Dr. William Tighe put me on to this story. I do not have many comments. It may interest you to know that I have know several ELCA women clergy who have likewise renounced the holy grail of women's ordination for which they were once so adamant in order to be a lay woman in the Roman Catholic Church. I report on this because the whole issue of the ordination of women has become a line in the sand for many church bodies. Giving up women clergy is one line that even former ELCAites will not traverse in their journey to leave ELCA and it is the premise for which ELCA meets other church bodies (are they in fellowship with any group which does NOT ordain women?). Likewise Missouri, although, there are nuances of difference in the way we deal with the line we have drawn against it. We stuck with the ALC for a time after they had decided to ordain women and we allowed a transition time for the Finns (I believe it was them) with whom we are connected but who also had a few women priests.
Anyway you can read the article here, written about 3 years after the fact. It is not the reactionary statement of someone justifying their decision to jump ship but rather the descriptive words of one who is comfortable in her new home....
Read it all here...
6 comments:
Though you may disagree with the practice scripturally and theologically, the respectful term, I believe, is still priest and "priestess" (and bishop not "bishopess" in reference to a comment from another post).
Myself I like "priestitute".
When I was a preconciliar RC kid, we were taught to call EO priests "Father" (a GO parish was across the street) because they are indeed priests, and call Episcopal priests "Father" too as a mark of respect for their beliefs and standing in the community but remembering they are not really priests.
Years later, when the ECUSA began having women priests, I remember asking the Episcopal owner of the mostly Catholic bookstore (sic) in town if the new priests should be called "Mother".
I was much pluckier in those days, by contrast to my characteristically placid and irenic self now.
Lutheran pastors were never referred to as "Father" by anybody, Lutherans and non-Lutherans alike.
The key excerpt from the article is: “She also had the humility and insight to recognize in her former role “the temptation to potestas”, adding: “That was the moment when I realized that I was called by God to move to a Church where I could not exercise dominion of any sort, but where I could still learn what servant priesthood actually meant when put into practice.”
I think she has pointed out something that many of us have suspected in the movements to first introduce female clergy and then homosexual clergy; which is that acquiring power through coercion seems to me to be as much the goal and motivation as fighting for one particular groups rights. Miriam and Aaron’s rebellion wasn’t about equality it was about pride, jealousy and the desire for power. When this usurpation is attempted today it is often in the guise of egalitarian suppositions, in that our individual whims are always worthy of being indulged and cultivated simply because they are our individual whims.
we allowed a transition time for the Finns (I believe it was them)
The Latvians, I think. The Church of Latvia is, as far as I know, the only Church body ever to have begun the ordination of women and then repented of it. The Church of Finland, on the other hand, is rabidly in favor of WO, to the point where no one who dissents from it can be ordained or assigned to a parish.
Of course, Bill Tighe has the goods on all of this.
Yes, you are right it was the Latvians...
As for me, I use the terms "deaconette" (for a purported "female deacon" but nor for a deaconess), "priestess" and "flaminica" (for a purported "female bishop").
And Chris Jones was right; it was the Latvians. I have long been a bit puzzled by the Missouri Synod's acceptance of Altar and Pulpit Fellowship with the small Lithuanian Lutheran Church -- a body which has never purported to "ordain" women, but which is a full member of the "Porvoo Communion" of grossly liberal and woman-ordaining bodies as the Church of England and the Anglican churches in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and the Lutheran churches of Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden -- and the Danish Church is about to join it as well. The Latvian Lutheran Church, by contrast, declined to become a member in 1995, and has not reconsidered its decision since that time.
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