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Seeing Darkly

"'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'"  --from Through a Looking Glass Darkly

The Catholic Church, Katherine Thomas writes in the Star-Tribune, "does not manufacture what is true, but looks at the way things are,  the way God has given them to us."  Then the Church tell us what is true; neither more nor less.

The Church says that Christ did not allow women to be ordained.  Women are not ordained in the Bible.  The Apostles, all, were men.  There you are!  The Church cannot allow the ordination of women to the priesthood, because it didn't do it before.  That is the way things are!

About forty years ago, in Fremont, California, I went from door to door to find people who might be interested in going to church.  "No," a woman told me, she wasn't interested.  Her family drove up to Oakland to attend church.  Just to make conversation before I thanked her and left, I asked why they went so far.  She explained that the local churches all had pianos and organs and such musical instruments, and that they weren't biblical.  There are no pipe organs in the Bible!

"How," I asked her, "do you get up to Oakland?"  "We have a car!", she said.

There are no popes in the Bible, either (begging your pardon, Peter!).  There are no Cardinals, or aspirins, or airplanes or cell phones.

We have a terrible desire not to have to think; not to slog our way through the rough thickets of moral dilemmas, but to just get an answer!  It is when the thickets are the thorniest that we most want a simple answer:  an authority.  "This is the way it is!  Jesus never married!  The Apostles were men!  And since the year 600 A.D., or so, priests are required to be celibate, except when they aren't!"

"When I say, 'priest', it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."  Humpty Dumpty said, darkly.

If we are to assume that the way things are is the way they ought to be, we shall have to be very careful about where we look, and when, to see how things are.  Katherine Thomas is quite right that the first century A.D., or the fourth century, or the sixteenth century A.D. was a man's world.  Only recently have we, here in the United States, been able to get rid of open slavery, and even that is dubious.  Evidence for sex slavery, and the sexual brutalization of young boys, even in the church, are sickening.  Shall we go to war because we have always gone to war?  Should we really get rid of the pipe organs and orchestras because Moses and St. Paul never took music lessons?

To settle ethical arguments by citing ancient authority is only to accept ancient practice.  There is no substitute for hard and frustrating thought.

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