I think this is a jewel
Luis
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From: Mary Condren [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 20 July 2010 11:24
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Letter to the Editor Vatican Document
Dear Madam
Studying, as I have, the Vatican pronouncements on the ordination of
women over the past forty years, it is very clear that the Vatican will
stop at nothing to defend the exclusive right to sacrifice from all
comers: homosexuals, Protestants, disabled men, and especially women.
Alongside Vatican pronouncements, I have also studied many secular
versions of sacrifice. Their proponents are equally vehement in their
assertions that their sacrifices, mostly for political reasons, and
conducted through bloody warfare, give rise to the only legitimate forms
of the various nation states. They too periodically celebrate the
legacies of such sacrifices through warrior, or remembrance, rituals,
and carefully guard access to such sacred occasions.
William Butler Yeats once wrote: "Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of
the heart. Oh when will it suffice?" Since 1968, we in Ireland have
intimately borne the consequences of ignoring his words as the competing
sacrificial claimants (the Somme or 1916) wreaked havoc here on this
island.
The most recent Vatican document, which spoke of the sin of child abuse,
the illegitimacy of the sacrifices of "ecclesial communities" and the
non-ordination of women, almost in the same breath, can only represent a
last gasp desperate effort to hold back the tide. Or maybe it is a
tsunami, unleashed by the recent revelations of child abuse, archaic
forms of authority, worldviews and mentalities that are no longer
functional, and even dangerous, in today’s world.
In the light of the threats facing humanity, and especially since 9/11,
scholars of religion throughout the world have been forced to
interrogate the legacies of sacrificial mentalities. They desperately
seek new ways of bringing communities together.
Maybe the ultimate test of such communities might reside, not in the
willingness to shed, or commemorations of the shedding of blood, but in
how far such communities adhere to the injunction issued by Jesus and
the prophets of many different religions: "I desire mercy and not
sacrifice"?
Mary Condren, Th.D.
Director, Institute for Feminism and Religion
Parkhill Rise,
Kilnamanagh
Dublin
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