The Good The Bad

And the Just Plain Ridiculous.

Did you know that in the back of the Catholic 'Worship ' Hymnal (usually a red book) is the daily gospel readings? You can read it while singing or in between. You can read it to your children, you can read it to yourself. But you cannot read it from any pulpit or altar or anything similar in a catholic church unless you are a priest. If you are catholic, You can read your bible (the four New Testament first books of the gospel) to your kids, your spouse, your neighbors, the homeless guys eating breakfast in the church basement or the dog- but you cannot read it during a mass from that apse, the altar or the pulpit---unless you went to seminary for a bunch of years, got ordained and call yourself a consecrated priest. That means no woman ever can read it in a Mass/service. It's cannon law. Just one of the rules I find off its rocker. Sorry- I do. It's like as if on Pentacost Sunday after the Resurrection when the Holy Spirit came down everyone was given a translation dictionary and told to stand in line behind the official translators before uttering anything. It's as if the most intimate act that the Holy Spirit ever had on earth wasn't with a woman we have statues of in every catholic church and school.

Perhaps they only want men with the insight that a seminary degree provides interpreting with the inflection appropriately the gospel with understanding- so the solution should be let women get the same understanding. But that is not the solution- even women who did go to seminaries and got PHDs in biblical literature or masters in theology cannot read the gospel during a catholic Mass. Only men priests can. No matter some will put you to sleep sideways- all men are just definitionally by virtue of man-ness more qualified than a woman to read the gospel--who is never qualified to speak the red lettered words of Jesus even though 'there is no male nor female in christ jesus."
As I attended the Red Mass, It was amusing to observe the procession of all men in cone-headed hats parading around and assuming position around the altar with all the fine embroidery of a renaissance festival- All men again. Lacey doiley dressed men some of them, and a few cone-heads with fancy titles trying not to act ridiculously pompous while they looked like a cirque du soleil act-I suppressed rolling my eyes out of 'when in rome do as romans' obligation. Does the Archbishop own a pair of jeans? Excuse please the irrevance but you asked for it.

The big photo shot that made Politico was Chief Justice Roberts with Wuerl. Nice.
Wuerl with the shepherd's staff and Roberts, the Republican protege of Rhenquist (whose name I never spell correctly and don't care.)
Because that's where we all want to be shephereded- the place in Reagon loredom where ketsup is a vegetable and civil rights mean I have a right to tell you to be civil.

As a woman attorney, I have to tell you that this gives me more fright than comfort.
Sorry. This institutional anti-womanhood stuff is really serious. All women it appears are blamed for abortions- were it not for all the murdering sluts who tempt innocent men our country would be a quarter larger, so goes the myth- as if men don't emotionally manipulate, abandon and abuse women ever coercing abortions to avoid the child support for two decades (and they all got pregnant by themselves). Women- feminazis-they are called are blamable for much of the ills according to the male mysogynist view of life - blame it on Eve. She did all the tempting and actually listened to the devil. She wanted a Job!

Women in the catholic world are the enemy if they are attractive to priests- they are even the enemy of the Cross apparently (but don't tell them or they might stop throwing bucks in the bucket.) Because priests must all be emotionally castrated, and unlearn everything their fathers should have taught them about being spiritual leaders of women, to turn them into women- after the model of the blessed mother.
Women who start getting ideas about married priests or families with them (real honorable ones, not the secret sad church mouse fake basement housewives who settle for fraudulent marriages) are persecuted worse than the Taliban before the Foreign Legion. This is unAmerican- but they don't care.

The inventor of the In-Vitro process just got a Nobel Peace Award. The Catholic Church wants him to go confession for the sin of creating all that life with the assistance of a petri dish. Imagine the scandal if older women start having healthy babies! What will they want to do next? Read the Gospel in Mass? Saints Preserve Us!!