Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, the chairman of the Committee on 
Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, asserted, 
"The Catholic Church, through its long and constant teaching, holds that 
ordination has been, from the beginning, reserved to men, a fact which 
cannot be changed despite changing times."

Of course it can be done; this is no bigger than the decision narrated 
in Acts 15.  Only God can judge, but could it be that they just don't 
want to do it?  In due time, we shall know for sure ...

Luis
--------------------------------------------------------
Rome Fiddles, We Burn
Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 18 July 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/opinion/18dowd.html

If the Vatican is trying to restore the impression that its moral sense 
is intact, issuing a document that equates pedophilia with the 
ordination of women doesn’t really do that.

The Catholic Church continued to heap insult upon injury when it 
revealed its long-awaited new rules on clergy sex abuse, rules that the 
Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said signaled a 
commitment to grasp the nettle with "rigor and transparency."

The church still believes in its own intrinsic holiness despite all 
evidence to the contrary. It thinks it’s making huge concessions on the 
unstoppable abuse scandal when it’s taking baby steps.

The casuistic document did not issue a zero-tolerance policy to defrock 
priests after they are found guilty of pedophilia; it did not order 
bishops to report every instance of abuse to the police; it did not set 
up sanctions on bishops who sweep abuse under the rectory rug; it did 
not eliminate the statute of limitations for abused children; it did not 
tell bishops to stop lobbying legislatures to prevent child-abuse laws 
from being toughened.

There is no moral awakening here. The cruelty and indecency of child 
abuse once more inspires tactical contrition. All the penitence of the 
church is grudging and reactive. Church leaders are merely as penitent 
as they need to be to protect the institution.

Can you imagine such a scene in the confessional?

"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I am as sorry as my job or 
school requires me to be."

"But my daughter, that is not true penitence. That’s situational penitence."

After the Belgian police bracingly conducted raids on the church 
hierarchy, inspired in part by the horrifying case of a boy molested for 
years by his uncle, the bishop of Bruges, a case that the church ignored 
and covered up for 25 years, the pope did not applaud the more 
aggressive tack. He condemned it.

In a remarkable Times story recently, Laurie Goodstein and David 
Halbfinger debunked the spin that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been one 
of the more alert officials on the issue of sexual abuse:

"The future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of 
nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright 
obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it 
was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s 
to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, 
growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own 
papacy."

If Roman Polanski were a priest, he’d still be working here.

Stupefyingly, the new Vatican document also links raping children with 
ordaining women as priests, deeming both "graviora delicta," or grave 
offenses. Clerics who attempt to ordain women can now be defrocked.

On Beliefnet, Mark Silk, a professor of religion at Connecticut’s 
Trinity College, suggested that the stronger threat against women’s 
ordination is not "a maladroit add-on" but the medieval Vatican’s "main 
business."

After the Vatican launched two inquisitions of American nuns, it didn’t 
seem possible that the archconservative Il Papa and his paternalistic 
redoubt could get more unenlightened, but they have somehow managed it.

Letting women be priests — which should be seen as a way to help cleanse 
the church and move it beyond its infantilized and defensive state — is 
now on the list of awful sins right next to pedophilia, heresy, apostasy 
and schism.

Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, the chairman of the Committee on 
Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, asserted, 
"The Catholic Church, through its long and constant teaching, holds that 
ordination has been, from the beginning, reserved to men, a fact which 
cannot be changed despite changing times."

But if it was reserved to celibate men centuries ago simply as a way for 
the church to keep land, why can’t it be changed? If a society makes 
strides in not subordinating women, why can’t the church reflect that? 
If men prove that all-male hierarchies can get shamefully warped, why 
can’t they embrace the normality of equality? The Vatican’s insistence 
on male prerogative is misogynistic poppycock — enhancing American 
Catholics’ disenchantment with Rome.

In The New Republic, Garry Wills wrote about his struggle to come to 
terms with the sins of his church: Jesus "is the one who said, ‘Whatever 
you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest, you did to me.’ That 
means that the priests abusing the vulnerable young were doing that to 
Jesus, raping Jesus. Any clerical functionary who shows more sympathy 
for the predator priests than for their victims instantly disqualified 
himself as a follower of Jesus. The cardinals said they must care for 
their own, going to jail if necessary to protect a priest. We say the 
same thing, but the ‘our own’ we care for are the victimized, the poor, 
the violated. They are Jesus."