experience. So it wasn’t suicidal, but some of the cases were very close and people were actually passing out from pain and lots of blood. Very graphic. I want[ed] to go cry.”…
“Performance artists serve a purpose by critiquing things we don’t want to feel,” Bailey said.
The conference’s other speakers were not as graphic as Schechner. Bailey named Kathleen Schlough’s near-death-experience session and Victoria Rue’s panel on women conducting Catholic Mass as some of the more popular sessions.
This woman doesn’t want to be a priest. She wants to mock the Catholic Mass!
Not “infalliby DEFINED” dogma.
I agree that it’s infallible and I accept it as a matter of Faith as binding upon myself and all Catholics. I also LIKE it and always believed it, even before the Pope’s declaration.
But he didn’t DEFINE it. He just said the he was declaring that it was infallible as a matter of the ORDINARY Magisterium.
That’s a much-disputed point. In Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, he used the phrase “Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”
No, it’s not a disputed point. What IS a disputed by point (by some, not by me) is whether it is infallible at all.
What ISN’T disputed is that the Pope goes out of his way precisely (if you read the rest of Ordinatio) NOT to define but to DECLARE that the doctrine is ALREADY infallible as part of the ORDINARY Magisterium. Definitions, as you know, Dom, are EXTRAORDINARY excercises of the magisterium.
Here is how Cardinal Ratzinger and CDF officially explained it in the answer to a dubium(my caps for emphasis):
“This teaching requires definitive assent, SINCE, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, IT HAS BEEN SET FORTH INFALLIBLY BY THE *ORDINARY* AND UNIVERSAL MAGISTERIUM (cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium 25, 2). Thus, in the present circumstances, the Roman Pontiff, exercising his proper office of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32), has handed on this same teaching by a formal declaration, explicitly stating what is to be held always, everywhere, and by all, as belonging to the deposit of the faith.”
Dom probably remembers this from theology, but for anyone else who wants a definition:
“Dogma” consists of those doctrines that (the Church holds) are revealed by God. Since God has revealed them, believing them is a matter of faith in God.
One believes them not as a consequence of believing in some other doctrine: e.g., the Church’s infallibility, but more directly: by exercising the supernatural virtue of faith in relation to God. These divinely revealed doctrines constitute the Catholic religion, and they are called doctrines “of the Catholic faith” (“de fide catholica”).
These are the doctrines one pledges to hold in one’s baptismal vows. To deny (or to obstinately doubt) one of them constitutes heresy.
So how many offenses against church law are these two accumulating?
To start with, they’re failing to assent to the doctrine declared in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, and they’re encouraging others to dissent similarly.
The married priest is celebrating Mass illicitly; the theater lady is simulating a sacrament; she already simulated receiving a sacrament (her claimed ordinations); he’s attempting to concelebrate Mass with a lay person; when she submitted to ordination rites in a non-Catholic sect, she (arguably) defected publicly from the Catholic Church: that is, committed schism; by refusing submission to the bishop in a grave matter regarding the unity of the Church, it seems they’re both committing schism.
They must be going for some kind of record!