Vatican says will excommunicate women priests
Posted: Friday, May 30, 2008, 12:39 (BST)
The Vatican issued its most explicit decree so far against the ordination of women priests on Thursday, punishing them and the bishops who try to ordain them with automatic excommunication.
The decree was written by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and published in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, giving it immediate effect.
A Vatican spokesman said the decree made the Church's existing ban on women priests more explicit by clarifying that excommunication would follow all such ordinations.
Excommunication forbids those affected from receiving the sacraments or sharing in acts of public worship.
Rev. Tom Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, said he thought the decree was meant to send a warning to the growing number of Catholics who favour admitting women to the priesthood.
"I think the reason they're doing this is that they've realised there is more and more support among Catholics for ordaining women, and they want to make clear that this is a no-no," Reese said.
The Church says it cannot change the rules banning women from the priesthood because Christ chose only men as his apostles. Church law states that only a baptised male can be made a priest. Proponents of women's ordination say Christ was only acting according to the social norms of his time.
They cite the letters of Saint Paul, some of the earliest texts of Christianity, to show that women played important roles in the early church.
Attempts to ordain women priests are highly unusual. But the archbishop of St. Louis earlier this year declared three women excommunicated after an ordination ceremony in his diocese.
Excommunication is usually "ferendae sententiae", imposed as punishment.
But some offences, including heresy, schism, and laying violent hands on the Pope, are considered so disruptive of ecclesiastical life that they trigger automatic excommunication, or "latae sententiae".
The decree says that women priests and the bishops who ordain them would be excommunicated "latae sententiae".
This was the same excommunication invoked against a renegade African archbishop who also broke Vatican rules when he ordained four married men bishops in 2006.
The archbishop, Emmanuel Milingo, made world headlines in 2001 for getting married himself in Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church at a mass wedding in a New York hotel. His union was never recognised by the Catholic Church.
© Reuters 2009. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
The comments below are readers' personal opinions and are in no way intended to reflect the editorial opinion of Christian Today.
Added: Friday, June 6, 2008, 20:06 (BST)
No one ever said the Vatican was a democracy. Women are nothing in the Catholic Church.
Just baby makers. There is no voice for women at all. I became a Catholic three years ago. The depth of the lack of appreciation was not that evident in the RCIA process. I think it needs to be made more clear before one makes a commitment. Now I see clearly that there is no opportunity for a woman's voice to be heard. The Vatican is an all boy's club. Hopefully Jesus Christ did not feel this way. If he did mean to exclude women from the priesthood, then the statement in the Bible, "In Christ there is no male or female....." simple isn't true.
Pan, Franklin WV USA
Added: Friday, May 30, 2008, 22:58 (BST)
If more and more Catholics are now in favour of women being ordained it demonstrates that the Vatican has not made a good enough argument against it. To result to threats of excommunication is appalling. The Church is so concerned about maintaining its numbers that it does not recognise marriages performed in other denominational churches; it does not recognise the right for people who may have been brought up Catholics who no longer consider themselves so and are now Atheists to be Atheists. It seems that the threat of excommunication is yet another move into scaring people not to revolt and call for change when it is much needed. If only the Catholic Christians, with the support of other denominations, had the courage to stand up to this appalling threat and we recognised ordained women even if it led to excommunication, the Church would be forced to re –think its position. Only if the Church itself felt threatened to lose members would it consider anything different. I think the Catholic Church, not criticising that it does much good, would move away from this belief of its superiority it would realise that excommunicating someone who calls themselves a Catholic would not stop this person from being embraced by other denominations. If someone considers themselves to be a Christian then they are so.
Jany, Australia
