Madam, – Studying, as I have, the Vatican pronouncements on the ordination of women over the past 40 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/Can make a stone of the heart./ O when may 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”? – Yours, etc,
A chara, – Your correspondents seem to miss the point that the document Normae de Gravioribus Delictis was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) which has responsibility for the area of the Seven Sacraments and also, since 2001, the sexual abuse of minors by clergy. It is merely housekeeping by the CDF, ensuring that its area of canon law is kept up to date.
If the Dáil debated an omnibus criminal justice Act, that contained updates on offences like robbery and murder, would we complain that the Dáil was trying to downplay the severity of murder because it included a less serious offence in the same bill? No, instead we would appreciate that it was not being wasteful by trying to pass two separate bills when one would do.
Other complaints about juxtaposing offences against the consecrated host with concelebration by non-Catholic ministers are equally groundless. Both these are offences against sacraments, and both fall under the jurisdiction of the CDF. – Is mise,