BeattieWatch!: 'A Year of Departure'

"A Year of Departure? The door is just over there, love."

St Christina the Admonishing is up to her old tricks again. When not flying into the rafters of The Tablet office ("Come down, Tina! We've made it all Fairtrade!") she's dazzling her local priest with her visions of the new Jerusalem coming down from Heaven, in which Christ is not so much King, but Divine Agitator for women's ordination and for the sowing of moral relativism and confusion within the Church.

Just on the point of your patroness, by the way, Tina, St Christina is another model of devotion, purity, piety, holiness and fidelity to Christ. Better than being a theologian, she actually died and came out from the tomb and, having seen Hell (where people against women's ordination go), Purgatory (where repentant people who were once against women's ordination go to be purified of their years of unbelief) and Heaven (where campaigners for women's ordination go), she devoted the rest of her life to living as a nun, performing extreme and often bizarre and confusing penances upon her person, fasting and offering up her considerable sufferings to Our Lord for the conversion of poor sinners and the souls in Purgatory. The only reason she disobeyed her superior, her Priest, after she rose from the tomb, was because she could not bear the foul smell of sin coming from the congregation and so stayed up in the rafters for a while, with presumably only a can of Air Wick to block out the stench of human sin. That's the legend attributed to her, a great mystic and Saint. Strangely, the legend of her becoming a pamphleteer for women's ordination across Europe never surfaced. I'm starting to notice a trend emerging with great female Saints of the Church.

Today, Dr Beattie, the great reforming theologian and prime candidate for the 34th Doctor of the Church, highlights a petition signed by 143 European theologians which, just by sheer coincidence, PrayTell has picked up on as well. In a document so waffling, inane and tedious that it could only have been penned by a modern theologian, it finally ends up where one would expect it would end up, asking for more 'participation' of the laity in the liturgy and the selection of priests and bishops, 'freedom of conscience' for those in same sex partnerships and divorced persons and, you guessed it, 'The Church also needs married priests and women in church ministry.' 'A Year of Departure' in the Church for modern, heterodox, relativist thelogians, eh? Hope springs eternal...

For a more reasoned analysis of this petition and these 'signs of the times', read Fr Ray Blake: The Centre Does Not Hold.