UCCtruths

Everything about this is wrong and hypocritical. As I mentioned on Monday, while United Church of Christ leaders go nuts over a phony conspiracy of church stealing by outsiders, we have prominent ministers in our denomination also meddling in other faiths. Here is Rev. Nancy S. Taylor's sermon given last month on her participation in the ordination of woman as Roman Catholic priests:

A month from today, on Sunday, July 22, Quinn Caldwell and I will participate in a different kind of parade. Our sister congregation, Church of the Covenant – a UCC/Presbyterian church, located just around the corner on Newbury Street – will host a solemn celebration of the ordination to the priesthood of five Roman Catholics. Quinn and I are organizing the colorful parade of robed and stoled priests and bishops … some seasoned, others to be newly minted that day.

These are no ordinary ordinations. The event is invitation-only, and will have a furtive quality about it. These are “underground” ordinations because the ordinands are women.

The movement for the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic Church describes these ordinations as “valid but illicit.” They are valid because the women have studied and prepared just as men do. Valid, because the Bishops who will enact the rite of the laying on of hands, have themselves been validly ordained, and are in the great succession that goes all the way back to St. Peter. They are “illicit” because the Vatican says they are.

A recent pronouncement from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith states this: “he who shall have attempted to confer holy orders on a woman, as well as the woman who may have attempted to receive Holy Orders, incurs … excommunication.”

It is that simple, that stark, and that swift. The very moment these women have hands laid upon them in line with great apostolic succession back to Peter; the very moment that a bishop confers upon them the holy orders for which they have so long studied and prepared, at that self-same moment, they will receive something else as well: automatic excommunication from their beloved Church.

Despite and because of the fatefulness of this undertaking, the ceremony promises to be moving.

Those attending will cry through their laughter and laugh through their tears. The liturgical parade of priests and bishops will be full of color, solemnity and sadness. What they are undertaking is brave. It is also fateful: it will forever sever them from the church they love and seek to reform.

I have not come to bring peace, but a sword, say Jesus.
I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
One’s foes will be members of one’s own household.

This certainly has ecumenical consequences, but don't expect the national office of the United Church of Christ to respond unless it turns into a public relations issue.