Fr. Z's Blog

A couple days ago (I’ve been busy) Breitbart had a summary of how Hell’s Bible (aka New York Times – “Women See Themselves as Left Out Amid Talk of Change in Catholic Church”) is cooling in regard to the Left’s Pope Francis’ Frenzy.

I’ve been saying all along that, eventually, they would start to turn on him. I also said that it would be women (feminists) who turn on him. Then the women will start putting pressure on weak men to turn on him.

Why will feminists turn on him? Women’s ordination. That’s the (un)holy grail of their agenda. That’s also where they will gain some support only among a few men.

Have a look on your own.

Breitbart:

[…]

Reading through the initial paragraphs of Povoledo’s [Hell’s Bible] article, one cannot help feeling that there is an underlying issue that is waiting to bubble forth.

And there, finally, in paragraph ten, her real point emerges: women’s ordination.

After Francis “opened the door to discussion of women’s status to growing hopes,” he crushed them by not caving on the question of women priests. And so “any debate on the role of women,” writes Povoledo, “is curtailed by one irremovable premise: There is no place for women priests. Pope Francis has rejected such a change outright.”

“This,” said Tina Beattie, [Of the Bitter Pill, aka RU486, aka The Tablet] a professor of Catholic studies at the University of Roehampton in London, “is the most sensitive issue in the Vatican, [well… probably not…] more difficult than so many others because it is fundamental to so many others.”

“We need to make him understand that this is a make-or-break issue for the church,” she added. [No, it really isn’t.  It can’t be, otherwise Christ would have provided for women priests.  He didn’t.  Women can’t be ordained.] “It would be an unbearable blow if he left papacy as he found it with regards to women.” [Unbearable!  Oh the drama!  And Francis certain can influence “the papacy”, just as Pope’s have in the past (e.g., Leo I, Urban VIII, Pius IX, John Paul II) but he can’t change teaching.  Note the fuzzy thinking and confusion of institution and doctrine.]

No matter what else he accomplishes, one concludes, if Francis does not change Church teaching regarding the priesthood, he will leave the papacy “as he found it with regards to women.”  [But he can’t change teaching.]

If only the Roman Catholic Church would become Episcopalian, The New York Times would welcome it as its own. If only the Church would begin to mirror pop culture and keep “pace with the social transformations of secular society,” rather than challenging it, the Left would bestow its unconditional seal of approval.

Povoledo’s arguments, unfortunately, echo the unimaginative refrains of a stagnant subculture that can only envision women’s authentic progress in terms of traditional male roles and categories.  [YES! Again as I have been saying all along, the irony in the feminist desire is that they desire to be approved by men.]

A more creative thinker, the feminist intellectual Lucetta Scaraffia, co-editor of a monthly insert on women and the church distributed by the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, exhibits a deeper understanding of both Pope Francis and the real situation of women in the Church.

According to Scaraffia, Pope Francis “doesn’t want a simply accommodation of the Church to the modern world.” What he hopes to spark is “a profound internal reflection, a ‘conversion’ that goes back to the origins and takes up the uninterrupted thread of the extraordinary role that Jesus gave to women.”

“Christianity,” says Scaraffia, “must reappropriate its specificity: that of having established for the first time in history an equality between men and women.”

[NB…] Six months after Pope Francis’ election, in September 2013, the same Elisabetta Povoledo in the same New York Times waxed rhapsodic over this “surprising” pontiff. “Francis,” she wrote then, “is challenging the status quo of the Roman Catholic Church so determinedly” that some now think the Pope may be preparing the ground “for a more fundamental shift in the direction of the church.”

Alas, this was not to happen, and thus disenchantment was bound to follow. [As the night the day!]

Any pope, no matter how “liberal” he may seem, is essentially conservative, since his job description is to re-proclaim a message that he received and embraced, and of which he is not the master, but the servant. He is not commissioned to invent his own religion, or to announce his own “good news,” but rather the Gospel of Jesus Christ of which he is an unworthy custodian.

The pope is, after all, Catholic.

Keep watching for this in the MSM.

I’ll turn on the moderation queue and let a bunch of comments pile up before releasing them.  That’s way you can react first to the issue rather than each other.  Time for that later.