{"id":36,"date":"2010-07-16T09:53:31","date_gmt":"2010-07-16T09:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/new-vatican-norms-all-about-women.html"},"modified":"2010-07-16T09:53:31","modified_gmt":"2010-07-16T09:53:31","slug":"new-vatican-norms-all-about-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/new-vatican-norms-all-about-women.html","title":{"rendered":"New Vatican norms all about women"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new set
\nof canon law norms<\/a> issued by the Vatican yesterday was intended to
\nwin some PR points on the sexual abuse front, but its substantive goal
\nis to ensure that no Roman Catholic bishop starts ordaining women. Far
\nfrom being a maladroit add-on to the list of “graver crimes” (graviora
\ndelicta<\/i>) subject to the juridical control of the Congregation for
\nthe Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the ordination issue is the document’s
\nmain business. That’s my conclusion.<\/p>\n

Talk to a canon lawyer and
\nyou will learn that there’s nothing much new in the other stuff. Under
\nthe norms<\/a>
\nissued in 2001 by Pope John Paul II, the Congregation Formerly Known as
\nthe Inquisition already had been given jurisdiction over graviora
\ndelicta<\/i> involving sexual abuse and the sacraments. If the statute of
\nlimitations needed to be extended in a given case, getting a
\ndispensation was a routine matter. OK, child porn has become a serious
\n“delict.” But it’s the formal acquisition of jurisdiction over “attempted
\nwomen’s ordination” that’s the significant innovation. Although the CDF
\nissued its
\nown decree<\/a> on the subject in 2007, now the pope has given the
\ncongregation formal procedural control over such cases.<\/p>\n

There’s
\nmore. In the 2007 decree, the CDF simply announced automatic
\nexcommunication for both the cleric doing the ordaining and woman
\nreceiving it. The new norm goes further and declares that the ordainer
\n“may be punished by dismissal or deposition”–i.e. formally removed from
\nthe priesthood: laicized.<\/p>\n


\nIn her report<\/a>
\nin today’s NYT, Rachel Donadio takes note of this addition, writing: <\/p>\n

The
\nrevision codifies a 2007 ruling that made attempting to ordain women
\nan offense punishable with excommunication. The new document said that a
\npriest who tried to ordain a woman could now be defrocked.\t\t<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What’s
\nimportant to bear in mind is that while the odd priest has participated
\nin ceremonies to ordain women, proper ordination in the Catholic Church
\nis the responsibility of bishops. Suppose a bishop–a Lefebve of the
\nLeft–were to start ordaining women, and not only as priests but also in
\ndue course as bishops. Then there’s apostolic succession and a
\nfull-fledged gender-equal schismatic sect–call it the Society of St.
\nJohn XXIII. That’s the nightmare scenario the CDF has been equipped to
\nforeclose.  <\/p>\n

If the Vatican had wanted to make clear that it
\ndidn’t regard attempted women’s ordination as being as serious a crime
\nas raping children, it could have kept the 2007 decree as is. Yes, CDF
\nspokesman Monsignor Charles Scicluna could have said, they’re both graviora
\ndelicta<\/i>, but the punishments are not of equal severity: A clerical
\noffender can’t be laicized for the former, only the latter. That’s not
\nthe way it is. Try to ordain a woman, Archbishop Lefty, and we get to
\nkick you all the way downstairs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new set of canon law norms issued by the Vatican yesterday was intended to win some PR points on the sexual abuse front, but its substantive goal is to ensure that no Roman Catholic bishop starts ordaining women. Far from being a maladroit add-on to the list of “graver crimes” (graviora delicta) subject to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nNew Vatican norms all about women - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/new-vatican-norms-all-about-women.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"New Vatican norms all about women - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The new set of canon law norms issued by the Vatican yesterday was intended to win some PR points on the sexual abuse front, but its substantive goal is to ensure that no Roman Catholic bishop starts ordaining women. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}