It's Like Talking to a...

More Receptive to Church Teaching than Tina Beattie?

Tina Beattie's back from her holiday and has posted this little nugget on her blog.

'Jennifer Sleeman, an Irish grandmother, has called on Catholic women to boycott Mass on 26th September and to stay at home and pray for change instead. (She suggests that men who are sympathetic to the cause should also join the boycott). The call is receiving widespread publicity and support from around the world. Click here for Rose Marie Berger's blog which gives links to a number of others. I must admit, I have mixed feelings about this and I wonder what other people think. I'm deeply sympathetic but also unconvinced. Let me try to explain why.'

So it is, that with flowing verbosity and a stream of consciousness that would have had even James Joyce reaching for a duck feather pillow, Tina explains why she is not encouraging women to boycott Mass even if, should 'a small minority of Catholics responded to Sleeman's call, that would be a most eloquent absence', instead suggesting...

'If you're sympathetic to the causes which the boycott wants to promote, but don't want to boycott Mass as a way of expressing that sympathy, why not pin a rainbow-coloured bunch of ribbons to your clothes that day? It would be a way of celebrating God's rainbow-coloured Church, a way of protesting against the spreading conformity and of showing to everyone around us that we're glad they are there, not because they think like us or look like us or agree with us, but because we are humans made in the image of God in whose diversity and difference all of creation is reflected and renewed, and we lament and protest the attempt to deny or close down that spacious sense of belonging by power masquerading as authority and fear masquerading as care.'

Her penultimate paragraph includes a stand-out quotation attributed to Julian of Norwich. A mystic of the Church, Julian of Norwich, was never formally beatified or raised to the Altar in any way...

'Let's be the rainbow people of God, who wear a sign of hope that all shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well (Julian of Norwich).'

Don't you just hate it when the lives of those who lived and breathed the Infallible Teachings of the Church are taken out of context? The holy anchoress did not call upon people to be 'the rainbow people of God'. The visionary, who was graced with a profound spiritual insight into the Passion of Our Lord Christ, His Agony and His Suffering, is said to have been related these words "All manner of things shall be well", by Christ concerning the Last Judgment at the End of Time. 

The question is, would the humble mystic anchoress, Julian of Norwich, author of Revelations of Divine Love, whose holiness is relatively well-documented, have agreed with Tina on women's ordination or have been the kind of Catholic whose mind is seared by feminism and other heretical ideologies espoused by Tina? I very much doubt it somehow!

Finally, to just drive this point home, since she feels confident enough to quote a holy woman from the Middle Ages, the English mystic of the fourteenth century said, throughout her revelation, that she submits herself to the authority of the Church:  

"I yield me to our mother Holy Church, as a simple child oweth."

Who knows? Maybe one day Julian of Norwich will be formally beatified? That would be another important woman in the Church, wouldn't it, eh? I don't know! Why didn't St Therese of Lisieux, St Catherine of Siena, St Theresa of Avila just give up on their silly devotions, piety and long-term striving for sanctity and stampede upon the Vatican demand for "Wimmin' Priests Now!"?



It is clear that Tina believes in 'the Choych'. She just doesn't believe in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. If Tina is so keen on all this women's ordination lark, then why doesn't she just hook up with Sinead O'Connor, otherwise known as 'Mother Bernadette Mary' and become a Priestess in the Definitely-Not-In-Communion-with-the-Holy-See, 'Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church' and incur the latae sententiae excommunication that is automatic as a result, or, alternatively, follow the advice of the holy anchoress she so esteems and be a flippin' Catholic!