My Catholic friends constantly deal with issues like these. A substantial number of liberal Catholics disregard the "official" position on birth control and reproductive rights. But much like the political makeup of our country, it is often the right-wing voices who get the most attention and set the official policy.

Many Catholics have left the church altogether for offenses like these, which unfortunately leaves more conservative voices behind, voices who have no problem restricting the role of women and their freedom to choose.

Why are we even surprised by this?

I sent the Archdiocese an email stating that I, for one, believe in the ordination of women as priests.

And my boyfriend's mom wonders why I or my family won't have anything to do with a catholic wedding... This is such blatant discrimination, even beyond all the other crap they pull.

I go to an all-girls' Catholic school. I'm a bit of an outsider, as I have a Jewish last name and my mother is a lapsed Catholic.

The Catholics I've encountered for the most part are people. They have different opinions. My junior year theology teacher, a doctor of theology and a man, predicted that within my lifetime there will be female priests. My current theology teacher preaches about traditional gender roles and blind patriotism.

Women *don't* have power in the Catholic church as it is. A telling example is from today's liturgy.

The bishop told a story of how another bishop, against the principal of a Catholic school (a nun's) wishes, dismissed the entire school for a week. We were dismayed when he only gave us a reprieve from homework.

In the Church hierarchy men have control over nuns. A priest is the only one who can bless the Eucharist - without the Eucharist you can't have a Mass. Religiously, and these women are very religious, a man is necessary.

I'm not too sure about the whole "if women were priests, there wouldn't be sexual abuse."
Um, hello. Yeah, there would be. Perhaps not just by the female priests but from their followers.

Ugh, why is my city only known nationally for the most terrible of things. I applaud Sister Louise Akers for fighting for equality, but I feel that the catholic church is a lost cause. If only its power would fade with its relevance.

A few years ago at my (very Catholic) undergraduate university I wrote a thesis paper on why women should be allowed to be ordained Roman Catholic Priests. Granted my professor is a feminist theologian, but no one complained. I also sent the paper to my uncle, who is a Roman Catholic priest, and he loved it.

There is so much sexism and patriarchy in the Catholic Church that, unfortunately, situations like this don't really surprise me anymore. Hurt me, but don't necessarily surprise me. Unfortunately, while there are people in the Church who do want to be progressive and allow woman leadership, the dominant voices are incredibly conservative. However, I do agree with Zhyenshshina above, that it's important that those of us who are Catholic keep a dialogue open with the faith and work for change. It's just discouraging sometimes :/

I also recognize that these positions will only become more stringent and harsh without input and leadership from its female parishioners.

I disagree. I think it's a good thing that this stuff is getting press at all -- and that more laity and clergy are being made aware of nuns' support for the ordination of women as priests.

Barring the recent uptick in seminary enrollees (hey, the economy's in the dumps, I'm not surprised), the Church is dangerously low on priests and could use some female ones.

Otherwise orthodox nuns and priests have been predicting, off the record, the imminent ordination of women for decades now.

The more the idea becomes normalized in the public consciousness, the better a shot at it Catholic women will have.

Yes, the Catholic Church opposes female ministers, yes, its wrong and blatantly illogical, and yes, if a religion isn't completely true, its not at all true.

Why do you who disagree with the teachings of the RCC still follow it?

From the fathers of the Church saying that female adulterers must be immediately shunned yet male adulterers must be admitted back into the home to the popes of the last century speaking of the woman's role in staying suppressed and domesticated while she was confined to her house, the Catholic Church has ALWAYS been sexist. Look at them- they admit to the fact that their God cannot be male nor female, and yet never call it anything but "him". Their greatest male figures are their genderless God and Jesus, but their greatest female figure was a woman who did nothing (in practical terms).

Leave it. Its no good. This nun shouldn't be a nun either. The Catholic Church has a reputation of moving slow; if it ever ever allows female priests, it wont be for a long long time I can promise you that.

One other thought-- unlike other Christian sects, the Catholic Church DOES regulate who their members are. If you don't agree, you are not Catholic.

I wonder if the dwindling numbers-- not just of priests, but also of members-- may eventually lead to changes many of this organization's restrictive policies. I don't know.

What I do know is that this church is not as big as it imagines itself to be. I bet there are a lot of people like me-- forced into that religion as children, never given a choice to explore other options or freely ask our own questions-- who as soon as we left our natal home, left this organization as well.

This church will always count me as "catholic", but I will never count myself. And freely-- by my own choice-- I have never counted myself.

Make your own religion. I did and it's been great ever since.

I was raised Catholic but to quote Goeoge Carlin haven't been since I reached the age of reason.
I tend to agree that the Church needs to change and that we shouldn't ignore it because of the huge amount of women worldwide who are affected by it's teaching.
However , I do have to laugh at how they can change things. When I was young we were told that the Catholic Church was the only true religion and that all of it's teachings came directly from God. Then they decided to get rid of limbo. To me is seems that when they change things it just proves that the whole thing was made up in the first place you know?
So it's a Catch 22 because don't change and it remains a sexist/homophobic/hypocritical institution and do change and it proves that religion is man-made and a bunch of men decide what goes which is how the content of the bible was decided on originally anyway so?!

I am a cradle Catholic and have bounced back and forth and anywhere in between with my Catholic-based beliefs. I was the first female altar server in my Archdiocese as a grade-schooler which was met with encouragement and dissaproval from various people. I wanted to be a priest as a young girl and even long after that faded, found it very unfair that others who wanted to could not...

As a feminist I have long had issues with many aspects of the Catholic church (I will use the lower case to define the institution as Zhyenshshina did). However, due to many events in recent years I proudly consider myself a feminist and a Catholic. One of the pivotol moments in this decision was when I read (and have subsequently re-read) the book entitled "Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church" compiled by Angela Bonavoglia. I really recommend it for those of you will similar internal struggles.

The church is a social institution that has religion as its basis. Additionally, if you have been raised in that faith it can be comforting to continue those traditions. But there is no proof that god exists. Therefore, challenging a private group to change their ways, while potentially important, is likely to fail if there is continuing support from.

Churches/Religion has provided support for social issues but their basis is on a lie which permeates what they support.

The best outcome would be to keep the church as a social institution but get rid of their religious teachings.

In the interest of disclosure, I am a devout, practicing Catholic. I understand and respect that the majority on this board disagree with the Catholic Church on many issues.

In fairness, when a teacher is hired by a Catholic school, they are expected to fully profess in their lives the doctrines of the Church, and to not, is grounds for dismissal.

The matter of who can validly receive the Sacrament of Holy Orders was re-examined under Pope John Paul II, and the matter, for Catholics, is closed. I am not opposed to someone questioning it to better understand it, but I would expect anyone who is going to challenge it to be well versed in the reasoning behind it; to say that the Scriptures don't point towards an all male priesthood - well I don't understand that statement because it does, in both the Old and New Testament [I've read the Bible cover to cover]. There are some also very important theological reasons, concerning the nature of the Sacrament of Holy Orders as well as Mass, that point towards the necessity of a male priesthood. If you are going to disagree, you need to first study all of that and at least intellectually understand it; based on what I have read, this nun has not. [That is also why I come to this website, to first better understand Feminist positions, and to challenge myself and beliefs.] For a Catholic, you can't openly dissent on this doctrine and claim to be in full communion with the Catholic Church. For someone to be a teacher at a Catholic institution to openly dissent on a doctrine that has been recently re-examined and then clearly defined, is to open yourself to being removed from your position.

Your comments concerning the Old Testament have left me scratching my head. The reasoning you apply to the Old Testament is alien to a Catholic understanding of how the Old Testament is related to the New Testament. From the Apostles, we use the same Old Testament that they did. As Catholics, we do not look to Jewish authorities on how we understand and practice our faith. So I don’t understand where you are coming from on that point.

As for the New Testament and the priesthood, the New Testament does not speak about it in the negative, as in who can’t be, but in the positive, as in who can be. First came Melchizedek in the Old Testament. Then Jesus, the High Priest is offering the Sacrifice in heaven eternally. And yes, Jesus chose only men to be Apostles; He could have chosen women, but He didn’t. At the Last Supper where He established the priesthood (Gospel of John, the washing of the feet), there were only the Apostles present. Only to the Apostles did He give authority to loose and to bind. After the resurrection, Jesus first appeared to a woman, and told her to go tell the Apostles; yet He did not still give Apostolic authority to women. Up to this point, the Gospel was only preached to the Jews not the Gentiles. When the Gospel was revealed to the Gentiles, it was men who were ordained to the Apostolic office of the bishop and deacons (Epistle to Timothy). So in regards to your comment about being more literal in who is ordained to the priesthood, we are keeping with what has been handed down by the Apostles. If Jesus had wanted women admitted to the priesthood, they would have been admitted to both the Levitical priesthood as well as to the company of the Apostles. When this matter as looked at again under the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, they deemed from both Scripture, and Tradition, that Jesus firmly established that only males can be validly ordained.

As for the Eucharistic/Mass aspect, when the bread and wine become the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus, it is no longer Father So-And-So, but Jesus himself at the altar, offering the One True Sacrifice to God our Father. At the moment of the Mass, a part of heaven has been revealed, and we are truly participating in the worship that is truly occurring in heaven. The priest is “Christ in Person”. Jesus, the second person of the Most Blessed Trinity is a man. So the person standing in for Him must also be a man. It does not make sense to have a woman there, where it is truly a man.

I would disagree that gender does not exist in the spiritual. For starters, God created us as in-fleshed souls. At the end of time, our bodies will be resurrected, and our souls will be united to that body for all eternity. We are incomplete without our body. And since our soul is the essence of who we are, which includes our gender, it is reasonable to conclude that that includes gender.

God has always had us refer to Him in the masculine, has defined our relationship to him as a child to a father, or a wife to her husband; we cannot write gender off in understanding the spiritual. Since it is the way God has revealed it, then it is how we are to understand it. To drop the concepts of gender will hinder developing an authentic relationship with Him.

The Church is properly understood in the feminine. God reveals His relationship to the Church through marriage. He reveals it this way not only to help us to understand it, but because it also points towards spiritual truths, that in order to understand those truths, you must view the Church, and our relationship to her, in this manner. Again, to drop gender, is to drop a key element in not only understanding, but more importantly, in entering into the mystery.

The whole point of the faith, of what God has revealed, is for our benefit, so that we may come to know God, to love God, to serve God. No one should see not being in the priesthood as being denied something. The priesthood belongs to God, not us, and it is for God to determine whom He will call to it. The priesthood is about serving; not all are called to serve in that way, not even all men. We are ALL called to know, to love and to serve God, in whatever state of life that we are in. A person’s greatest spiritual growth is found in humble obedience. The most important thing in this life is loving God to the point where we would give all to Him, in whatever manner He asks of us. The Church, the Sacraments, Jesus sacrifice upon the cross, is to lead us to that end. Everything has been set up for that; to change it, will lead one away from that end.

If I may be so bold as to make an observation: I find it difficult to believe that you find this the only point keeping you away from the Catholic Church; maybe the straw that broke the camel’s back. I do sincerely hope, and pray, for you to come back. And maybe working through this matter, if you do and come to accept it, it would help in other matters where you disagree with the Catholic Church. A quicker way would be in, as Jesus said, in denying yourself: humble obedience. True acceptance of this doctrine is going to be between you and God. And I truly hope you can. If I can be of any help in accepting it, I am your humble servant.

There's some notes here on the RCC that I think need bearing out (and if it's again, I apologize).

Firstly, unlike a lot of Christian organizations in the US, the Catholic Church exists in more than just the United States. It's also in no way a democracy for a laity or anyone, really, above the Papal Council. There's no council like in a lot of American Protestantism. The Church is headquartered in its own country and is considered a Monarchy. Pope is King -- or more accurately the King, but sometimes from God (ex cathedra). Everyone else has to listen to him. The end.

With that in mind, the Church is under no obligation to listen to anyone's opinion on anything. They've been through the organizational structure from the ground up to get where they are now and, like a CEO, they're not going to take full stock in the opinions of the people who don't really know the entirety of the systems in the company on how to do his job. The laity only knows so much about the inner workings of the Church and the Church is not going to just let it all out at once.

Continuing on the CEO analogy, just like people continue to shop at Wal*Mart despite their vehemently anti-employee policies, the laity will continue to go to the Church. The laity of the Catholic Church is a community. Each Church is its own community with its own activities and identity blended around the idea that, yes, we are all basking in the light of God but we are all here to take care of each other. We're all part of this one part of the flock. Mutual support and love are strong bonds that tie, even if the "Big Organization" of Papal decree doesn't include our beliefs on certain or all subjects, it doesn't mean that we can't enjoy the community.

(that above paragraph, by the way, is another reason why it's important to distinguish that it's an American perspective. In many places in the world, especially Italy, the idea that Americans "pick and choose" which parts of the Church to believe in has led to the phrase "Cafeteria Catholic".)