According to Catholic Culture, the dust-up began with an editorial written by NCR staff that condemned the Church's teaching on the issue of women's ordination as "unjust."
"Barring women from ordination to the priesthood is an injustice that cannot be allowed to stand," the editorial began.
It goes on to defend Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest who was recently defrocked for refusing to recant his public support for women's ordination. The NCR claims that the Vatican was wrong when it accused Bourgeois of "ignoring the sensitivities of the faithful" by his outspoken dissent. They claim it was Bourgeois, not the Vatican, that was in touch with the faithful, saying that the priest, "attuned by a lifetime of listening to the marginalized, has heard the voice of the faithful and he has responded to that voice."
It goes on to say that the majority of the faithful believe, along with Bourgeois, that "no one can say who God can and cannot call to the priesthood, and to say that anatomy is somehow a barrier to God's ability to call one of God's own children forward places absurd limits on God's power."
Even though Blessed John Paul II wrote in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994 that the judgment of the Church is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful and the matter is closed to further discussion, NCR urges Catholics to defy Church teaching by continuing to press for women's ordination by speaking up "in every forum available to us: in parish council meetings, faith-sharing groups, diocesan convocations and academic seminars. We should write letters to our bishops, to the editors of our local papers and television news channels."
Catholic blogger Elizabeth Scalia called the editorial "serious" in that it implies that the leaders of the Catholic Church, who have consistently ruled against female ordination, are suppressing the will of God and the Holy Spirit by doing so.
"To suppress the will of the Holy Spirit—to suppress the will of God—is a wicked thing," she wrote in this blog appearing on the First Things site. "To charge the Church with doing so is to make a serious accusation of wickedness—one bound to have repercussions lasting beyond the heat of a moment. It is to label the Church as antichrist."
The seriousness of NCR's irresponsible editorial can also be found in experts who say encouraging the faithful to press for something that will never be changed does more harm than good to the people involved.
As this blog appearing on the Cardinal Newman Society site explains, Dr. Joyce Little, a theologian retired from The University of St. Thomas in Houston, said at the time of Blessed John Paul's 1994 pronouncement that encouraging women to hope for ordination was unconscionable.
“Rome has always been up front about this,” she wrote, according to EWTN. “Neither the Pope nor Ratzinger nor anyone representing either of them ever gave anyone, anywhere, any reason to expect anything other than what has happened. In fact, anyone who read Ordination Sacerdotalis carefully already knew that the Pope had declared this practice to be, at the very least, irreformable. (What, after all, do people imagine ‘definitively’ means?)”
She added, “I think the sowing of that confusion was in very many instances unconscionable and the responsibility for that confusion and the ensuing grief is one for which many will be held accountable, if not in this life, then in the next.”
This latest dust up is just one of many incidents of outright dissension promoted by the NCR in its long history. For this reason, groups of the faithful are calling for an end to the publication's use of the name "Catholic". The Pro Life Corner of the Stephenson County Right to Life Committee is urging the faithful to "consider sending a short note to Bishop Finn in Kansas City (Diocese where the NCR is located) and ask Bishop Finn to stop allowing the NCR to use the name Catholic because they are deliberately confusing the Catholic faithful, distorting Catholic teaching, and leading people away from Jesus Christ."
Click here to send a note to Bishop Finn.
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Update: I have just discovered that Bishop Charles H. Helmsing of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri, officially condemned the National Catholic Reporter in 1968 for its repeated heresies and asked its editors to stop using the name "Catholic" because, "By retaining it they deceive their Catholic readers and do a great disservice to ecumenism by being responsible for the false irenicism of watering down Catholic teachings." Click here to read his letter of condemnation.
