This is incredible! I'm a big fan. I wonder how the people will handle it, clergy and lay. We've all experienced hyper-clericalism to certain degrees in our ministry; to most Catholics, no one is or ever will be as authoritative as a priest. It will be interesting to see how successful this is for the Church in India. My hunch is that Catholics are hungry to hear from the top, in this radical way, that everyone has a say in our Church.
I'm kind of confused. At my parish, decisions are made predominantly by women. In our deanery, the fact that my parish has a male DRE is an oddity. And when I worked at the USCCB, there was certainly no lack of women in leadership roles.
Even historically, women ran most Catholic schools, Catholic hospitals, and Catholic charities. Granted, most of them were religious, but isn't that at least as much a factor of the fact that nuns were some of the only women educated to the point of being able to handle such tasks? That's seems to be the responsibility of girls' parents at that time, not the Church as an institution. In fact, Catholics were leaders in the education of women.
Maybe my experience is unusual, but I can honestly say I've never felt hindered by my womanhood, especially as a Catholic. Obviously the culture in India is really different from that in Indiana (or anywhere else I've lived), but is it actually your experience as Catholic young people that being a woman is somehow treated as an inferiority within the Church? It hasn't been mine, so without stories from your own experience, I'm afraid I don't understand this sentiment very well at all.
2 comments:
This is incredible! I'm a big fan. I wonder how the people will handle it, clergy and lay. We've all experienced hyper-clericalism to certain degrees in our ministry; to most Catholics, no one is or ever will be as authoritative as a priest. It will be interesting to see how successful this is for the Church in India. My hunch is that Catholics are hungry to hear from the top, in this radical way, that everyone has a say in our Church.
I'm kind of confused. At my parish, decisions are made predominantly by women. In our deanery, the fact that my parish has a male DRE is an oddity. And when I worked at the USCCB, there was certainly no lack of women in leadership roles.
Even historically, women ran most Catholic schools, Catholic hospitals, and Catholic charities. Granted, most of them were religious, but isn't that at least as much a factor of the fact that nuns were some of the only women educated to the point of being able to handle such tasks? That's seems to be the responsibility of girls' parents at that time, not the Church as an institution. In fact, Catholics were leaders in the education of women.
Maybe my experience is unusual, but I can honestly say I've never felt hindered by my womanhood, especially as a Catholic. Obviously the culture in India is really different from that in Indiana (or anywhere else I've lived), but is it actually your experience as Catholic young people that being a woman is somehow treated as an inferiority within the Church? It hasn't been mine, so without stories from your own experience, I'm afraid I don't understand this sentiment very well at all.
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