Comment by lukan

1 hour ago

"It is, therefore, not enough to state simply that men and women have equal dignity and rights; it is necessary that this be reflected in concrete decisions, such as in laws, access to employment, education, social and political responsibilities, and the way society listens to and values women’s contributions. As long as this gap persists, we cannot say that society truly and fully recognizes that women have the same dignity as men."

So ... women should have the same dignity as men and should get the same access to "employment, education, social and political responsibilities". But of course they cannot be trusted with spiritual matters, so they cannot become priests. In other words, to me this is still the same old hypocrisy that made me leave that institution and also today make me deeply distrust any words of wisdom coming from there.

Your argument is a bit stretched. Women had and have a principal role in catholicism, the fact that cannot be priest is not that important or seen as discrimination.

  • Oh my, I assume you are male?

    Just declaring the discrimination to be "not that important" is quite typical then (as it does not affect you) and well, my catholic aunt would disagree, but she is not important.

    May I ask, what the principal role of women is in catholocism, besides being good mothers?

You speak as if the Pope can just change that unilaterally, with no cost.

Now, I don't know if Pope Leo actually believes in the full equality of men and women or if he's really being a hypocrite here. It's fully possible that you're absolutely right to scoff at him for it.

But the thing is, the limitation of priesthood to men in the Roman Catholic Church is such a deeply ingrained thing, it would be very, very hard for a single Pope to change it, especially early on in his papacy. If one wanted to, one of the first things he'd have to do would be...

...why, it would be to release an encyclical talking about the equality of men and women. Whether that was its core message or not.

  • Yes, I am aware of that. And I don't know much about the current pope, but he seems progressive and can only go step by step, like Franziskus.

    What I do know is, that a main motivation to introduce the celibate, was that priests don't inherit church land to their offspring anymore.

    In other words, I applaud reforming what is possible, but I would not want that job as hypocrasy seems required. Because on the other hand all this should be gods own unique church and I could not preach that, while knowing about all the well, human compromises so to say.