relda,
>>The process of feminization is deeper than most would presume<<
I found the analysis you offered following this insight very interesting. I have often been speculating whether humanity is not on the threshold of an evolutionary stage when not only mental but later also biological differences between our male and female descendants will be gradually - probably in centuries and millennia - smoothed out, even erased, whatever that would imply for procreation techniques. However, I somehow believe that at the end it will be our female descendants, rather than males, who will not want to have their different identity thus erased.

I could not understand your statement that "If the official liturgy of the Church continues to use ... the name of Father for God ..., the sacred nature and absolute transcendence of God will be forgotten". If it were so, why did we not loose "the sacred nature and absolute transcendence of God" through many centuries while the Church(es) "continued to use the name of Father for God"? Or do you think we did but did not notice? I would have thought it was the other way around, that we loose something in the liturgy if we fiddle with the biblical name for God.

After all, if we make this concession to modern (or just fashionable) trends, why stop here? If it is "Our Father or Mother", why "who art in Heaven" rather than "who art beyond space-time"; why not "hallowed be Thy names"; why not "Thy Kingdom or Republic come" to make anti-royalists happy, etc? I hope you understand what I mean by using the Lord's prayer as an example. (Let me repeat, I am not speaking of the theological content of the liturgy just of the metaphors it uses in text related to the Gospels and tradition.)

So I would agree with Sells when he says that "most of language is metaphor, that does not give us permission to change it as we see fit. I would say that the metaphor is essential and when we change it we lose something of its structure".

Sells,

Via The Cardinal Prefect of the Vatican, The Pope asserts that, “Lord is exalted above any other name”, citing Phil 2.9; Phil 2.11; Acts 2.20; Joel 3:4; 1 Peter 1.25; Romans 10:9; 1 Corinthians 2:8; 1 Corinthians 12:3. Lord corresponds to Adonai (Hebrew) and Kyrios (Greek). “Moreover, the Tetragrammaton is not a substitute for God’s name, which is “Lord”. [“Dominus” was a second century Vulgate substitute]

The Vatican’s position, I put, shows Humanity’s relationship to (the alleged) God, rather than God’s relationship to God’s self (The Trinity). As a protocol, the former would seem to be more appropriate. “Lord” presents the male gender in this tradition.
“The solution is to explain that they (women) are not left out, that they are included in the love of God and that the preservation of the name of God is essential.” - Sells

But in their place, in OT tradition? Must explain to women? “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.” - 1 Corinthians 34:35 KJV

In some traditions [e.g. Ugarit], Ashara is the female consort of Yahweh.

Above, I have used the word tradition several times. Here, events need to be review in context with their Times.
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Offline for a few days

Dan,

Do you agree that there are trees older than 6,00 years and that heavy metals are forged in stars?

George,
The “feminization process’ to which I referred is the radical pendulum shift (reaction) from overt patriarchy to overt matriarchy – merely resulting in another ‘imbalance’. I doubt, ultimately, there will be any evolutionary change, fundamentally, to alter our masculine or feminine traits. Such evolutionary change, if it were to occur would certainly render the following definition, given by satirist Ambrose Bierce, as accurate: “MALE, n. A member of the unconsidered, or negligible sex. The male of the human race is commonly known (to the female) as Mere Man. The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.” Mind you, there are pockets within the male ‘colony’ so downtrodden.

I don’t take the position of removing “Father” from the Lords prayer to substitute with “Mother”. 'Father', as a root metaphor of Christianity, means its exclusion on the basis that it was sexist would result in the religion being so changed that it would not be Christianity any longer. To move 'Beyond God the Father' would to ultimately cease being Christian. 'Father' is not a male projection onto God. It is a judgement of our fatherhood. It is how God reveals Himself. It is therefore not a sexist term. However, despite the high scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas (for his time), he argued that the male is the normative or generic sex of the human species. Only the male represents the fullness of human potential, whereas woman by nature is defective physically, morally and mentally. Not merely after the Fall, but in the original nature of things, woman’s ‘defective nature’ confined her to a subservient position in the social order.

It follows for Aquinas that woman cannot represent headship either in society or in the church. Her inability to be ordained follows from her defective or (as Aquinas put it, following Aristotle’s biology) her ‘misbegotten’ nature. The Vatican Declaration against the Ordination of Women in 1976 sums up a new theological materialism when it declares that there must be a physical resemblance’ between the priest and Christ-leading Roman Catholic theologians, including Karl Rähner, have actually condemned this Declaration as ‘heretical’.

relda,
Sorry, I seem to have misunderstood you by seeing your "feminisation process" of males more as a reaction - or rather accompaniment - to the "masculinisation process" of females, expecting them to compete in traditionally male roles at the expense of their female psychological, mental, identity (emphasis on "at the expense of").

You are probably right that "Thomas Aquinas ... argued that the male is the normative or generic sex of the human species". And today some people speculate that the "technology" of human cloning will make males completely redundant. Only the future will be able to look at our times with the same understanding of the historical context (or condescension?) as we look at times when the asymmetry of the male and female role in the society was dictated by many things, but perhaps mainly by the low level of available technology. Technology that today allows us to put more emphasis on intellectual abilities (where there is no difference between man and woman), than on physical strength (where there is an obvious difference) as it was the case in the past.

I know, and understand, your objections to the Catholic definition of priest (and the complementary nature of the male and female aspects of existence, reflected in the complementary roles of men and women in the workings of the Church). Today nobody is forced to be a Catholic if his/her conscience dictates otherwise: there are many Churches that see these roles differently. We have been here already, and there is no need to repeat my personal opinion on this.

George,
Neither do I wish to enter a debate on the Reformers of the 16th century rejecting the traditional definition of the magisterium, the ‘authority’ of the Roman Church or the ‘priesthood’. But I must say, as with most, if not all Christian denominations, the average Catholic is typically unaware of their own denominational diversity.

More often than not, each ‘brand’ of Catholic seeks to define themselves as normative and attempt to portray other groups as not being truly Catholic. This variety is emblematic of the whole Church, which has changed from being “Catholic” in the strictly identifiable Roman-focused way, to something closer to the original Greek sense of “catholic,” meaning universal, broad, and inclusive. It is this tension that is at play in the frequent 'family conflicts', or even wars going on between the various "camps" of Catholics. The dictates of conscience therefore really don’t arise.

Professor Denis McLaughlin of the Australian Catholic University (Brisbane) has found that most Australian Catholics constituted a "parallel Church", which largely disregarded the teachings of the "institutional Catholic Church, the Vatican, the Magisterium". In practice: "If they agree with the Church on an issue, it is because the Church position makes sense to them and they actively decide to agree. If a Church teaching does not make sense to them, they will refuse to agree, no matter how often or how clearly or how authoritatively the Church has spoken on it." I would suggest this applies in most other countries, including Australia.

I respect your Catholic ‘brand’ but realise, and as mentioned, a ‘catholic’ universalism is nevertheless growing. The days are numbered for a shifting power structure that has, for millennia, allowed a few clerical men to define and control the message and organization of Catholicism. A diverse group of unorthodox lay men and women, who worship as Catholics, consider themselves as Catholic as the Pope – despite Pope John Paul II’s reassertion on the traditional claims of the teaching authority and emphasis on the need for all Roman Catholics to adhere closely to a strict definition of orthodoxy.

relda,
Thank you for your interesting exposé. I am aware of the difference between "catholic" (meaning universal), "Catholic" (meaning a Christian baptised into the Roman Catholic Church, and loyal to the Pope) and "Catholic", meaning all sorts of Christians desiring Catholicity (in the first meaning of the word), with an ambivalent relation to the Pope.

The term "Christian" branched during Reformation into the Roman Catholic and Protestant streams, and today it seems that the concept of "(Roman) Catholic" is undergoing a similar diversification into loyal - (a) and (c) below - and not-so-loyal varieties. I would say that today those who see themselves as actively belonging to the Catholic Church, can be more or less divided into three groups:

(a) those who take the Church's teachings literally, and accept and follow all of them verbatim,
(b) those who also take these teachings literally but reject, criticise and even agitate against some of them because also their comprehension does not go beyond the literal (not unlike those who attack the bible because they cannot understand it except on a literal basis), and
(c) those whose loyalty takes into account freedom of conscience leading sometimes to the need to interpret and apply the teachings to their particular - often exceptional - situation (which is not the same as a licence to criticise the teachings, or even agitate against them).

Of course, this is a simplification of the situation. I am certainly not an expert on ecclesiastical matters. So I would not want to make predictions whether or not the group (b) will ultimately prevail, except that I do not think the trend in Western countries - whose share of the world's Catholics is dwindling - is indicative of future developments.