Of course, women priests and popes are part of a bigger package containing all sorts of theological surprises…
To make the Church less masculine: this is the task that Pope Francis has given the International Theological Commission. Or at least, that is the official translation of the Italian word Francis used, smaschilizzare, which the English-language media rightly translated as “demasculinize”, i.e. “emasculate, castrate”. “Rendere meno maschile,” which Francis did not say, would translate literally as “to make less masculine.”
But how can anyone, much less a pope, contemplate demasculinizing a Church that was founded by the only-begotten Son of God who came down from heaven and become man? Where did Francis get this blasphemously bizarre idea?
In tasking the Commission, Francis refers to the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthazar, who wrote that the “Marian dimension of the Church is antecedent to that of the Petrine, without being in any way divided from it or being less complementary.” Borrowing from von Balthazar, John Paul II stated in Mulieris Dignitatem that “one can say that the Church is both ‘Marian’ and ‘Apostolic-Petrine.'” ….
