#756 Ingrained Priest

Sexism is an insidious and ingrained thing. The implication is someone can’t do something simply by virtue of her sex. Or his sex. A man can’t raise children. A woman can’t hold high office.
Or be a priest.
Recently the Pope was in the US. He was on a mission of peace and goodwill and apology to the victims or clerical abuse. The Catholic Church is conflicted. On the one hand, they say women can’t be priests.
On the other, they have to admit that apparently pedophiles can.
The American Catholic Church has broken from Rome on many issues, or at least sees differently than the Holy See over the sea.
One of them is birth control, which is the real issue behind global food shortages and global warming. One of them is Catholic sexism regarding female priests. The Pope maintains that the church has the long view of centuries and that perhaps it’s not a good idea to abandon all that tradition for the ephemeral nature of the modern.
His detractors point out that defending sexism by calling it tradition is sexism of the worst kind. It was the argument used by the South before the civil war to excuse slavery—with appropriate, centuries old, justifying Bible verses. It was the argument used during the civil rights movement by conservatives to justify separate water fountains and back-of-the-bus discrimination. It is the argument used by conservative Muslims to justify dressing females from head to foot in confining and uncomfortable clothing with hoods, veils, and other identity and self-esteem stripping accouterments.
And here is an example of our own tradition and prejudice all rolled into one uncomfortable package. We’re appalled when Muslims suppress their women. Yet we nod indulgently when the Pope talks of tradition and the priesthood.
Maybe it’s because sexism persists in the areas people secretly think most important. Europeans elect women to the highest office, but they don’t say much about the sexist Pope. Here in the US, we think female priests are a perfectly obvious choice, yet we’ve never elected a female president.
America, ya gotta love it.