Catholics Equate Women Priests with Sex Abuse of Children

(John Hooper, The Guardian, 15 July 2010)
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[T]he Vatican stoked the anger of liberal Catholics and women’s groups by including a provision in its revised decree that made the “attempted ordination” of women one of the gravest crimes in ecclesiastical law. . . . The change put the “offence” on a par with the sex abuse of minors. . . . Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, called the document “one of the most insulting and misogynistic pronouncements that the Vatican has made for a very long time. Why any self-respecting woman would want to remain part of an organisation that regards their full and equal participation as a ‘grave sin’ is a mystery to me.” . . . Vivienne Hayes, the chief executive of the Women’s Resource Centre, said the decision to raise women’s ordination to the level of a serious crime was “appalling”. . . . “We are sure that the vast majority of the general public will share in our abject horror at the Vatican’s decision to categorise the ordination of women as an ‘offence’ in the same category as paedophilia – deemed to be one of the ‘gravest offences a priest can commit’. . . . ”This statement follows a series where the Vatican, an institution which yields great influence and power not only in the Catholic community but also wider society, has pitched itself in direct opposition not only to women’s rights but to our equal worth and value. . . . tens of thousands of Catholics, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have abandoned their faith in disgust