The People Speak Out

Local voices connecting globally

This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good.  (Pope Francis)

Canon Law 212 calls upon the laity to speak up:

2 - The Christian faithful are free to make known to the pastors of the Church their needs, especially spiritual ones, and their desires.

§3. - According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.

Dear Mary, Thank you for your story. When are we human … male and female in God’s image?

I am 73, the oldest of eight children, my Catholic mother living with the reality that no impediment was to be placed between her husband’s seed and her egg or she risked damnation … living female born to serve her husband’s sexual needs. Whether she wanted to be impregnated was a secondary consideration for she was my father’s compliment, not his equal.
She was no fan of celibate male priests in general and loathed the hierarchy even more, even as she was a devote Catholic. “What do they know of my reality?” she would exclaim.
She tells a story of being so angry back in the 50s when her parish priest decried “shorts” on women in public. As he was speaking, she imagined showing up at Church next Sunday in hers shorts and dare him to give her communion. I wish the Church was filled with millions of women like her.
Do not get me wrong, she eschewed “feminists” and was always modest in her dress … but saw it as a women’s right to wear shorts in public.
She lived the prevailing fundamentalist moribund sexual teaching that the moment of inception is the moment of conception.
She was so very angry when she learned that the “inception as conception” teaching is based on a now completely discredited “homunculus” (little person) theory of human sexual reproduction … the male impregnated the female with a “little person”. Given that understanding, it was logical for St. Augustine (a man of great learning) and others to conclude inception as conception.
That teaching set in stone … St. Augustine would not approve of making him a false idol.
What sexual reproductive science tells us is the making of male and female is a process that starts months before and goes on for three months after inception. For those three months what the mother carries is not yet male or female … but some combination of both to unfold at three months.
At three months the miracle of human life … conception, meaning life male and female takes place.
We will know when our Catholic Church is truly on the path to reform when a commission to update Catholic teaching on human sex to bring Church teachings in line with science has concluded its work.
Let’s not let sex be another Galileo event. Perhaps the work of Vatican III to right it.{jcomments on}