The Ordination of Women in the Catholic Church: Why or Why Not?

We'll be using this section of the site to deal with the issues surrounding the subject of the ordination of women in sacramental churches, examining historical, theological, magical and scientific implications. For now, here are a few relevant quotes:

Relevant Quotes

The Liberal Catholic Church

"It is often asked whether a woman could validly be ordained. That question has been practically answered in an earlier chapter. The forces now arranged for distribution through the priesthood would not work effectively through a feminine body; but it is quite conceivable that the present arrangements may be altered by the Lord Himself. It would no doubt be easy for Him, if He chose, either to revive some form of the old religions in which the feminine Aspect of the Deity was served by priestesses, or so to modify the physics of the Catholic scheme of forces that a feminine body could be satisfactorily employed in the work. Meantime we have no choice but to administer His Church along the lines laid down for us."
~ The Science of the Sacraments, +C.W. Leadbeater, page 391 (Ninth Reprint, 1991) ~

Female Popes

1) "Newman in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), discusses the Guglielmites who elected Maifreda as Pope. She celebrated Mass in public in 1300. (These events occurred in Milan--probable point of origin of the oldest extant Tarot decks.) In 1324, Pope John XXII cited the charge of aiding and abetting the Guglielmites in a Papal Bull designed to discredit the Visconti family. Maifreda was a cousin of Matteo Visconti. Maifreda was also an Umiliati nun, and Moakley noted that the habit worn by the Papess in the oldest extant Tarot is that of an Umiliati nun (though the rendition isn't perfect).

Newman also provides several figures of the Virgin Mary being crowned. In particular notice the 15th century panel painting on page 202 where she is being crowned with something very similar to a Papal Tiara."
~ Bob O'Neill, posted to alt.tarot on Friday, May 28, 1999 ~

2) "...also keep open the possibility that it represented Papess and Mary and Church and Isis and Venus and Sibyl. It appears that such multiple levels of association were deliberately induced by using the same image.

The Madonna was deliberately made to look like Venus, and Venus was represented as a Mater Dolorosa (Wind: Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance , p 24).

Gombrich (Gombrich on the Renaissance, Volume 2: Symbolic Images, p 62ff) believed that these multiple references provided a simultaneous sense of the sacred (Mary) and the deeply philosophical (Venus). He notes that two contemporaries commented that Boticelli's Venus looked very much like his Madonnas.

So it is not just that such an image changed meanings in each new context - it carried a suite of connotations and shades of meaning from one context to the next.

So think of the richness of meaning if the TOWER represented the Tower of Babel AND the Tower in the image of the martyr St. Barbara and patron saint of those threatened by lightning AND the House of God AND Lightning as the first hint of progressive enlightenment (followed by star, moon, sun) AND..."
~ Bob O'Neill, posted to alt.tarot on Friday, May 28, 1999 ~

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