A Sound of Sheer Silence

[T] he whole body of the Church hath power to alter, with general consent and upon necessary occasions, even the positive laws of the apostles, if there be no command to the contrary, and it manifestly appears to her, that change of times have clearly taken away the very reasons of God's first institution.  --Richard Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book   VII, v, 8 (1594). Last week, the Vatican announced that it would be following through on one of Pope Francis's promises to the world's religious sisters-- to appoint a commission to study the issue of women deacons .  The panel is half men and half women, which is surely a first for the Vatican.  It also includes Phyllis Zagano, who is a well known expert on the issue.  All of that seems positive. Nevertheless, I am skeptical that this commission will produce any useful fruit.  The focus of the commission will be the status of the female diaconate in "the earliest times in the Church." ...

Pope Francis just won't let this complementarity thing die.   He talks about it all the time , in a variety of different ways.  He still talks about "gender ideology," which is terrible (apparently), and now he is talking about the need for an "alliance" between men and women.  To be fair to the Pope, he has repeatedly stated that his view of complementarity does not involve some sort of inherent inferiority of women, which is good.  But, it is still not clear to me exactly what he means by any of this.  And, when people hear him talk about complementarity, or use complementarity-type words, they assume there is some deep coded message about female subservience.   Because that is what complementarity has come to mean on a concrete level . After going back and reading some of my previous posts on complementarity, it seems to me that part of the problem is that we are framing the question wrong.  The question is not "is there such a thing as complemen...

I saw  this story yesterday morning .  I know people who go to Star of the Sea in the Richmond (or, perhaps, know people who used to attend Star of the Sea).  It's a pretty normal parish, in a diverse, residential, middle class (by SF standards) area of the city.  Star of the Sea is no different from a thousand parishes all over the country. In and of itself, this story about whether altar girls will be allowed at Star of the Sea Parish is not of tremendous significance.  Most Catholic parishes do allow altar girls.  Most people don't care much one way or the other. No, I would submit that people who see this story, who have a reaction to this story, are not reacting to the story itself.  They are reacting to the discussion that we are not having, and so they are using this story as a proxy to fight the real battle. Here is the real battle.  For all but a few isolated periods of recorded history, the following things are essentially undeniab...