by their actions

[sophiaserpentia]

Bridget Mary Meehan said she and seven other women are Roman Catholic priests after being ordained Monday during a riverboat ceremony in Pittsburgh.

But church officials say the ordination was invalid and could lead to excommunication. Pittsburgh's Roman Catholic Diocese warned the women beforehand that those participating will have "removed themselves from the church."


The Church of Kenya writing to the Anglican Consultative Council interprets this as, "the provinces of Canada and ECUSA... by their actions have chosen a different path from the rest of the Communion and should be considered by the rest of the Communion as having broken fellowship. They need to re-consider their official standing in the spirit of repentance, reconciliation and willingness to re-affirm their commitment to the Communion and restoration should only take place after repentance and healing".

What do these statements and issues have in common? Look at the emphasis i added to these quotes above to see what i am getting at. In each case, we have a worldwide religious organization with clear rules about who is allowed to contribute in what way and who is not, and a group of dissidents who believe the rules are against the spirit of the church and who actively break the rules in accord with their conscience. We have in each case the organization stating in response that the dissidents have removed themselves from fellowship by their actions.

Actions of conscience in defiance of prejudicial institutional rules can have a profound effect on public opinion. For example, look at what has happened in the United States since San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom began issuing marriage certificates to same-sex couples in 2004. Opposition to same-sex marriage has dropped from 63% to 51% and support has risen from 30% to 39%. Since then one state, Massachusetts, has instituted same-sex marriage; in Massachusetts, same-sex marriage is supported by 62% of the population.

Public opinion took a similar course when courts began to strike down laws banning interracial marriage, too. When this redefinition of marriage took place, conservatives warned that public morality, indeed the fabric of society itself, was threatened with collapse. This has not happened, in fact in the last 20 years there has been a notable and enduring drop in the crime rate. Massachusetts has not seen any sign in the last two years that its social institutions are collapsing.

Similarly, there have been no signs of collapse of British civilization since the Church of England began ordaining women.

I've written in the past about "trajectories" in the development of Christian doctrine and practice. The idea of trajectories (or as Jon Stewart called it in his interview with Bill Bennett, the "human condition"), extended to the evolution of justice over the course of human history, provides a way to gauge the change over time in a culture's social institutions.

If the trajectory of the human condition is towards greater equality and equity of human rights, seen through the history of debates over slavery, freedom, suffrage, property rights, employment access, freedom from violence, then we must conclude that those who seek female priests, gay bishops, or same-sex marriage are on the right side of history.

At the outset, the church was an egalitarian emancipatory movement seeking justice for the oppressed and downtrodden. Christian doctrine, however, is not equipped to handle the situation where the church itself is an instrument of oppression, or, even more subtly, where the language itself of Christianity has been co-opted and misappropriated. The authors of the christian testament could not have conceived of such an outcome. They did see the dangers of literalism, but could not have protected against the subverting of their message.

As the ancient theologian Valentinus observed, when we awaken from a bad dream, we find that the scary phantoms which gave us chase are nothing. Similarly, "one's ignorance disappears when [one] gains knowledge, and... darkness disappears when light appears." Acts of conscientious dissent, like the ordaining of women as Roman Catholic priests or the consecration of homosexual bishops in the Anglican church, have the effect of waking us from our bad dream because they are in accord with the trajectory of justice in human history. The phantoms we feared prove to be nothing, just figments, and public opinion shifts drastically in the course of a single generation.

This demonstrates the importance of being brave.

Have the dissenters truly separated themselves from the community of justice and faith? Notably, talk of divisiveness and schism comes not from the dissenters but from the voices of the institutions -- who then is the actual source of that divisiveness? Is what defines a strong union conformity and strict obedience to written rules, or is it mercy and respect for diversity?