Saturday, August 25, 2012

Cardinal George Encourages Innovation of Liturgical Deaconesses

Women Readers Are Also an Innovation
Edit: despite the evidence to the contrary and the well-established fact that accommodating women in Liturgical roles like Reader [women are still not ordained as Readers although there have been suggestions to make it so], and has a negative effect on new vocations and is wholly an unprecedented innovation, Cardinal George is encouraging a woman to enter into the Deaconate.  He's saying that he will bring up the issue on his visit to Rome.

One nun, however, is discouraging this mistaken notion.  This notion that ordaining women to the Diaconate will ease alleged discontent over the issue is a fatuous one, for when have revolutionaries ever been satisfied with merely a concession.   What's lacking here is an understanding of reality.  Women were never legitimately functional in the Liturgy and they never will be.   A nun from Mundeline puts it this way.

Sister Sara Butler, a professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake Mundelein Seminary, said the role of women deacons in the early church was never the same as that of male deacons. Female deacons had separate duties such as ministering exclusively to women, and they received their ordination in separate rites, she said.

"I don't think there's any precedent for inviting women into the form of permanent diaconate," she said.

Women with ministerial roles also never completely disappeared, she said. Butler believes women deacons morphed into abbesses or leaders in monastic communities.

Link to Monteray County Herald.... 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you, Archbishop Lefebvre. Thank you.
Thank you, Lord for holy Archbishop Lefebvre.

Sir Louis said...

Go to the original story from the Chicago Tribune. The reporter does not claim to have heard Cardinal George say anything of the sort. The reporter only passed on what Cardinal George "reportedly" said, and we would have to think that the report of what he said came from the woman who fancies she will be the first woman in a "restored" female diaconate. Cardinal George declined to comment for the story. I can easily imagine Cardinal George saying something like "Yes, it is certainly time for the speculation to stop. I'll bring it up when I visit Rome." One sees it as an encouragement and endorsement and the start of a dialogue. The speaker, on the other hand, means that he will urge the Pope to say expressly that Ordinatio Sacerdotalis includes any participation in Holy Orders, whether as priest, bishop, or deacon.

Tancred said...

And yet it's perfectly in character for him to say things like that and to allow dissidents to get away with their assortment of transgressions.

I'd love to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he has a long established track record of being hands off, does he not?