Negating women

Maureen Dowd writes:

Negating women is at the heart of the church’s hideous — and criminal — indifference to the welfare of boys and girls in its priests’ care. Lisa Miller writes in Newsweek’s cover story about the danger of continuing to marginalize women in a disgraced church that has Mary at the center of its founding story:

“In the Roman Catholic corporation, the senior executives live and work, as they have for a thousand years, eschewing not just marriage, but intimacy with women ... not to mention any chance to familiarize themselves with the earthy, primal messiness of families and children.” No wonder that, having closed themselves off from women and everything maternal, they treated children as collateral damage, a necessary sacrifice to save face for Mother Church.

I agree with her. I can't find an electronic version of it, but there's a wonderful editorial cartoon that was published shortly after Dagmar was ordained that pictures her as the Pope, coming to clean up the mess the "boys" created. Ordaining women certainly won't "fix" everything, but it would bring new light and hope into a very dark chapter in the church's history.