Equal does not mean the same.

Recently, I got into a bit of a heated debate in the blogosphere.  Some British article in some online rag said the Catholic Church was still practicing "misogyny" because it refuses to ordain women to the priesthood. They said things like the Catholic Church was "recruiting" Anglicans who didn't like the idea of female or openly gay married priests and that just because the Church may have been successful in recruiting these lost sheep, that doesn't mean it validates the Church's "misogynistic" position and they better think again if they believe it does! I'm paraphrasing but it was something to that effect.
The article itself was rather silly and poor journalism at its' finest. First of all, the Catholic Church didn't "recruit" these Anglican congregations. These congregations approached Pope Benedict XVI saying they wanted to be taken into the Catholic Church as a whole congregation and still wanted to keep some of their Anglican liturgy and the Pope said, (paraphrasing again,) "O.k. we'll figure something out so that you can keep your liturgy and congregation together but still be in keeping and in Communion with the Roman Catholic Church...."

And the Pope did just that. Even the Anglican priests will still be able to remain as priests with some further education, I believe. Not too sure how that works out.

However, this isn't about Anglican congregations becoming Catholic. Somehow this issue was yet another opportunity to bash the Catholic Church with erroneous charges.

A blogger pointed out the idiocy of this nasty article and people commented on it. I found myself in a debate with two that were sympathetic to the Catholic bashing article. They went on to say how the article was correct on every count and that we are all "equal" in Christ's eyes and it was "shameful" that the Catholic Church doesn't ordain women priests but instead treats them as "second class" citizens. They also thought it was "ridiculous" that there was all this "bickering" inside the Church about whether or not women should be priests when there's all this poverty, natural disasters, wars etc etc...
So, I felt a calling to defend my Mother Church. I pointed out that the bickering appears to be outside the Catholic Church since that was in fact what this article was doing: Bickering about the affairs of the Catholic Church. I also pointed out that as far as world problems go, the Catholic Church is smack dab in the middle of poverty, natural disasters, wars etc. I openly wondered if the writer and Church bashing commentators would care to venture over to Dar fur, Sudan or the Congo, or just about any other war torn, poverty stricken, natural disaster ravaged place where many Catholic religious and lay people are serving the poor and destitute and risking their lives doing so. I explained that the Catholic Church is not anti-women and that equality does not mean sameness. Men and women have different roles in the Church and in life. One is not better than the other. I explained that Jesus was a man and He appointed 12 men to be His apostles to lead His Church. These men would be His representatives when He left the earth. They in turn handed this authority over to more men. Not because men are superior. Mothers aren't fathers and fathers aren't mothers. Both are equally important. Equal does not mean the same.Somehow acknowledging this fact that Jesus is a man and He appointed only men to lead his Church meant I was "selling out my gender." I thought I was just stating the obvious. I mean, if Jesus wanted to appoint women to lead His Church, He could have done that. It wasn't like He was afraid of being crucified for it...That and He is God!.

I was also told that it wasn't just people outside the Church but that there were "many" inside the Church that "passionately" disagreed. She pointed me to some article,(we all know how kind and "fair" the media is to the Church...) about how there was over a hundred nuns petitioning the Church to ordain women priests. This woman also pointed me to a website that is for the cause of ordaining women priests in the Catholic Church, (Ooh a website! Must mean they have clout if they have a website!)
Somehow, this was supposed to wow me and show how much dissent there was going on in the Church.  Right...there's over 1 billion Catholics in the world with almost 3/4 of a million being nuns. I'm supposed to believe that 100 of those 760,000 plus nuns are a sign of major dissent? I urged her to get a class in statistics. Not that it would matter because the Church isn't some kind of democracy where majority rules and Jesus' teachings on the Truth are subject to change. I had to give her a brief history on heresies in the Church and how some of them such as Arianism had the support of "many" bishops! Praise God, the Church exercised Her God given authority and stomped that heresy out!
Also, the Church isn't some corporation that has a "glass ceiling" and there is no "corporate ladder" to climb as these two Church bashers suggested. The priesthood is not a career. It is a vocation. It is a calling for mostly non-married celibate men. The religious order of nuns and sisters is a vocation for non-married celibate women. Marriage is a vocation for lay men and women. Men can't become mothers and sisters, and women can't become fathers and brothers. The Church is a mystical family with spiritual mothers, (Virgin Mary, Mother Superiors, lay mothers...) spiritual fathers, (God, popes, bishops, priests,) spiritual brothers, (religious brothers, lay brothers, Saints,) and spiritual sisters, (religious sisters, lay sisters, Saints,)
A pope, bishop and priest is a spouse of the Bride of Christ-The Church. A nun is the spouse of Jesus. A Catholic lay family is it's own domestic church with father, mother, sons, daughters, grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc...Since the Church doesn't believe in same sex marriages, women can't be the spouse of Mother Church and men can't be the spouse of Jesus Christ. The Church is the mystical family of God. The Church is the mystical body of Christ. Again, not a corporation with a glass ceiling for women to break through. I as a wife and mother wouldn't try to take down my husband so I could be the husband and father. Now that would be just crazy!

I tried to explain this as simply as possible but the Church bashers weren't buying it. One of them told me I suffered from "cognitive dissonance" because I didn't see how 100 out of 760,000 nuns was "many." She also said that Jesus only appointing men to lead His Church as a reason for only men being popes, bishops and priests in the Church today was "ridiculous" because Jesus also only appointed Jewish men. So by that logic, she stated,  it should only be Jewish men following Mosaic law to run the Church today. This woman is apparently a Christian and yet she seemed to have forgotten the council of Jerusalem in Acts 15:1 that said men didn't have to become Jewish and follow Mosaic law to become Christian. Already taken care of right from the start! But somehow this woman knows more than Jesus or the Apostles or the Church Fathers from 16 plus centuries ago. She couldn't believe that I thought people in the Church attempting to ordain women was "heretical." She apparently didn't even know what the word "heretical" meant.(Hint: It means departing or being contrary to Church teaching... )

What baffles me is if people want women priest or ministers, there are plenty of other denomination they could join that could fit their views on the way they think things should be. And if there isn't they could always make one up to add to the pile of 30,000 different Christian denominations, (Although I, along with Jesus do wish we'd be as One!). But even with all these choices, people insist on changing the one institution that has stayed constant in it's teachings for 2000 years.  And praise God, the Catholic Church refuses to have women fathers! Equal does not mean the same!