to think that your religion can't be that important to you

[theevildead2]

if you can just "switch to catholicism" when it suits you?

There is a bit on the news at the moment about women maybe being allowed to be bishops. Apparently some of our local priests will be leaving the church if women get this right???

Just launching this back to the OP, I have to say that I disagree that it's not much of a switch, and so I don't think the OP is being unreasonable.

One of the biggest differences between Catholics and Anglicans is Holy Communion.

So for Catholics Holy Communion becomes the body and blood of Christ, and that Jesus Christ is present in the form of the bread and wine. It is the miracle of the mass.

Anglicans believe that the bread and wine represents the body and blood of Christ.
If you are an Anglican vicar I am not sure how you can just decide that Catholics had it right all along simply because they wont ordain women bishops and your church will.

LRD- Paul was pretty vitriolic about heterosexuality, too

True! I think it's an excellent reason to ignore him.

My first encounter with Paul was when I was taught the Wife of Bath's feminist rants about him at school - so I have a fairly biased view.

silver, why do so many high Anglican churches have a sacrament light? I thought that due to the doctrine of Real Presence it wasn't as clearcut as that?

always sounded like a fudge to me tbh

mak, it's possible to be High Anglican and to believe in the Real Presence. It's just not compulsory. I've never seen a High Anglican church with a sacrament light though - might you be thinking of an Anglo-Catholic church?

(Sorry if I am wrong, just it sounds unlikely to me.)

It is a fudge - deliberately so. There's a apocryphal story that Queen Elizabeth I, when asked by her Catholic sister if she believed in the Real Presence, didn't want to answer truthfully (no), but didn't want to be killed either. So she said:

Christ was the Word that spake it.
He took the bread and brake it
And what the Word did make it
That I believe, and take it.

Not bad for quick thinking!

I wonder what percentage of UK Catholics believe in transsubstantiation, the virgin birth, etc? As far as I can tell, my practicising Catholic DH doesn't believe in the bits that protestants don't believe in.

From my perspective, it's all one religion with lots of different sects. The fact that one sect says that another sect is not really Christian is not relevant, except to them.

Priests/vicars/ministers do not all rigorously believe the same thing. They're people and they all have different opinions. In pursuit of a life serving God, they try to adhere to one tradition or another, usually the one they were brought up in, but if the consensus or authority in that tradition moves to far from their own views, they jump ship. A bit like politicians changing political parties.

Although the Thirty-Nine Articles called the idea of transubstantiation repugnant, it never really went away is some parts of the Anglican Church as the theological divorce, as it were, took longer than most people think. In fact, it continues to this day. Every time the Anglican church changes another bit of its beliefs from the Catholic belief, someone reaches their "this far- no further" point. It happened in the thirties over Lambeth and birth control, it happened in the eighties over female ordination. Right now it's those who thought they'd isolated themselves from female priests being forced to assent to them in the form of bishops.

RRocks - I think so too. Clearly for lots of people married priests/women priests are purely political issues.

My perspective on all of this is a bit odd though, because I come into contact with people who very seriously believe in the Virgin birth, Real Presence, saints interceding, demons possessing people ... you name it! It strikes me as immensely medieval and far-fetched, but when it's right in front of me, I can't help but see that some people really do believe this stuff. And they're not necessarily thick, or naive, either.

They're all made-up stories, so just pick the one that suits you best.

Like extreme politics, but with no need for facts whatsoever. Good analogy RRocks.

MaryMungo, it just seems so odd that of all the human characteristics of Jesus, his maleness is the one that is so absolutely essential to represent physically every time the mass is celebrated.

I find that so odd too, this idea that it's so important to represent maleness at the Eucharist. Christ on the Cross was bleeding, in order to bring forth new life. It's no leap to see a feminine side to that!

RRocks- that's down to the deep human inclination to Not Want To Think About Things. People spend most of their lives Not Thinking About Things- actively avoiding it, in fact. If people started Thinking About Things, they might have to change the way they live, whether that be "This Catholicism doesn't really make any sense, I should do something else" or "I think Catholicism is the True Faith and should follow it more closely".

What generally happens is people go about being guided solely by feelings. That's how people can go about thinking "Aww, baby in a manger, how sweet!" and "Virgin birth- how silly is that?" at the same time. It's why people make such a fuss going to Midnight Mass, but can't be arsed for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time.

As I said, the sacrifice of the mass is a wedding feast- the church, the people in the pews, are the Bride. You can't justify a male priesthood if you are Anglican and believe in sacramental same-sex marriage (as opposed to civil unions). You can if you believe, as the Catholic church believes, that sacramental marriage is reserved to the uniting of masculine and feminine.

erm reading that post I started out agreeing with you MM but actually the more I think about it that doesn't make sense to me.

It's when you're confronted by an actual nativity scene with an actual representation of a human baby with its parents, that IMO you are most likely to be hit with the realisation that the virgin birth has to be either a mistake or a metaphor.

Mary, do you know how old that is, the idea that the Church is the bride? I think it's a third-century interpretation of the Song of Songs, but my MIL (who has a fair grasp of Orthodox teaching) thinks that it may be more of a recent idea.

I know of a few Anglicans who don't like the idea of a female priesthood but who would not see the Church as female - though I'm not sure on what grounds they'd argue.

but MM if the priest absolutely has to be physically male to represent the wedding feast, wouldn't the congregation have to be entirely physically female? and if the latter is not the case, why the former?

I dont know why I am arguing, I will never get this, which is why I am not even attempting to attend church any more! Sorry if i am coming across as unpleasant.

I think Virgin Birth is easier to understand if (like the majority of people throughout Christian history), you don't really know how pregnancy comes about. It must have seemed like a huge miracle to some people, however it happened.

LRD, the church as bride is mentioned e.g. in Ephesians 5, also Revelation I think, also in Isiaah?

Yes, and it's the substance of Song of Songs (unless you think people kept their erotica with their holy books, which is possible too I reckon). It's just as far as I know, the idea that the Church must be female, and Christ must be the bridegroom, is not an idea that was in force in the first couple of centuries of Christianity.

The thing I find fascinating and scary in equal measure is the way that layers of literalism and metaphor are wrapped around Christian belief. Sometimes people justify something by an extremely literal interpretation and other times by a metaphorical one. I've seen the 'bride of Christ' imagery interpreted either way, and certainly the image of Christ as a mother is quite prevalent. Given both of those things, I find it very hard when people insist that they 'know' a priest must be male ...

But I may just not be very spiritual!

LRD- the idea of Christ as the bridegroom is as old as Jesus. It is from his own mouth. The church as his bride is inferred in these passages and conffirmed inrevelation, so circa 90AD, according to Catholic. The references are clear to the point of not really requiring interpretation.

Asto your other point, try googling "Christ the divine pelican" some time :-D

Exactly - why is Christ's Y chromosone all-important, even more important than his humanity, or his suffering, or his teachings?

I think the fact that people prepared to jump ship for a different branch of Christianity, with very different interpretations of the Bible, practices and teachings shows that actually this is about misogyny, not about faith at all.

I mean, they are members of a church whose supreme head IS a woman - have they never noticed she's a Queen, not a King?

MaryMungo,

But that is just an analogy. The Mass isn't actually a wedding and the church isn't actually female. (It either has no gender or it's male because it's run by men, or it's both male and female because it includes the congretation.)You can't conclude that priests can't be women from an analogy of the Mass with a wedding. Or at least to do so is logically invalid.

Re Not Wanting To Think About Things, I'm sure you're right that most people don't want to think about the issues that exercise theologians. Many of those issues are based on a medieval understanding of the world and involve rather fuzzy thinking.

Mary - thanks for the reference. What I'm getting at, though, is that there aren't really any points in Christian history that don't require interpretation. I reckon if someone had said what maktaitai says about the congregation needing to be all female, the early church would have been in uproar!

We were discussing the Christ-as-mother/pelican imagery on the feminism threads a while ago - it's interesting how the interpretations run alongside social ideas about womanhood.

RRocks - medieval fuzzy thinking? Such as?

I'm struck by how very medieval this whole debate is!