Last week, I wrote about a perennial GetReligion sport — “fundamentalist” whack-a-mole. The word is often used to describe any old traditional or conservative sect, but we’re forever pointing out “fundamentalist” has a very specific meaning in the context of Christian theology.
This week, I’m back with a another edition of GetReligion whack-a-mole. Longtime readers are no doubt familiar with the media’s fascination with what the media calls “female Catholic priests” or “Catholic women priests.” If Rome ever were to start ordaining women, obviously that would be big news. However, it’s a well-known fact they don’t.
But that doesn’t stop the media from seizing on ordination reports from Catholic groups unaffiliated with Rome. Here’s the headline from The Telegraph:
Italy to ordain first woman priest
Italy is to have its first woman priest, in a move likely to upset the Roman Catholic Church and inflame the long-running debate over female clerics.
Well, golly. That sounds oddly confusing — but dramatic!
Let’s go to the article and find out what’s going on:
Maria Vittoria Longhitano, 35, will be ordained in an Anglican church in Rome, a stone’s throw from the Vatican, this month.
“My ordination represents a great chance for all women of faith. It means hope, it means giving a push to an important debate between Catholics on the issue of denying women the possibility of fulfilling their vocations and being ordained as ministers,” she said.
She is not an Anglican, but a member of a small Catholic order called the Old Catholics, who broke away from the main body of the Church in the 19th century.
They do not believe in papal infallibility or the Immaculate Conception and are not recognised by the Vatican.
Mrs Longhitano, a married teacher from Milan, said she hoped to stimulate a debate and break down the “prejudice” within the Catholic Church when she is ordained at All Saints Anglican Church, near Rome’s famous Spanish Steps, on May 22.
Gotta love that line about being “a stone’s throw from the Vatican” — clearly if you’re near the Holy See you obviously have its imprimatur.
So in sum, this woman is being ordained a priest by a “Catholic” sect that split from the Vatican well over 100 years ago, and doesn’t believe in any number of other key Roman Catholic doctrines?
Note that the article doesn’t have a single quote from an authority at the Vatican substantiating the claim the “move likely to upset the Roman Catholic Church.” Regardless, I’m sure this development among the Old Catholics is the Pope’s number one priority and he will address it head on, just as soon as he gets done obsessing over what the Archbishop of Canterbury had for breakfast.
As has been discussed many times here at GR, Roman Catholic and catholic mean different things. “Catholic” just means universal — lots of Christian churches that are not Roman Catholic describe themselves as catholic, including any number of churches that have been ordaining women for quite sometime. That doesn’t mean they have any connection whatsoever to Roman Catholic church, or make the fact they ordain women in any way newsworthy.
But none of this stopped the Times of London (which ran a report with a different byline, but had a lede suspiciously similar to the or Telegraph’s story) and the Sydney Morning Herald from also weighing in with bad write-ups touted by sensationalist headlines. These stories prey on the confusion over the words “catholic” and “priest” which obviously mean very different things given the context. And this context is never really explained adequately, because doing so would undercut the supposed newsworthiness of the story.
The fact that this “female catholic priest” story pops up so regularly is dismaying.
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Comments (25) |
May 22, 2010, at 10:15 pm
The Church preceding the reformation did not call itself the “Roman Catholic Church”. It then and now says “the church” and “the church everywhere”.
All Catholics aren’t Italian and the Popes don’t have to be Italian. This was a move by the British government (Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) to make it appear “foreign”. If you read the comments in the Rimes of London you will see that it is still the reason for the moniker- “foreign”.
Some Western countries have acquiesced and have quit protesting “ROMAN Catholic Church”, but that doesn’t mean that the moniker is the official one.
Other churches baptize their members, but nobody opposes the Baptists using that as their name. Why are the Catholics not allowed to name themselves?
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May 23, 2010, at 12:30 am
It was the same thing on BBC World Report. Almost verbatim the Telegraph story.
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May 23, 2010, at 8:42 am
Wow! Saint Paul’s Inside-the-walls (the American Episcopalian parish) had a woman priest a couple of years ago! Why no story about that? It’s just a stone’s throw away from the Vatican, too! They broke off of the Catholic Church in the 16th century, not the 19th, but why should that matter?
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May 23, 2010, at 9:45 am
My (Anglican) Church History professor taught me that while “catholic” means “universal”, in church usage it refers to that body of Churches in Communion with the See of Peter, Rome. Nothing more, nothing less. Hence, the “Old Catholics” aren’t “catholic” at all, but one of a thousand groups that broke from the fellowship of the apostles since, pretty much, the beginning. While I’m certainly willing to note than not belonging the the Church of Rome, but rather my local Church, I am not a Roman Catholic, for practical purposes, RC is fine.
This is not a complicated matter, hence I have long discounted news stories like those here as advocacy rather than honest reporting. Hence, the ordination of this woman to the ministry of the Old Catholic church is of no more significance to a Catholic than the ordination of two women in Los Angeles to the ministry of the Episcopal Church.
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May 23, 2010, at 11:12 am
This is, sadly, a typical trend in news reporting across the board. A tendency to minimal research and confused entities in order to raise a little controversy and sell papers. It is a symptom of the state of the market in this area and a by-product of change.
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May 23, 2010, at 11:35 am
If the lady in question is Italy’s first female priest that in itself might be noteworthy, although I guess that has to be weighed against the significance of these Old Catholics. Like, how many members do they actually have?
Why is the word priest in quote marks in the post title?
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May 23, 2010, at 1:06 pm
This is something anyone who follows the news should always keep in mind:: Selling newspapers and pumping up ratings is the main business of the news media. The Truth runs a very distant second—if at all.
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May 23, 2010, at 1:08 pm
Observing this discussion from my Lutheran parish placed in Southern Germany, my impression is, that there needs to be some more input about what the Old Catholic Church is. There might be a difference between the USA, where there are hundreds of denominations, whereas in Germany and Switzerland the Old Cahtolic Church is not just one of many sects pretending a name of their own choosing, but a small and well respected member in Ecumenism. The Old Catholic Church came into being when they defined new doctrines in the Vatican Council 1870/71. These people, hwoever, just wanted to stay Catholics without the new doctrines, hence “Old Catholic”. They have bishops in historic succession, they are recognized by the Orthodox and the Anglican Churches, they even levy church tax, just as the RCC does in Germany. These Old Catholics are as much catholic as the Roman Catholics are, and the Greek-Catholics, and the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which does obey the pope, but is not Roman. Contrary to the Lutheran Churches, most of which do ordain women to the office of pastor, some Old Catholic bishops do consecrate women to the priesthood. My question is: How much background like this one can be expected from ordinary journalists in coutries outside of Europe?
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May 23, 2010, at 2:09 pm
“How much background like this one can be expected from ordinary journalists in coutries outside of Europe?”
I’m not from Europe and I’m not a journalist. I haven’t studied Church history. I know what the “Old Catholic Church” is.
It would be nice if journalists did just a tiny bit of homework.
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May 23, 2010, at 2:43 pm
And, of course, there the reference to the Old Catholic Church as an “order”.
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May 23, 2010, at 7:12 pm
Irony of ironies—The Old Catholics broke with Rome because the Catholic Church finally officially defined some very, very old (not new) doctrines that had been around for centuries upon centuries.
So doesn’t that make it sort of weird that the Old Catholics make the news today for doing some really new doctrine defining with regard to the priesthood.
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May 24, 2010, at 10:04 am
The media should make it clear that the Roman Catholic Church does not ordain priestesses.
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May 24, 2010, at 2:50 pm
Truth, to many reporters, that simply isn’t clear. The prevailing assumption seems to be that the Church could do anything it wanted to if it just wasn’t so hung up on artificial rules. It’s a lack of understanding of the nature of a sacrament and the difference between a doctrine and a discipline.
My aunt is a Unitarian minister (who should have had at least some knowledge of other religions), and I had to explain to her that ordaining a woman is analogous to baptizing a carrot. You can go through the ceremony all you want, but in the end, all you’ve got is a wet carrot. According to Catholic teaching, that sacrament cannot (not just “may not”) be conferred on a woman. Period. It’s not just canon law, it’s not institutional misogyny; it’s dogma. (A word that carries its own baggage far beyond its actual meaning, but that’s for another GR post.)
Will, I noticed the “order” reference as well. It sounds like the reporter doesn’t know that the Old Catholics are a separate church whose ordinations aren’t binding on the Vatican. If it were an order within the RCC, there would be some need for the hierarchy to respond, but as it is, the ordination makes no difference to them anyway. Even if it happens a stone’s throw away.
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May 24, 2010, at 4:08 pm
What is usually meant by “Roman Catholic Church” is actually the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, not Italians in the city of Rome. The RCC term leaves out the Eastern Catholics who are not Latins, and actually everybody outside of the city of Rome.
Everybody in union with the Pope is Catholic and then there are the subheadings.
The Old Catholics chose their name and that choice is honored. Why are only the Catholics in union with the Pope (and the Church in Rome) not allowed to name themselves?
There are other churches in England besides the Anglicans - why are they allowed to be called the Church of England? Don’t you Lutherans and Methodists living in England object to that? Why not?
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May 24, 2010, at 5:32 pm
The RCC term leaves out the Eastern Catholics who are not Latins, and actually everybody outside of the city of Rome.
Julia, I was aware of that and used the abbreviation with gritted teeth. I’m a Latin Rite Catholic myself. But in cases where church affiliations are part of the topic of discussion, it seems better to allow a little imprecision than to risk confusing the capital-C Catholic Church with the lower-case-C catholic Church, of which the Old Catholics are a part.
The Old Catholics chose their name and that choice is honored. Why are only the Catholics in union with the Pope (and the Church in Rome) not allowed to name themselves?
For the same reason that the Mormon Church failed in its attempt to truncate its name and convince the media to call it simply “The Church of Jesus Christ.” All churches consider themselves catholic, just as they all consider themselves the Church of Jesus Christ. We might as well insist on being called “The Honest-to-Goodness Real Church that Jesus Founded to the Exclusion of All Others.”
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May 24, 2010, at 5:33 pm
Come to think of it, that’s not such a bad idea. AP Stylebook editors, take note: henceforth that is the new name for the Catholic Church.
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May 24, 2010, at 6:35 pm
Joel, I was responding to this in the blog post:
Why are Baptists allowed to call themselves Baptists even though almost all Christians do baptisms? Nobody is saying they can’t use the term Baptist because other denominations also baptize.
Why can Evangelicals claim that name even though other Christian groups also evangelize?
The irony is that from time immemorial when the Catholic hierarchs referred to the Catholic Church they meant the entire church connected to the Church of Rome - the church universal - and not just the church in Rome or the church in Alexandria or the church in France. Slapping “Roman” onto Catholic is subverting what the word meant - it’s the opposite of what the term meant. Roman Catholic is an oxymoron.
It was the Church of England that slapped the “Roman” on to the church’s name. I can understand, although I disagree, with its power to call churches in the UK what it jolly well feels like calling them, but why does it get the power to call the shots about names of churches outside of the UK, too?
And, as I understand it, the Church of England only started saying it was Catholic with a big “C”, too, in response to the Tractarians in the 1800s. There was a big battle in England, after it became legal to be Catholic again, over the sovereign’s refusal to accept the first Apostolic Nuncio from the Vatican until he acceded to being called the ambassador from the ROMAN Catholic Church. There was a long stalemate and I think he finally gave up.
OK, but why should the rest of the world take England’s side in this dispute? The US has no dog in that fight.
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May 24, 2010, at 7:45 pm
Julia, I was just pondering that very thing during Sunday mass (when I should have been listening to the homily) as I reflected that my Pentecostal friends probably don’t make nearly as big a deal of Pentecost as Catholics do. What’s more, we take baptism more seriously than Baptists, our bishops have more authority than Episcopal ones, and we’ve certainly got more saints in these latter days than the few million those other folks boast. We’re the original church of Luther, Calvin and England, we’re orthodox, we have more presbyters than the Presbyterians, we stand foursquare behind the Gospel (okay, that one’s a stretch) and if anyone has a claim to be the Disciples of Christ, it’s the church that the disciples started out with.
(Whoo, that was fun! Let the slings and arrows begin to fly!)
Anyway, I think it still boils down to comprehensibility. The purpose of using a particular religious tag in a story isn’t to be technically correct but to convey to the reader which church is being discussed. Like it or not, the English usage of Roman Catholic is what most people instantly understand to mean “the church that is in union with the pope.” Using “Catholic” works in most situations, but in this case the church that carried out the faux-rdination also has “Catholic” in its name and a distinction needed to be made. (Personally, I think “Papist” is more correct, but that one seems to raise hackles.)
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May 24, 2010, at 11:25 pm
Re: The irony is that from time immemorial when the Catholic hierarchs referred to the Catholic Church they meant the entire church connected to the Church of Rome
Which makes it eminently sensible for us to refer to it as the ‘Roman Catholic’ church. ‘Roman Catholic’ = ‘Christians in communion with the Bishop of Rome’.
I understand that some RCs dislike the term ‘Roman Catholic’, but conversely, a lot of the more high church Anglicans (and maybe Orthodox and Orientals too) dislike the use of the simple term ‘Catholic’. In the self-understanding of Anglo-Catholics (like myself) we have as much claim to be a genuinely apostolic and traditional church as the RC church does, we share a great deal of Catholic beliefs (about Mary, about the Eucharist, etc.) and we dislike the fact that the RC church, by claiming to be the sole ‘Catholic’ church, is excluding us and the Orthodox from connection to tradition and to the apostles.
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May 24, 2010, at 11:31 pm
Re: There are other churches in England besides the Anglicans - why are they allowed to be called the Church of England?
Because the Church of England was founded explicitly as a national church, a state religion. Same as the Church of Sweden or the Church of Norway.
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May 25, 2010, at 1:26 pm
…we dislike the fact that the RC church, by claiming to be the sole ‘Catholic’ church, is excluding us and the Orthodox from connection to tradition and to the apostles.
Hector, I understand your annoyance, but in fact, the (Roman et. al.) Catholic Church does recognize Orthodox, Oriental and Anglican churches as part of the one, holy catholic and apostolic Church. For that matter, they also recognize Christians whose churches care not a fig for apostolic succession as part of the church. Where we differ is in what constitutes full communion as opposed to impaired communion within the catholic Church.
My wife and I were married by an Old Catholic bishop, who happened to be a friend of ours and was instrumental in our meeting. The RCC had no issue with his bona fides and had we taken the extra time to make arrangements, he could have performed the ceremony in our parish church. Not all Old Catholics have valid apostolic succession in their orders; I know that some of them have gone to extra effort to be ordained by Eastern Orthodox bishops or to check up on the validity of their ordaining bishops. (The latter was the route our friend had gone, and his succession has been verified.)
Essentially, who is in communion with whom is a very tricky issue when we’re talking about traditional churches. I think the term “Roman Catholic” does pretty well as an identifier, even if it’s a little fuzzy technically.
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May 26, 2010, at 5:28 pm
The Old Catholic Churches are not in communion with Rome, but they use Catholic in their names.
The article plays off a confusion in names to make a headline that is not. It also misinformes about the Old Catholic Churches. The Dutch Old Catholic Church pre-dates the 19th Century.
The Old Catholics claim that their break with Rome comes in 1870 (140 years ago) with the First Vatican Council.
However, this is true of the Old Catholic movement on its international scale. The Italian Old Catholic Church dates its own break with Rome to 1808 and was clearly out of Communion with Rome and in communion with other groups out of Communon with Rome by 1862.
The Old Catholics are in full communion with the Anglican Church.
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May 26, 2010, at 5:40 pm
I had not noticed the “order” statement, mainly because I know who the Old Catholics are. They are not an order, and never were. They were Catholics who left the Roman Catholic Church for a broad variety of reasons (
The Polish National Catholic Church (which actually operates in the United States) broke with the other Old Catholic Churches in the Union of Utrecht over ordiantion of women in 2004, that is to say they oppose women being ordained. Since that was six years ago, the newsworthiness of this matter is probably over-stated.
Contrary to Oesch’s statement the Old Catholic Church is only partly related to the clear definition of the doctrine of Papal Infalibility, and many Catholics would dispute his assesment of the issue.
Also, despite Julia’s attempts to turn this into an issue of xenophobia and anti-Papism, Roman Catholic is in some circles used as a synonym of Latin Rite, as opposed to Greek Rite, Chaldean Rite, Ethiopian Rite, Coptic Rite, Armenian Rite and a few other seperate Rite groups of Catholics who are in communion with Rome.
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May 26, 2010, at 5:46 pm
Joel,
Your characterization of what you call “The Mormon Church’s” attempt is unfair.
The Church asks that first references be to “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”. It is only later references that they ask be to either “The Church of Jesus Christ” or “The Church”.
There is a church which uses the name “The Church of Jesus Christ”, and there is another group which referes to itself as “the Christian Church”.
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May 26, 2010, at 7:21 pm
Jack, thanks for the correction. I had misunderstood the style issue and thought that the Church was simply trying to move its image more into the mainstream. It has made an effort in recent decades to dispel stereotypes, and I thought the name thing was part of that. Although I don’t accept the theology, I have great respect for Mormons and I don’t intentionally run down their church.
Nevertheless, my actual point still holds: that designating a church by a characteristic claimed by most churches is confusing at best and could be interpreted as disingenuous. Calling the Catholic Church simply “Catholic” and avoiding the distinction “Roman” leads to confusion. I know that the Reorganized church has changed its name to the Community of Christ, but groups like the FLDS, the AUB and the TLC all consider themselves Latter-day Saints as well. The media’s tendency to lump them all in with the mainstream Mormon Church is a source of much irritation to orthodox Mormons.
I don’t think Julia was trying to stir up xenophobia; she was making the case that precise nomenclature is important.
In the same way, I don’t think that the reporter in the original article was being deliberately misleading. I think he was simply clueless.
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