Vanity and Pristesses

Via Elizabeth Scalia comes the story of another woman who thinks that we can declare herself a Catholic priest.

A Sag Harbor grandmother [Lorello] says she has become the first Long Island woman to be ordained as a priest in a group that seeks equality for women in the Roman Catholic Church....The Vatican does not recognize the ordinations as legitimate, and has said that the women automatically “excommunicate” themselves when they take part in such services....Lorello, who said she did not want her age disclosed, said she was dismissed earlier this summer by the diocese from her volunteer position as a lector at St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic parish in Sag Harbor.

Gee, I wonder why this "grandmother" doesn't want to reveal her age. Sadly, a few younger women have allowed their minds to be poisoned by this nonsense as well, but it's mostly folks in their 60's, 70's, or even 80's who are choosing to excommunicate themselves in this way.

Also, Ms. Scalia is spot-on with her analysis:

Let’s start with the vanity: there is a ton of it, threaded within an article full of self-involved, self-congratulatory “firstness” and “I-ness” and “Me-ness”. I have never met a great, pastoral priest who was all about himself, but this gal manages to communicate herself and her desires in her every sentence. Interestingly, she mentions “justice” and what she believes she is due, and she talks of Augustine and Ghandi and Martin Luther King, but never Christ Jesus or service or sacrifice or laying down one’s life, or denuding oneself interiorly and materially in order to pastor the sheep in need, which is what a good priest does — is called to do. 

Perhaps her “sacrifice” was being told she could no longer lector at Saint Andrews, except that she is not characterizing it as such. It’s just something else being denied her. Poor thing.... 

Her disingenuousness also seeps through the page, like the second person of a fabulist trinity, beginning with the notion that she can willfully separate herself from the church due to a principled disagreement, but should still be able to proclaim from its ambo. And then, per Newsday, She called herself “a faithful daughter of the Church…” without caring (or perhaps without realizing) that one cannot claim to be faithful in a relationship while stepping out from it, or breaking trust with it. This woman has done both. She can no longer say she is “faithful.” Nor can she claim “obedience”, which is one of the anchors of the Catholic priesthood — so heavy it helps to keep the entire church well-grounded. 

Finally, this woman is offensive in her thoughtlessness. To drag her priest and his canonical duties into her passion-play was gratuitous and unnecessary; it’s of-a-piece with her self-involvement, though. She was thoughtless to the pastor and priest who served her — I am sure very faithfully — the whole time she was collecting the theology degree that seems, to some women, to be all one needs to be ordained a priest (as though the credential proves the calling). 

That about says it. "She called herself 'a faithful daughter of the Church…'" Yes, and Anthony Wiener is the faithful husband of Huma Abedin, just as his friend Bill CLinton was the faithful husband of her friend Hillary, and for that matter King Henry VIII was a faithful husband to Anne Boleyn.