How fun. I was just talking to my daughter about how incredibly sexist the Catholic Church is yesterday.
She said that someone she was talking to online excused the ‘women must not speak in church’ part of the New Testament as saying that makes nuns possible. So since she knows basically nothing about Catholicism, I explained to her the major power imbalance between priests and nuns and how the patriarchal structure of the Catholic Church will keep it that way for the foreseeable future.
Tax the church!
In Germany church taxes you.
Not me.
Opt out 🤩
There is “compensations” paid to the church from the general tax pool. Also church run hospitals, daycars and schools are still largely financed through public money, while their employees have less rights because of church law. Oh and the bishops are also paid by the government directly.
Unless you dont pay any tax in Germany you also pay taxes to run the churches. The church tax comes on top of that.
If you’re religious, you pay tax. If you’re not, you can opt out. https://www.welcome-hub-germany.com/blog/church-tax-germany
Yes, but you opting out does not remove the fact that from the normal tax pool money also goes directly to running the churches. In other words as long as you pay any taxes, you also pay to the church.
It is considered “compensations” for Napoleons disowning the churches.
Quoth Article 138 WRV, part of the Basic Law of Germany:
(1) Rights of religious societies to public subsidies on the basis of a law, contract or special grant shall be redeemed by legislation of the Länder. The principles governing such redemption shall be established by the Reich.
Just so we’re clear: “redeemed” here means “gotten rid of”. It’s been on the books since 1919, so far the Reich, now the Bund, has failed to pass the required guideline laws for the states to do it. Back in the days redeemed would’ve meant “we’ll give you a lump sum one-off, in exchange, we’ll stop paying regularly”, now, after all those years, it arguably should be “you’ll get nothing from now on also you still owe us”.
There’s been movement, though. There’s been uppity municipalities having a look at those age-old contracts, who noticed that they said nothing about money that aspect was agreed upon, unofficially, sometime later so they went ahead and dumped what the local reverend was entitled to on their driveway: Something like three steres of wood, ten sacks of rye and five of wheat, a hundredweight of onions, a tub of salted butter, two kegs of beer, as well as some length of linen and some of melton.
If anyone was hoping for women priests, give up on that. The Roman Catholic church would first have to retract both papal infallibility and ecumenical infallibility.
They have made too many definitive statements that women can’t be priests, and they have made definitive statements that their definitive statements are infallible, and must be agreed to by anyone who calls themself Catholic. It’s not even up for debate (unless all of the infallibility stuff is also up for debate).
For example:
I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.
They really painted themselves into a corner. While the rest of society moves forward with equal rights for historically marginalized groups, the Catholic church will be stuck with the effects of their early bad decisions (and some recent bad decisions) because they banned themselves from admitting when they are wrong.
Eh they could do whatever they want. They could declare that “the point in time has been reached that god wanted women to be able to be priests from. His plan has always been that women were not allowed to be priests until a certain date had passed, and now that date has arrived.”
I mean, a lot of people already hate the dude. There are catholics out there who already refuse to call him the pope.
Now imaginenig he just came out one day and said, yeah everything the previous pope’s said may have been wrong. But I know what ir right so now listen to me.
Won’t go down well
When protestants started the logical stance that the bread and wine is a metaphor being used in the Eucharist, Catholics stayed with saying it is a ritual that transformed the bread and wine to having christs blood and body imbued into them, like an act of magic performed with superhuman abilities, not people just worshipping him. If they would choose to say cannibalism is terrible, except when we do it, I cant see the stubbornness lapsing when it came to say women can suddenly perform magic after a certain date. But who knows, crazier things have happened in life.
When protestants started the logical stance that the bread and wine is a metaphor being used in the Eucharist,
That’s never been the Lutheran position, at least for all I know. The Lutheran position is “whatever happens, happens, regardless of what you think it is that happens”: If someone is saying “This is my flesh, this is my blood” while handing out suitable food and drink and the giver and the recipients are in the mood to receive the sacrament, then it is the sacrament, no matter what metaphysics anyone involved believes in.
I cant see the stubbornness lapsing when it came to say women can suddenly perform magic
Oh but there’s the priesthood of all believers, even the Catholics accept that as doctrine. It’s not about whether or not women, or laypeople, can or cannot perform the magic, it’s whether they should be doing it in the church, for a congregation. I’m pretty sure there’s women cloisters where women are doing the magic. The Lutheran church, too, restricts the incantation of the magic words to the reverend, but that’s a church rule. Like, “If it was on the schedule and the reverend is sick in bed the cantor isn’t going to jump in we’ll do it at another date”.
Yeah, the Lutherans were the first split from Catholicism and sort of what I would say would be the start of protestantism. Not that Martin Luther initially wanted that, but he wanted a return to basics and a simpler less controlling version of what the church had slowly become. (95? Thesis and what not… maybe it was 99 can’t recall)
Now we have thousands of denominations of Christians, and they all do their own versions of how they believe things should be. Haven’t studied the historys of religion in a long time, it’s crazy to think about how much I’m sure things have changed and I’ve distorted in my brain throughout time when I reflect on the fact that it has been more than 15 years since the last real class I would have taken. Getting older is strange.
Some day it’d be nice to start studying history more again.
That’s a Hell of a background they decided on for that photo
It looks like something out of Dark Souls
https://publicdelivery.org/fazzini-resurrection/ massive intimidating sculpture that the pope sits in front of when he meets with people
Jesus out there lookin like a C’tan shard
Was just thinking - why does the Catholic Church have one of the C’tan captured - but then again that would probably explain a whole lot.
Lack of equality is why I left the church in my youth. I have way more reasons to never rejoin now, but this feels way too little way too late.
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