Pope Benedict warned "feminists" last year: Maternity is Job One!

The Pope will call on leaders of the Roman Catholic church today (July 31, 2004) to attack feminist ideologies which assert that men and women are fundamentally the same.

The Vatican is concerned that this belief is eroding what it regards as women's maternal vocation. But a paper on the subject which is due to be published today - the Vatican's third major pronouncement on women's role in the quarter century of John Paul's papacy - has drawn scornful criticism from feminists and academics. According to a leaked extract, the document accuses feminists of "blurring the biological difference between man and woman"....

The letter was drawn up inside Cardinal Ratzinger's Vatican "ministry", the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. However, as a statement of doctrine, it would not have been sent for publication without the consent of the Pope.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0%2C12272%2C1273140%2C00.html

===

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a German cleric who heads the Vatican department in charge of preserving and interpreting church doctrine, wrote the letter in May. The pope approved its release Saturday.

The Vatican says the notion that all gender differences must be erased challenges the idea that a family has both a mother and a father, whose roles are different. The church letter says employers must make it possible for women to work outside the home without giving up their family lives.

Cardinal Ratzinger's letter says Catholics should not consider homosexuality and heterosexuality equally valid lifestyles. It defends and reaffirms the church's refusal to ordain women priests, but says women nevertheless must have full access "to the heart of Christian life."

http://www.religionnewsblog.com/8112-.html

Are they yours?

:)

.............................. ......... .......... ........... .........!

and how about an edict on equal wages while you're at it.

dp

Am I allowed to criticize him now?

:shrug:

evil!
(and I'm even worse than evil, I'm an atheist)

I bash all day long!

:P

I give up and bow to the new sin-meister! :patriot:
:applause:
:evilgrin:

and the human race consists of warring tribes fighting over food, the Catholic Church will say "hey, birth control ain't such a bad idea after all." But, for now, the Catholic Church is HURTING mankind.

This is the group that just pardoned Galileo for saying the Earth wasn't the center of the universe. They hurt mankind for centuries by suppressing science and now they continue to hurt mankindwith destrucive policies forbidding birth control and even disease control.

I'm not judging individual Catholics, only the Church itself.

nevertheless must have full access "to the heart of
Christian life." "

Is that like separate, but equal?



:shrug:

...evidently means motherhood.

I'm sure that's in there somewhere, it usually is.

N/T

:toast:

Oh, thank you sooo much allowing half of the population "access". How BIG of you!

While Ratzinger was prancing about the Munich BMW weapons factory in his Hitler Youth uniform, watching Dachau concentration camp victims being forced to labor there, other youth from Munich had joined the resistance known as The White Rose. Here is a small excerpt from one account:

"In February 1943, the Gauleiter (District Leader) of Bavaria, Paul Giesler, addressed the students at the University of Munich. By then, he was already aware of some of the White Rose activities. He sneeringly said that the female students should be producing children for the Reich rather than wasting time studying and added: "If some of the girls lack sufficient charm to find a mate, I will assign each of them one of my adjutants." Female students who attempted to leave the session were arrested by the Gestapo, which led to a general riot and the eventual freedom of the women."

More at http://www.holocaust-history.org/short-essays/white-rose.shtml

Looks as if the more things change, the more they stay the same.

(May I introduce you to Jimmy/Jeff?)

This likley means the death of the church. (BTW, notice how PO'd she looks? Wouldn't you? LOL.) What a pathetic old (chauvinst) fool he sounds like. Tsk, tsk.

that's what I hear ...

OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON THE COLLABORATION OF MEN AND WOMEN IN THE CHURCH AND IN THE WORLD discussed the the Guardian article mentioned above.

Now, first a caveat or two -- I'm neither Christian nor Catholic, although I have spent a lot of time reading spiritual and metaphysical works. So, I try to maintain an open mind as I work with difficult language or concepts.

Frankly, I do not get the same take on what Cardinal Retzinger wrote as the authors of the Guardian article. This letter is not anti-women nor anti-feminist, nor even anti-modern in context.

The text struggles to define the role or men and women in the world. It begins with Genesis, but doesn't stay there. I think it's a fairly remarkable letter that needs to be read in its entirety and discussed from the points that it makes.

I think that without reading it, one is gravely wronging the new pope. Argue over what he actually said rather than what you think he said.

and certainly anti-gay. There are more negative articles out there, so what "I think he said" is shared by many readers.

reading original source documents and forming your own opinion.

I am not impressed with his stance on gays and women.

Why waste time thinking?

Has basically engaged in lifelong repression of inate biological urges to engage in -- gasp -- sexual activities..at least we can assume that. So you have a man who hasn't co-habitated with a woman in his life other than his mother talking about what it's like to be a woman and where their priorities are. Makes perfect sense to me.

65 and older

It is as if they had never even considered that angle(taking direction from someone who has absolutely no experience in real life matters)

They agree and then say well what's going to happen to them (as individuals)when they die? They want a Catholic funeral and feel it is too late to shop around for another religion.

If they continue in this vein maybe they will start to add up all the money they've poured into the Church week after week. Getting a funeral is all the return on the investment they've made. Pretty shitty return if you ask me

Flaming Asshat he has no fucking clue how hard the job really is. NONE. Note Ole PopeFurher I've a son in uniform, guess where he's headed? FUCK YOU RATSHIT.

n/t

</whine>

:banghead::banghead::banghead:

I'm a bashoholic.

...so I guess that makes me like a crack baby? Born "a bashing addict"?

:P

I think organized patriarchal autocratic institutional religion is dangerous and next to useless for its followers if they follow its diktats to the letter, but I'm down with personal, self-reflecting, nonjudgemental spirituality that the believer applies only to their own life.

then, yeah, maternity (and paternity) SHOULD be Job One.

However, I understand that not all women (and men) want or need children.

Maybe you should rephrase your post to reflect that what Ratzinger is saying is that women shouldn't have any other choice but to be barefoot and pregnant.

I dunno... it sounded to me like you were advocating making something else a priority over children IF YOU ALREADY HAVE THEM, which, obviously, you're not.

You are absolutely correct and points well taken. If you choose to have children that is great and carries a big responsibility. This Pope seems to imply that maternity is the ONLY choice~!

no. very sad.

Ratzinger is a celibate male who did his darnest to coverup child sex abuse by priests. Hypocrite!!!

This woman is happily single and cheerfully child-free, and I say "Screw you, Ratzinger!"

They create Jabberwockies, go off and slay them, to crow from the dispatched creature's corpse their wisdom and knowledge.

Read.

From article OP cited:
"Recent decades have seen a plunge in birth and fertility rates, particularly in the Roman Catholic heartland of southern Europe, as women struggle to combine jobs with their traditional roles as mothers, homemakers and carers .

Church representatives have argued that this is symptomatic of a breakdown in values, and particularly a greater selfishness among young couples more interested in consumer goods than creating life. Feminists have long held that it is a result of the reluctance of men to share household tasks and the failure of governments to provide adequate support for families.

Cardinal Ratzinger's document appears to have embraced implicitly the feminist view on this point, though in language unlikely to win over many feminists."

Second link:
"The letter, titled On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World, written by one of Pope John Paul's closest advisers, says women should be respected and have equal rights in the workplace, but it advised Catholics to recognize and accept differences between the sexes. ...

The Vatican says the notion that all gender differences must be erased challenges the idea that a family has both a mother and a father, whose roles are different. The church letter says employers must make it possible for women to work outside the home without giving up their family lives."

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040731_collaboration_en.html is the source document.
If you wish to take issue with Ratzinger, please, do so. But do not create a Doppel-Ratzinger that is far more extreme, impolitic in speech, and therefore easier and more satisfying to dispatch. This is intellectually dishonest, and misleads people on a matter where misleading them is inappropriate and pointless.

But if I could afford to have 12 kids, I'd also have a billion dollar mansion with playground, 4 nannies, 3 private tutors, 2 butlers and a chauffer for good measure.

Oh...I forgot the cooks, the maids, and the groundskeepers.

I'm not Catholic, but hubby is. At least that's how he was raised and baptised. In or 25 years of marriage, I can remember only one time ever going to mass with him. That was over 20 years ago...we were visiting his family over Easter and attended with his sister.

My point is, having children for the sake of having children (or because the church says it's what you're suppose to do) is not always the prudent thing for you...but especially, not for the children being brought into the world.

Matthew Fox is former Roman Catholic priest. He has written 14 books, exploring the theme of spirituality in the modern world in all of them. Fox clashed with Vatican repeatedly and he was eventually defrocked.

Fox was a Catholic priest for more than 30 years. He became an Episcopal priest in 1994

Former Catholic priest Matthew Fox doesn't think of his views on "creation theology" and other theological issues as renegade, even though the pope had him dismissed from the Dominican order in 1993.

from www.matthewfox.org (read books and articles by Matthew Fox, he has such a sweet face. He would have been an excellent pope!)

"This pope and his self-appointed German mafia headed by Cardinal Ratzinger will have to face the judgement of history (and very likely God also) over issues that include but are not limited to the following:

A pre-occupation with morality as sexual issues even when this morality is deeply flawed. I include the following examples:
--The forbidding of one billion Catholics world wide to practice birth control even while the human population explodes at the seams.
--The forbidding of the use of condoms even in a time when AIDS is killing individuals and whole populations the world over.
--The head-long pursuit of Augustine's theology of sexuality (all sex must be legitimized by having children)
--Ugly attacks in the pope's name against homosexuals and the complete ignoring of what science and professional psychological associations have learned about homosexuality (for example, that it is a natural phenomenon for 8-10% of any given human population as well as over 460 non-human species).'

'Other attacks include documents against yoga (yes!); against Buddhism (calling it "atheism"); against Thich Naht Hahn (calling him the "anti-Christ"); against feminist philosophers; against women (girls cannot serve at the altar; nor can women be priests); against theologians in general. Priests are forbidden to use the pronoun "she" for God at the altar.'

<snip>

'When I think of this pope I think of a hard-working priest who came to see me a year ago from southern California. He cried as he told me how ALL of the budget for the ministry to the poor was being cut to pay for a big new cathedral and for priestly misconduct. He himself was close to leaving the priesthood. I think of another priest who came to me three years ago and who was the person who actually ran his entire diocese on behalf of his bishop. He was at his wit's end with the hypocrisy and lies emanating from Rome--he knew many secrets. Rather than leave and rather than play the game, he quit his position and diocese and found a ministerial position in another diocese thousands of miles away."

"Now that this pope has passed, let readers reflect on the seriousness of these matters. And pray for this pope. I for one would hate to have to face my Creator with a track record like this one."

Copyright 2005 Matthew Fox