Press Release, Hannover/Passau, 30. June 2002
We Are Church/ Germany and Austria
translation John Wijngaards
German original
The German movement "We Are Church" and the Austria platform "We Are Church" interpret the socalled ‘ordination of women priests’ of 29th of June 2002 in the neighbourhood of Passau as a sign of protest against the fossilised and traditionalistic understanding of ministry in the Roman Catholic Church.
Though the event has to be questioned from many points of viewn and though the ordination did not happen in conformity with Church law, the real scandal lies in the fact that the official Roman Catholic Church still excludes women from a ministry of leadership, and this in spite of there being no valid grounds for the exclusion from a biblical/theological point of view.
The road to obtaining a leadership role and the priestly ministry for women is envisaged in qa variety of ways even among reform-minded Catholic men and women. This effort by the women from Austria, Germany and the USA should be utilised to blow new life into the discussion around women’s ordination.
Together with the Austrian "We Are Church", the German "We Are Church" movement calls on all to continue and intensify the discussion on the renewal of the ministries and their opening to women on all levels of the Church with more discernment. Only then does the hope exist that future ordinations of women will take place within the organization of the Church.
The word wide involvement of Catholics with the question of women’s ordination proves that the prohibition of further discussion, decreed by the pope in his letter "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis" of 1994, has not worked. Ever more people among the committed faithful can no longer understand the attitude of Church leadership in this particular question. They would like to see the call of women confirmed through an ordination to the priesthood or diaconate.
71% of practising Catholic men and women in Germany are in favour of the ordination of women, as has been shown by the American sociologists of religion, Prof. Andrew Greely und Prof. Michael Hout, in a study of 1996. The public request "What God’s People Really Want" of 1995, which included a demand for the inclusion of women in the priestly ministry, was signed by 2,3 million people in the German language area.
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