OPINION: Christianity, women and the major inconsistencies
THE priests and women issues within the Christian churches are in focus again, with a Roman Catholic resigning for love and marriage and the place of women ministers within Protestantism in the melting pot. News Letter contributor VICTOR GORDON highlights the inconsistencies of the controversy.
ONE of my favourite church-related stories goes back to July 1999 when I was in Canada with a Co Armagh community organisation.
I was in the pew in a Toronto Church beside an Orangeman who was becoming increasingly agitated as the priest conducted the proceedings.
"This is a Roman Catholic Church," my loyal friend declared as the wine cup was held high and the wafers were displayed in anticipation of Holy Communion.
"I'm getting out of here."
I assured him it was obviously a Protestant service, and then we were invited to partake in the Sacraments, drinking from the goblet and having the wafers placed on our tongues.
And just as the Orange Brother rose to make his exit, I whispered: "How can it possibly be an RC service? The priest is a WOMAN!" It was, in fact, a High Anglican Church. A broad smile illuminated his face, he joined the Communicants and then sat back to enjoy the service.
"She's a right good-looker, too," he enthused.
Not everyone is quite so delighted with women clerics, notably the Catholic Church where, not only are they barred from the priesthood, but priests are not permitted to marry, therefore restricting their numbers more and more as time goes by.
A Catholic member of the aforementioned community group told me it had been his early life's ambition to become a priest, but his girlfriend – long since his wife – is the love of his life and the priesthood was abandoned. He commented: "Literally thousands of people like myself have been lost to the priesthood. Celibacy is a man-made rule, hundreds of years out of date. I couldn't imagine life without my wife and family."
The RC Church has lost many good men and true like Fr Sean McKenna of Londonderry who has plumped for love and marriage. And as priests become older and fewer, the time has surely come to re-think the policy. It's one of those antediluvian rules that belong in the Middle Ages and are so difficult to erase from the Statute Books.
It's ironic that the Vatican is willing to bend the rules to accommodate the anti-women-bishops' rump of the Anglican Church and admit them to the RC fold, evidently ignoring the fact that many of them are married.
My own church – Presbyterianism – isn't without its controversies on the gender issue, trying to ride two horses at the same time. Some 2,000 years after the Apostle Paul made his "she is to keep silent" proclamation on women (1 Timothy 2:12), Presbyterianism doesn't quite know where it is headed.
Women were accepted as ministers in the 1970s, but in the 1990s, a pressure group of male clerics engineered the opt-out clause and can therefore ban women ministers from their pulpits. Try banning women in any profession in the real world...
Let me declare a personal interest in this one. I'm a member of Armagh Road Presbyterian Church in Portadown whose minister the Rev Christine Bradley was famously excluded from the pulpit of First Portadown for the traditional inter-church Christmas service by the Rev Stafford Carson (since made Moderator). My newspaper reports didn’t go down too well with either congregation as I castigated both – First Portadown for their “banning order” and Armagh Road for refusing a reasonable compromise.
Methodism and the Church of Ireland, meantime, seem to have accepted the fair sex into their pulpits without too much controversy, although the same cannot be said for the evangelical wing of Protestantism where the main raison d’tre of the ladies seems to be the making of tea and sandwiches, the wearing of hats and the singing of hymns and sacred songs in the choir, making up soprano and alto sections.
And therein lies another inconsistency. If – as St Paul said – “women should remain silent in churches” (1 Corinthians 14), how come they’re allowed to make a joyful sound inside (and outside) the choir stalls?
I once put this point to a Presbyterian minister from the traditional wing of the Church – a man who refused to allow a female student of the ministry (she was baptised and brought up in his church) anywhere near his pulpit.
“The singing issue is going too far,” he protested.
Indeed it is. But then, if you take the words of St Paul literally, women mustn’t make a murmur in churches.
Which simply serves to highlight the glaring inconsistencies throughout Christianity.
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Tuesday 14 February 2012
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