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Keywords: Ordination

  • RELIGION

    Women deacons: A closed book?

    • Bill Uren
    • 11 June 2024

    In a 60 Minutes interview, Pope Francis was asked whether there would ever be the prospect within the Catholic Church of a woman being ordained as a deacon. The Pope’s reply was a blunt ‘No’. This negative response came as a surprise to many Vatican watchers. 

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  • RELIGION

    Is it time to re-think seminaries?

    • Gideon Goosen
    • 23 September 2021
    60 Comments

    The Final Report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse identified clericalism as a significant contributor to abuse across religious institutions Australia-wide. Clericalism is rooted in a theological belief that the clergy are different to the laity, having undergone an ‘ontological change’ at ordination, and feeds the notion that the clergy may not be challenged. And according to the report, the culture of clericalism is on the rise in seminaries in Australia.

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  • RELIGION

    Women deacons the solution to priestly power problem

    • Phyllis Zagano
    • 11 May 2016
    21 Comments

    Pope Francis may be interested in better situating women within Church governance and ministry, and there is sufficient theological evidence to readmit women to the order of deacon. Even so, significant curial roadblocks keep him from moving in the obvious direction. Women deacons could take up significant posts, at the Vatican and around the world, but in 2008 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith decreed ordination of women a crime worthy of automatic excommunication.

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  • Calling the Pope a feminist

    • Maureen O'Brien
    • 11 May 2015

    An eye-opener in the recent ABC TV Compass program on women in church leadership was how willing two leading  Australian Catholic women, Kristina Keneally and Sr Trish Madigan, were in using the 'ordination' word and seeing women's ordination as an essential part of equality in church governance. All indications are that Pope Francis doesn't share their view and nowhere more so than when he wrote in his Apostolic Exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, that 'The reservation of the priesthood to males ... is not a question open to discussion.'

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  • RELIGION

    Radical Pope's gender flaws

    • Megan Graham
    • 13 March 2014
    47 Comments

    The broad support Francis receives from progressives, despite his unwillingness to even consider female ordination, demonstrates how marginalised women's issues really are in our society. He may have changed the game in terms of the Church's engagement with the poor, but this does not diminish the significance of his oppressive and outdated views on gender roles.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Philosophy of falling

    • Ailsa Piper
    • 18 September 2013
    9 Comments

    Waters fall. So does night. We fall asleep, sometimes because staying awake is too painful. Soldiers fall, and we mourn them. They are boys, many of them, so fall-able. We fall into love, and out of it again, like it is some dark hole. We forget that love should be about rising, because we have fallen back onto cliché. We go through life as though we will always be upright, and when we fall, it hurts.

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  • RELIGION

    Church and ordained ministry in the 21st century

    • Frank Brennan
    • 23 May 2013
    2 Comments

    Fr Frank Brennan's keynote address at the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn Clergy Assembly, St Clement's, Gaylong, on 22 May 2013

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  • RELIGION

    Equality within marriage is biblical

    • Andrew McGowan
    • 03 September 2012
    31 Comments

    Leading Sydney Anglicans have argued for a notion of male 'headship' within marriage, taking ancient biblical authors' advice about first century existence within a given social order as a prescription for the 21st century social order itself. Most Australians, including most Christians, are rightly disturbed by such suggestions.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Harmonising the government bureaucracy symphony

    • David Cappo
    • 06 February 2012
    2 Comments

    The Federal Government is using the word coordination a lot. But coordination of health, education and employment services could come to nothing if the coordinating bodies are not given power. And power is the very thing bureaucracy treasures and wants to keep to itself.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Meddling priest's milestone

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 25 March 2011
    1 Comment

    Earlier this year Frank Brennan celebrated the 25th anniversary of his ordination as a Jesuit priest. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating once dubbed him a 'meddling priest', a label he accepts with mixed feelings.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Prophet of women's ordination

    • Janet Scarfe
    • 13 March 2011
    18 Comments

    Patricia Brennan put the ordination of women on the agenda of the Anglican Church and kept it there. Like Germaine Greer, she was tall, with an unmissable presence and rich voice. And, like Germaine, she was often called strident.

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  • RELIGION

    'Divided' Anglicans dodge conflict

    • Andrew McGowan
    • 30 September 2010
    1 Comment

    The Australian Anglican Church is divided on questions of women's ordination, sexuality, lay presidency and liturgical texts. But the recent assembly in Melbourne was relatively polite, although the question of the conservative, evangelical Sydney Diocese's relationship with the rest was never far from the surface.

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