Women Priests: Destruction of the Church

Posted on November 17, 2022 by Father Joe

OBJECTION

Anglican women now serve as both priests and bishops. They preach well from pulpits and administer the Eucharist and other sacraments. It is evident that the Holy Spirit enables and empowers their efforts. Their church has been enriched, not impoverished, by their contribution. We as Catholics should be ashamed of ourselves for dismissing the calling to ministry that women have received.

RESPONSE

How can you suggest that the experience of the Anglican “communion” has made this concern mute? Their church is dying, the priesthood and Mass are dubious, and heresy is rampant. The Episcopalian Australians have even pushed for an eradication of the priesthood altogether in allowing laity to preside at the Eucharist. The matter of women priests is tearing what ecclesial reality they possess to pieces. Their dire situation provides further evidence that the Catholic view is true. Their orders are null-and-void. Now many of their most devout and intelligent thinkers are agreeing with us. Indeed, their inrush into the Catholic Church raises fears about the possible restoration of the old anti-Catholic laws in England.

You wrongly claim that the heretics did the right thing in ordaining women. But their reasoning was false. Their appeal was more to a contemporary assessment of social justice than to revelation. Many of those seeking to justify the change in discipline appealed to Gnostic writings and a heretical interpretation of Galatians. They negated the value of the incarnation of Christ and disavowed his masculinity as having any role in his saving actions. They would also make unsubstantiated jumps in reasoning based upon frivolous arguments and suspect data, i.e. assuming that women referenced in apostolic communities were themselves apostles.

The Anglicans reduce the faith to well-performed ritual and the recitation of the creed. But when it comes to women priests, they reject the long-standing tradition and the wisdom of such saints as Augustine, John Damascene, and John Chrysostom against women priests. The legacy of the saints is given voice in the new catechism. Once you reject one tenant, the foundation for holding the rest is shattered. Such a faith becomes arbitrary and open to whim. Where is your burden of proof? Many of the Anglicans admitted that they did not have any. They were pressured and they gave in.

Galatians 3:28 is the verse that the Anglican Communion cites for the ordination of women. But the heretical Montanists did the same to rationalize their inclusion of women as priests and bishops. The truly catholic and orthodox churches saw through this deception. What applied to the baptismal priesthood of all believers could not be sustained for the ordained priesthood given the witness of Christ and that of the apostles, including St. Paul.

My doubts made the priestly ministry increasingly burdensome and problematic. As a heterosexual, Bible-believing, Anglican Traditionalist, I found no affirmation in the Episcopal Church as it moved toward a radical revision of the Gospel, setting aside the Apostolic Tradition for its social justice agenda. Evidence of Anglican departure from the tradition is self-evident. Until 1976, even though a negative verdict had been rendered about the overall status of apostolic succession in Anglican orders due to Cranmer’s defective ordination rite in the Ordinal of 1550, only men were ordained to holy orders. The negative verdict of Apostolicae Curae (1896) had been mitigated or put into question because of the later participation of orthodox and Old Catholic bishops at certain Anglican ordinations. The Ordinal had also been corrected. Nevertheless, a second break arguably occurs in the modern era at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church when a vote is made to ordain women against the constant teaching of the Fathers and the Bible. Despite Ecumenical gestures by Roman Catholicism, everything was spurned so that women might be made clergy. Forcing this question upon the Catholic Church, Pope St. John Paul II closed the door to women priests with Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994). The Church does not have the authority to change the tradition handed down from Christ.

Error builds upon error and the first woman ordained to the Anglican priesthood in the U.S. was a professed lesbian. Later the floodgates would open the priesthood to active homosexuals. Indeed, the chief bishop for the U.S. was at one point a man who left his wife for his homosexual lover. Anglicans had reduced what was a gift of God to one of many supposed rights in a social justice agenda.

Turning to Catholicism, we see something of this association between women’s ordination and lesbianism with the likes of the ex-nun and pseudo Catholic priestess Victoria Rue who tags herself as a “lesbian-feminist.” While she regards herself as Catholic, she is only invited to celebrate liturgies in Episcopal churches. All these so-called “Catholic” women-priests are in truth now Protestants. It is also my understanding that they are excommunicated, as is any legitimate Roman Catholic priest (male) that is involved with their fictional ordinations or consecrations as clergy. The ordination was attempted by former nun Christine Mayr–Lumetsberger, former nun Patricia Fresen, and Gisela Forster (a matronly wife and mother). They themselves claimed their spurious orders from the renegade Catholic Argentine Bishop Rómulo Antonio Braschi who joined a made-up church called the Catholic Apostolic Charismatic Church of Jesus the King.

Renewed demands for the ordination of women as priests in Catholicism echoes the developments in the Episcopalian churches. Indeed, I am particularly worried that the new rallying cry for a synodal Church might hijack Pope Francis’ overture so as to transform a hierarchical body and make it democratic. However, such runs against the grain of the Church’s institution by our Lord. The truths of God are passed down from God and do not emerge from a consensus of people (weighted toward dissenters) who desire to vote their whims.

The values of a secular humanist society are increasing asserting themselves against the Judeo-Christian teachings of the Church. All this plays into the movement for women priests. It is demanded by radical Marxist feminists who find themselves problematic bedfellows with the current gender dysphoria that is being forced upon us as normative and elective. While there is a pick-and choose style when it comes to the sources of revelation, there is an irony that St. Paul’s writings are used to promote women priests while they absolutely despise his moral exhortations and his demand for women to be silent in the churches. Scripture and Tradition are distorted and even rejected by the supporters of women’s ordination. They stamp as patriarchal and sinful the teachings of living popes and dead saints (including the Church fathers) that condemn women’s ordination as impossible. They argue that the priest shortage demands the ordination of women even though women’s vocations have been even more severely retarded and many ancient orders are disappearing. As a symptom of their clericalization of the Church, they also tend to dismiss the good and vital work that many lay women do for the faith, especially in parishes and schools. If there is not an outright hatred and distrust of men, there is nevertheless a tendency to gather like-minded women and to alienate men as co-workers in ministry or even in the pews. The Anglicans have seen vocations for men wither in the wake of women entering their priesthood. Men are forced out. This is deliberate as an effort, they claim, to make up for past imbalance and injustice. The intrusion of a woman as a feigned priest distorts the meaning of the liturgy and invalidates both the Mass as a sacrifice and the Eucharist as the real presence of Jesus Christ.