You, and the others looking in from the outside, are missing one very significant bit in all this. It is a discipline in the Church to pick 12 men to stand for the Apostles in this Rite. This is our discipline, this is our Rite, the meaning is ours and the liturgical unity is ours.

This is the CATHOLIC Church we are talking about, not some cult, some breakaway "sect." To speak of the way the Catholic Church organizes and governs itself and enacts or performs what we call the "one, true faith" as being of nobody else's business but ours is a denial of what we claim to be. People like sopiaserpentia and ladybabalon have EVERY RIGHT to point out the obvious (see below).

They are men only because they stand for the 12 apostles. That they are men is not the point. This is not a gender issue, and those who make it such have long since lost the meaning of the practice. That people are protesting this *is* a condemnation of that diocese, but not over gender. It is a condemnation that the diocese has failed to teach these people the meaning of what is going on.

In some ways, I agree with this statement: the diocese has failed to teach the people of its parishes that men and women are equal sharers in the Kingdom. The diocese has failed to foster "community," but part of the way it has failed to foster community was to fail to show the people how to grasp and subdue and discipline the POWER that inheres, unfortunately, in EVERY human community, and then to USE it for the equal benefit and interest of ALL. The way that badsede speaks of the "diocese" (the ecclesiastical polity) "teaching" the "people" the way he does makes ME think that, at heart, he is still living, as are, unfortunately, the remnants of the Catholic faithful who still go to church (most don't) in the top-down phallocracy of the pre-Vatican II Church. Many of the Church's critics must understand that, in their hearts, most of the "faithful" (i.e."conservative" Catholics) justifying EVERYTHING the ossified, reactionary hierarchy is doing or saying nowadays, NEVER ACCEPTED THE DIRECTIONS VATICAN II THREATENED TO TAKE THE CHURCH IN. They've won, however; we "liberal" Catholics are thrown out, and rejected. I love that lonely old nun, though; she's a holy woman, who refuses to see her Church commandeered by the power-mad ecclesiastical bureaucrats of its hierarchy.