Priest in trouble after ordination comments

I read this morning that

THE future of a Western Port parish priest hangs in the balance after he went public with his view that women should be ordained in the Catholic Church.

Father Greg Reynolds, based at The Immaculate Conception church in Hastings, whose parish stretches from Somerville to Flinders, made his assertions in a homily during weekend Mass two months ago.

“I believe certain women are being called by God to the ministerial priesthood and our official church is obstructing the work of the Holy Spirit.

“I feel I can no longer sit back and remain silent,” he said in his homily.

It was reported in The Age last week that he sent a copy to Archbishop Denis Hart, head of the Catholic Church in Melbourne, to save his parishioners the trouble.

I cringe a little bit when I read that this man believes that god tells him what he thinks on women’s ordinations, but let’s just ignore that for the moment.Does this priest not read the official press releases of his cult ? It’s only been 4 months that the Catholic Church, when announcing tougher policies on pedophile priests, in the same announcement called the ordination of women a “grave crime”.
The current “reasoning” in the Catholic Church with regards to women’s ordinations is clarified in the apostolic letter ORDINATIO SACERDOTALIS by John Paul II, from 1994.Here’s the RCC’s argument in a nutshell :

When the question of the ordination of women arose in the Anglican Communion, Pope Paul VI, out of fidelity to his office of safeguarding the Apostolic Tradition, and also with a view to removing a new obstacle placed in the way of Christian unity, reminded Anglicans of the position of the Catholic Church: “She holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons. These reasons include: the example recorded in the Sacred Scriptures of Christ choosing his Apostles only from among men; the constant practice of the Church, which has imitated Christ in choosing only men; and her living teaching authority which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God’s plan for his Church.”(1)

and:

“In calling only men as his Apostles, Christ acted in a completely free and sovereign manner. In doing so, he exercised the same freedom with which, in all his behavior, he emphasized the dignity and the vocation of women, without conforming to the prevailing customs and to the traditions sanctioned by the legislation of the time.”(5)

So they make it up as they go along, and base the inequality they espouse on bad translations of stories written decades to centuries after the fact by stone age goatherders.The thing that surprises me most about believers pointing out the inconsistencies and inequalities in scripture, is that they then don’t take the next step and say “no this is rubbish, count me out”, but instead appeal to their bosses, silly old men in robes, to change their interpretation of their holy book.It’s not going to happen.I wonder what kind of response this priest will get from the Archbishop of Melbourne.I suspect it will be something between STFU and GTFO.It’s what the Catholics do with dissenters, since they know that they have no leg to stand on otherwise.Maybe Archbishop Hart hasn’t responded yet because he’s too busy getting Ethics classes banned in NSW.

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