Catholicism: Not for sissies

NCR/RNS: "Cardinal Raymond Burke: 'Feminized' church and altar girls caused priest shortage"
http://ncronline.org/news/people/cardinal-raymond-burke-feminized-church-and-alt...

Crux: "Cardinal Raymond Burke: Catholic Church is too feminine"
http://www.cruxnow.com/church/2015/01/07/cardinal-raymond-burke-feminized-church...

RNS: Kaya Oakes, "Does Catholicism have a ‘man crisis,’ or is Cardinal Burke paranoid?"
http://www.religionnews.com/2015/01/07/catholicism-man-crisis-cardinal-burke-par...

"Apart from the priest, the sanctuary has become full of women. The activities in the parish and even the liturgy have been influenced by women and have become so feminine in many places that men do not want to get involved."

"The introduction of girl servers also led many boys to abandon altar service. Young boys don’t want to do things with girls. It’s just natural. The girls were also very good at altar service. So many boys drifted away over time. I want to emphasize that the practice of having exclusively boys as altar servers has nothing to do with inequality of women in the Church."

The real joy here, however, is the site that interviewed Burke, "The New Emangelization" \sic!\ ( http://www.newemangelization.com ), which advocates for a new, more manly Catholicism, the "the powerful manliness of the Mass" and so forth. It includes a whole section on what a manly man Jesus was. Here, for example, is the page on "the physical Jesus Christ" that argues that Jesus was "physically attractive," "wore attractive clothing," "was physically strong," etc. The argument for "was physically attractive" is that the guy on the Shroud of Turin is a stone cold fox ("an attractive, robust Jewish man"), and the women who remarked "Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you." I have to admit, I had never thought of that as a come-on.

By pure coincidence I was chatting about altar girls two days ago to one of the priests who introduced altar girls in Kenya many years ago. His bishop didn't exactly encourage the idea but to his credit didn't ban it either. I haven't noticed any shortage of vocations to the male priesthood here.

I can see the argument that altar boys are a sort of training-ground for the priesthood, so, if you're never to have women priests, too many girls can crowd out your trainees. So if your parish is overwhelmed with applicants—problems you want to have—you might not want to be turning boys away. I'm not sure I'd see it that way, but that's not crazy.

Meanwhile, Burke is out there in crazy-land. In a towel. Lifting heavy things. And grunting. Like a man.

>5 nathanielcampbell: On the other hand, I've also seen far too many inappropriate candidates clogging up the seminary system on the recommendation of parish priests who insisted, "Oh but he was a great altar server so he'll make a wonderful priest..."

>1 timspalding: "wore attractive clothing"

This would come as a shock to the spiritual Franciscans and their conviction of the absolute poverty of Christ!

Needless to say, it should come as no surprise that I, as a scholar of Hildegard of Bingen, am in fact most interested in seeing the Church "feminized", since she is, after all, our Holy Mother.

It's not the richness of his clothing, it's the way he carried them. (And always laundered with that heavenly dazzling bleach - the blood of the lamb.)

Haven't you seen the movies?!

Wow!

from the Emangelization interviewer:

"One of the frequent themes in the New Emangelization Project research is that large numbers of men do not understand the Mass. Men think that the Mass is feminized and they don’t really understand the powerful manliness of the Mass. This is particularly true of a majority of Catholic men who are Casual Catholic Men..."

It's a crazy broken record on that site.

I prefer to think of my self as a Relaxed-Fit Catholic Man.

It's a crazy broken record on that site.

No, it's crazy. And Burke's crazy. And, listen, this guy was principally in charge of picking new bishops within the US for years.

You're right. The craziest thing about this whole affair is that Burke was in charge of vetting bishops for the US church. That guy is a powerful argument for women priests.