17 July 2010

Oh my (Readers of a delicate persuasion look away now)



What a lot of absolute bilge is about in the press at the moment. I know it's always open season for Catholics, but sometimes it's more than just annoying, and today is one of those days it's got to me.

We have tweets  of the most offensively juvenile kind from a Times reporter (nuff said!), The Suppository performing to its usual standard (warm up the cocoa dears, that last gathering liturgy really must have taken it out of you), and academics who are supposed to have incisive intellects showing themselves to be as ignorant of their own Faith as an average agnostic (I find the penny catechism kind of gives you the flavour of proper Catholicism).


It's very simplistic of me, and probably awfully unsophisticated, but I would really like to know what 'equality' (in the job sense of the word) has to do with religion.






I'm all for equality in the workplace, equal pay for equal work, non-discrimination of all kinds in the workplace. But what has that got to do with the Faith of the Church?





As a woman in the church, I have never felt as though 'The Church' treated me as a second class citizen. The fact that I can't be a priest doesn't bother me in the slightest, any more than the fact that my husband can't get pregnant.
It was God after all Who made men and women complementary, with different ways of looking at things and with different emphases in our lives, and I like the way the Church acknowledges that.
It might not be 'fair' according to some people, but it is right.


It's enough to make me race out and buy another mantilla.
And of course one of the biggest feather rufflers is the resurgence of the wonderful Latin Mass, that bastion of maleness, that sublime experience where all face God equally - gosh, even the priest!

I could rant on and on, but the thing that I wonder about more than anything is why people remain in the Catholic Church if it offends them so much.

6 comments:

pelerin said...

Exactly, Annie. Very well put! I have nothing to add as I agree with every comment you have made. Well said.

Gerontius said...

Yes Annie, well said indeed. I read this blog immediately after watching EWTN’s series ‘G K Chesterton – An Apostle of Common Sense”. The episode was about Modernism and, though he was writing around a century ago, seemed at least as relevant now as it was then. Perhaps the liberals are even less tolerant now. A pity we have no Catholic in these times with the intellect and willingness to argue.

It is true there are ‘Catholics’, including some in positions of influence, who do not seem to know light from dark, truth from falsehood or good from evil. Maybe it stems from an opinion that the Church’s doctrines and dogmas are changeable. Hence God himself is changeable.

I rather like Jeremias (6.16) as quoted in the programme:
“Thus saith the Lord: Stand ye on the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, which is the good way, and walk ye in it: and you shall find refreshment for your souls. And they said: We will not walk.”

david said...

Annie I often wonder why we cant do a straight swop, with the so called "liberals" going over to the C of E and the Anglo Catholics coming over to us then everyone would be happy.I could scream for England over the Tablet crew.

Geoff Callister said...

Along with the comments already made, I in common with any normal Catholic, completely agree: I too, saw, and was outraged by those three incidents last week. It’s interesting isn’t it, that it feels there’s a new, post-child-abuse, wave of mud-slinging against the Church in the past couple of months, with two of these three salvos - which Annie so gloriously & passionately describes - coming from inside the Church: from The Suppository (I really like that name - good one!), and from what must surely be the only ‘professor’ in the country who appears to know less about her subject than your average GCSE student, and who thinks theology is nothing more than an extreme brand of 70s feminism: Her writing is straight out of Private Eye’s parodies of feminists at that time.
There are two bits of good news, however: one is that Tina Beattie is becoming so ludicrously extreme, that by all accounts, she’s starting to split the Liberals - YES! And the second is that, clearly the Devil knows Cdnl. Newman’s beatification could very well generate a rapprochement between Church and State, and even trigger ‘the Conversion of England’, and so he’s rallying his troops, both from outside and inside the Church. On this last point there’s an interesting article by ‘Frere Rabit’ at the following:
http://catholicismpure.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/politics-and-the-making-of-saints/

Mulier Fortis said...

I missed this post before - it's excellent. You sum it up so well.

And hey, any excuse to buy another mantilla, right?

BTW, are you located in Eastbourne?

Annie said...

Any excuse is right, lol! And thank you :), and yes I am!