COMMENTARY: From annoying to absurd to downright dangerous

(RNS) The Catholic story du jour is that ordaining a woman is equal to priestly pederasty. Lots of folks are wondering what, exactly, they’re smoking in the Vatican. How could they say something like that? The short answer is the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith asserted its authority over perpetrators of various […]

(RNS) The Catholic story du jour is that ordaining a woman is equal to priestly pederasty. Lots of folks are wondering what, exactly, they’re smoking in the Vatican. How could they say something like that?

The short answer is the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith asserted its authority over perpetrators of various “crimes” against the church, now including “the attempted sacred ordination of a woman.”

The list includes priestly pederasty, violating the seal of the confessional and improper celebration of Eucharist. Even though the document modifies rules promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 2001, it does not come directly from Pope Benedict XVI (though it obviously has his approval).


American Cardinal William Levada, who heads the CDF, signed the new missive, which restates his prior decree against women’s ordination. In both 2007 and now, Levada goes further than even John Paul’s 1994 position that ruled out women as priests.

Now any women’s ordination — including as deacons, which some bishops support — falls in a criminal class equal to the most disgusting aberrations of human behavior attributed to Catholic priests worldwide.

The international headshaking is understandable.

Under the revamped rules, the same level of criminality is attributed to violation of the seal of confession, clerical sex with minors, clerical pornography collections of persons under 14, and ordaining women. In every instance, it seems, the offending cleric could be defrocked.

That’s the front end of the tale. The rest is equally disturbing. What about, say, clerical sex with 19-year-old students or parishioners? What about clerical pornography collections of 15-year-olds, or bestiality?

As Vatican spokesmen and occasional bishops defend the entire document, they are caught up in a maelstrom of apparent misogyny. The intent may have been for canon lawyers to tidy up loose ends here and there, but the result appears to demonstrate that no one with any media smarts had the chance to say, “Wait a minute! Do you hear what you are saying?”

It looks like the Vatican is taking advice from the BP public relations team.

The problem — all the problems, in fact — could probably be avoided by including more women in the mix. Leaving aside the issue of ordaining women, is there not one female canon lawyer who could help? Not one women theologian with a sense of how the media works?


The woman’s view of this latest gaffe is of a complete lack of emotional and intellectual understanding of the world’s empathy toward persons damaged by sexual abuse: the victims, their parents, their siblings and, eventually, their children. Misconduct by priests and bishops is not simply a scandal, it is a pandemic of extreme proportions that threatens to consume and destroy the Catholic Church as a functioning organization.

That destruction will surely follow the combined sinfulness and malfeasance of clerics at every level unless the Vatican addresses its real or perceived anti-woman stance.

Christianity will survive because of the message of Christ, but the Catholic Church is in grave danger, and will remain so, unless and until its leaders figure out how to square Christ’s message — that all people are made in the image and likeness of God — with the ways the pope’s curia acts.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)

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