Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

I'd love him to say no to all the dogma and rules, too .. lol, even searched just now 'could Pope Francis have stopped the excommunication of Reynold's?' .. maybe he could have .. and .. wow .. if he had, and that had then been reported how FUNTASTICO it would it have been!!! .. lolol ..but if he were that much of a rebel, of course he would never had a chance of being the Pope which .. don't know about his whole career, but would guess for some time he probably has been thinking about, anyone who gets there probably would have been .. thing is, as has been said many times by many people now over time, he is a Catholic and they are a very conservative religion .. and they have a terrible history .. still do .. for sure he has not rebelled nearly as much as many others still in the church have .. that's for sure, as if he were anywhere near that mode, to be elected Pope he would have had to fool most everyone .. even if he were the guy who might eg allow disobedience, or disrespect to the Eucharist, he would have had to be totally dishonest about many things .. as you i sure wish he would take some action against that Bernard Law guy, and others like him .. most anyone would except Law, the others and their supporters .. i really do appreciate your position .. lol .. it's one i could easily take .. my choosing not to does not mean i don't feel as strongly as you do about all of that stuff, am not letting Bergoglia of the hook for any of it .. it just means that in looking at Pope Francis i choose .. lol .. because it helps me to feel better .. to hope for, and to acknowledge some good things about him which could make a difference over time in the institution he leads .. so that's my rant on that .. :) .. oh, on the above mentioned search i got this one ..

Sucker Punched by the New Pope?

September 26, 2013 at 1:32 pm

The following is a somewhat revised version of my article that appeared on .. http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/7320/aussie_priest_is_excommunicated_for_support_of_women_s_ordination/ .. Religion Dispatches .. http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/7320/aussie_priest_is_excommunicated_for_support_of_women_s_ordination/ .. last night. There’s a reason I’m an academic and not a journalist: attending to the twenty-four hour news cycle makes me a nervous wreck. Minutes after I mailed my article to RD, in which I suggested that Pope Francis’s Latin American upbringing might have contributed to his attitude toward women, an email appeared announcing that Francis had denounced machismo in his interview published in fifteen Jesuit publications last week. Once this post is up, I’m going back to my research.

Sucker Punched by the New Pope?

Soon, many optimistic, not to say naïve, Catholics—and Protestants—will be shocked to learn that the kindly new Pope Francis has excommunicated an Australian priest .. http://ncronline.org/news/global/australian-priest-advocate-womens-ordination-excommunicated .. for supporting women’s ordination. Perhaps it’s all right to be obsessed with some pelvic issues after all.

According to the National Catholic Reporter, Rev. Gregory Reynolds, of Melbourne, was notified on September 18 that he had “incurred latae sententiae excommunication for throwing away the consecrated host or retaining it ‘for a sacrilegious purpose’” (Somebody in Reynolds’s small Eucharistic community had apparently given the host to a dog) as well as for “speaking publicly against church teaching.” A letter to the priests of the archdiocese clarified that Reynolds’s support of women’s ordination was a primary reason for his excommunication.

I am not among those shocked by this development. As enthusiastic commentary about the new pope flowed out from the media in recent weeks, I was reminded of a comment my husband used to make about the police in Philadelphia back when we lived there. Some poor kid shoplifted something and BAM, there’d be three police cars surrounding him. “These boys don’t play,” my hubby would say. Neither do popes and cardinals, no matter how benign they seem.

Other Catholic feminists—Mary Hunt .. http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/7313/what_the_church_needs_more_than_a__good_pope_/ , for example—expressed wariness of the new pope even before Reynolds’s excommunication. It was not lost on us that even in the first interview, on the plane from Brazil .. http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-holds-press-conference-on-flight-back-from-br , Pope Francis drew the line at women’s ordination. Indeed, the clear hierarchical distinction between genders underpinned by the refusal to ordain women has been the line in the sand since just after the Roman persecution of the church. But since John Paul II’s 1994 statement declaring women’s ordination absolutely off-limits, it’s been a twofer: something the church “has always taught,” and an example of “papal infallibility.” Never mind that papal infallibility applies only to church doctrine; no pope is going to undercut his own authority.

Of course, the boys’ declaring women’s ordination the line in the sand is something just this side of a death wish for the church. Despite attempts to obscure the fact, the men now in seminaries can’t begin to replace the priests retiring and dying, or to reverse the parish closings that necessarily follow. I have been arguing for forty years that women’s ordination is a fundamentally conservative issue; I cannot tell you how many Catholic women I know who would have been perfectly happy living their lives as grunt parish priests, baptizing and marrying and burying people. Instead, they’re picketing cathedrals, or writing articles for Religion Dispatches.

Of course, Pope Francis’s position on women’s ordination doesn’t mean he won’t initiate other more moderate reforms in the Catholic church. Indeed, his position on this issue may well be an olive branch to the conservative wing of the church so as to be able to introduce other changes. Pope Bergoglio is a strategic centrist; in Argentina he proposed civil unions as a compromise between the right-wing bishops on one side and the Kirchner government’s efforts to legalize gay marriage on the other

Then again, describing Pope Francis as a “strategic centrist” may credit him and the rest of the institutional church with more coherence than is warranted. I concluded a previous version of this article with speculation that Pope Francis’s origins in a machismo culture played some role in his excommunication of Rev. Reynolds. Just after I mailed it to Religion Dispatches,, an NCR blog by Phyllis Zagano .. http://ncronline.org/blogs/just-catholic/what-pope-really-said .. appeared in my inbox. Francis had apparently spoken negatively about machismo in the original Italian version of his famous interview published last week by fifteen Jesuit journals. But somehow, the English version published in the Jesuits’ America magazine omitted the statement. Since then, America has apologized .. http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/america-apologizes-omission-francis-interview .

Maybe the pope sucker punched us by excommunicating Father Reynolds. Maybe he knew nothing about it. Maybe we’ll get a kiss tomorrow. Stay tuned.

http://marianronan.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/sucker-punched-by-the-new-pope/

.. seriously .. sometimes putting all negatives aside even momentarily helps me feel better .. so i do it .. LOLOL ..