Charlotte-Therese på A Catholic Renewal kommenterar och konstaterar att ordvalet i Vatikanens skrivelse är oklart och svävande. Hos henne kan du läsa hela skrivelsen, plus de prästvigda kvinnornas svar. Saxat ur det senare:
Nu tänker någon att det var ju precis så som Missionsprovinsen gjorde: innan de mer eller mindre ofrivilligt blev eget samfund vigde de egna präster och biskopar. Företrädare har också dragit in salighetsfrågan i det hela, dock utan den impact som påven månde ha.
Roman Catholic Womenpriests reject the penalty of excommunication issued by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stating that the “women priests and the bishops who ordain them would be excommunicated ‘latae sententiae.” Roman Catholic Womenpriests are loyal members of the church who stand in the prophetic tradition of holy disobedience to an unjust law that discriminates against women.
We hold up heroic women in the church’s tradition like Hildegard of Bingen, Joan of Arc and St. Theodore Guerin who obeyed God, followed their consciences and withstood hierarchical oppression including interdict, excommunication and death.
In obedience to Jesus, we are disobeying an unjust law. The Catholic Church teaches that a teaching or law of the church is authoritative only if it is “received” by the sensus fidelium, the community of faith. If the community of faith does not accept the law, it has no effect on us. All people have a moral obligation to disobey an unjust law. St. Augustine taught that an unjust law is no law at all. Since 70% of U.S. Catholics favor women’s ordination and a growing majority of Catholics worldwide also favors women’s ordination, we do not “receive” or accept the Church's prohibition against the ordination of women and the church’s continued reliance on sexist metaphors, beliefs and assumptions for denying ordination to women.
Recent scholarship affirms that women were ordained in the first thousand years of the church’s history. The first half of the church’s history provides us with images and accounts of the inclusion of women in Holy Orders that contradict the later prohibition. We are reclaiming this important tradition in order to bring equality and balance, and reconciliation and renewal to the church we love, and to all the holy people of God who have been hurt, marginalized, and ostracized in the name of Jesus Christ, who always and everywhere said, as we do, that ALL ARE WELCOME.
“Roman Catholic Womenpriests are leading the way to a renewed Roman Catholic Church in which the full equality of women will be a reality,” commented Bridget Mary Meehan, U.S. media spokeswoman. “Like Mary Magdalene, apostle to the apostles, and the women deacons, priests and bishops who served in the early centuries of our church, we are offering a model of a renewed priesthood in a community of equals.”
Men skillnaden är ändå klar. Medan förnyelserörelsen inom romersk-katolska kyrkan syftar till att välkomna, balansera och återställa, vill Missionsprovinsen istället utestänga.
Förresten, medan påven fortfarande var kardinal Ratzinger, skrev han så här:
"Over the Pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there still stands one's own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority.”
(Doctrine of Vatican II, volume V, page 134)
