What an annoying woman

Who gave Sr. Joan Chichester the right to judge God and the Church?

Here's an interview Patrick Craine did with her from LifeSiteNews.com

LSN: It's been reported that you hold positions that are divergent from Catholic magisterial teaching. Would you say that's correct?

JC: Well, yes, I guess it is correct. It's not an opposition position. It is a position of query, of theological and scriptural commitment and search. I'm asking the question, for instance, how do we understand God if God made women inferior to men, incapable of functioning as full adults, full moral agents, in a society. What makes God a sexist? And if God is not a sexist, when are we going to discuss this question as a Church? The way we treat women is a result of our theology. What we keep them out of, what we allow them to do, what we respect in them. It emerged out of making a statement some years ago that I felt that the question of the role and place of women in the Church was a necessary discussion, and that it stood on strong theological concerns.

LSN: How do you see the Church being sexist, as you said. In what particular ways do you see that happening?

JC: Well, I think it's pretty obvious. It's not going to take a rocket scientist to figure it out. For instance, we have always had marital instructions for women that their role was submission to the husband. Now when we see that on television, and we see it in China, or Japan, or Islam, we think it's terrible. But it was our operational theology for years and years. And even now we claim that there's very strong separate roles for women. We argue that they are not – not only are they not fit matter to be ordained, as if Jesus came to earth to be male instead of flesh, but we don't even see women as fit matter to have their feet washed in a church on Holy Thursday. Now, we have a double standard, and we have had it for a long long time. It needs to be reviewed. We have a Church that is based, like the rest of society, admittedly, on a patriarchal system – men are at the top, men are the last word, men are the first authority in everything. The problem is - it seems to me, as a follower of Jesus, when I look at Jesus and the way Jesus dealt with men and women in his society and I look at the way the Church excludes women from the heart of the system, both in the Vatican, and in chanceries, and in dioceses, and in seminaries everywhere, that I have to wonder how it is that secular institutions are leading the development of women in society, rather than churches. I think that's shameful.

-snip-

JC: I don't know. Whatever you're talking about. What are the infallible teachings in question?

LSN: Well, the question about women's “ordination”, contraception...

JC: Ordination is a question of infallibility?

LSN: Absolutely.

JC: Oh, well then what happened to Peter and his mother-in-law?

LSN: What do you mean?

JC: Well, Peter had a mother-in-law.

LSN: Yes?

JC: Well, was Peter allowed to be a priest? What are we doing here?

LSN: Yes.

JC: We had married priests all the way to the 13th century. None of them were priests?

LSN: I'm not talking about married ordination. I'm talking about women's ordination.

JC: Ah. Women's ordination. I see. That's your problem. Women, right.

LSN: My problem isn't with women. My problem is with women's “ordination”.

JC: But women couldn't be ordained. But you do know that men could be ordained, right? So it's only women?

LSN: Yes.

JC: Ah. And on what do you base that?

LSN: On the teaching of the Church and the will of Christ.

JC: No, no, no. What's it based on?

LSN: The idea that only men can be ordained?

JC: Yeah.

LSN: It's based on the fact that that's the way Christ ordained it.

JC: Christ didn't ordain anybody, Patrick.

LSN: Christ decided that men were to be ordained.

JC: No, Christ didn't decide that men would be ordained. You have to have a little more theology before you begin to ask questions, Patrick. You can't overlay it with another whole theology that is your own. You're either asking questions because you're interested in the answers, which is a good journalistic question, or you're asking questions because you want to shape them one way or another. I really think – I'm happy to come to Canada. I think this is a great program that they're doing, allowing, they're enabling a wonder reflection on life for a Lenten season for the entire Church. I think it's phenomenal, and I think that to try to upset that in any way outside of or because of your own personal questions or in order to, somehow or other, mix those questions at this time, I think that's a journalistic disservice.