The Catholics are in the news again as the make it a sin woman who is ordinate. The woman who have been ordinate will be excommunicated, and not allowed back because the Vatican has made it a grave crime on Par with child abuse. :roll:
Well, first of all I think you're mistaken that these women will not be allowed back into the Church. That just isn't the case, any excommunicant can be readmitted to the Church provided there is sincere repentance. This entails that the excommunicant give up, in this case, the illicit ordination, any woman so ordained will be readmitted a part of the laity, just not as a priest. Also, I haven't read the revision to the norms, but I am given to understand that it is applicable only to the priest who performs the illicit ordination on the woman rather than the illicitly ordained woman herself. Could be wrong about that though.
Secondly, it's really mischaracterizing this addition to canon law to say that it puts female ordination "on par" with child abuse. Nothing of the sort is happening. The attempted ordination of women is a "grave delict" against the sacrament of ordination. I suspect that this is based on a mistranslations.
Catholic News Service said:
Pope John Paul's 2001 document distinguished between two types of "most grave crimes," those committed in the celebration of the sacraments and those committed against morals. Among the sacramental crimes were such things as desecration of the Eucharist and violation of the seal of confession.
Under the new revisions, the "attempted ordination of women" will be listed among those crimes, as a serious violation of the sacrament of holy orders, informed sources said. As such, it will be handled under the procedures set up for investigating "delicta graviora" under the control of the doctrinal congregation.
Catholic New Service
Child abuse is considered a "delictum gravius," literally a "more grave delict." Though I haven't been able to confirm this anywhere, I'm guessing attempted ordination of a woman is "delictum grave" only. But even if it is also "delictum gravius" it only reflects the seriousness of the sin as against the sacrament, not as a crime against morality.
Also, you have to keep in mind that the Church doesn't really have an interest in appeasing the slim segment of mostly European and American liberal Catholics who want to see female ordination. The Church works in geologic time, not in human lifetimes, so I see this as a reaffirmation of the stance on male-only ordination, in the wake of the Anglican decision to the contrary, to appease the vast swaths of conservatives in Africa and Latin America. But at the same time this could be a build up to a move toward allowing priests to marry, which is seen by many as the solution to both the child abuse crisis and the priest shortage.
