How can you tell if God wants women to be priests? The same way you can tell if a man is called to be a priest, you listen to the delusions and accept those voices in people's heads that tell you want you want to hear.
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If a man says he hears God telling him to be a priest you are inclined to believe him if he is intelligent and presentable. If a man says he hears the voice of God telling him to slice prostitutes up into little pieces you are disinclined to believe him, no matter how intelligent and presentable he is, on exactly the same level of evidence. Indeed, the more convincing the second man is the more likely you are to believe he is deluded. But what happens when an intelligent and presentable woman says she hears God calling her to be a priest? Tricky one. Everybody knows that God moves in mysterious ways and he has been known to come up with new strategies every so often, such as flooding the Earth, laying waste a city or two, impregnating a virgin, cursing a fig tree, chasing pigs off cliffs and that sort of thing so the idea that he is all wise and capable of predicting everything and setting the universe up to work perfectly without intervention is obviously a non-starter for a good Catholic. From the generally accepted idea that God calls women to be nuns and they know when they are called, and God calls men to be priests and they know they are called how can it be so inconceivable that a woman has a call to be a priest? Why would God be so fickle? Or if the explanation is that the women who are called to be priests are mistaken how do we tell the difference between a genuine call and a bogus one? The solution is simple. Ordain the women. If you worry about the blasphemy angle you can use expendable paedophile, racist, drunkard or otherwise embarrassing bishops to do this bit, if they lose their Holiness nobody is going to be overly bothered. I expect such men are not in short supply in the Catholic Church. If the women are really called to be priests the ordination will take and they will have the ju-ju power to turn bread and wine into flesh and blood. Then it is a simple matter to take the samples to a laboratory and test them. If they are not flesh and blood then the whole women priests issue is dead and buried, and we will all be able to say without fear of contradiction that whenever God tells people things the Church doesn't want to believe then the people concerned are deluded, no matter how much they protest the sincerity of their conviction. Some people might say that the test will always come back negative, that the wafers and wine will always appear to be just wafers and wine. But then there will always be people who believe what they want to believe whatever the evidence is, won't there? |
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