Word: heinemann
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ever virgin, meaning that she and Joseph never had sex and that the "brothers" of Jesus mentioned in the Bible were cousins. This idea consolidated the tradition of celibacy for priests and nuns. Protestants reject the belief as antisexual and lacking in biblical support. Liberal Catholic theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann of Germany contends that the notion of a celibate clergy demeaned women by robbing Mary of sexuality and normal motherhood. This is, Ranke-Heinemann declares, "a monstrous product of neurotic sexual fantasy." Responds a Vatican official: "The church doesn't have problems with sex. The world does...
...very model of modern Roman Catholic femininity: wife, mother and the first woman in Germany appointed to teach theology under church auspices. For good measure, Uta Ranke-Heinemann was a convert from Protestantism, the daughter of a West German President and the wife of a first cousin of Poland's Catholic Primate. Nonetheless, in 1987 the German hierarchy forced the University of Essen to oust Ranke-Heinemann from her Catholic professorship and give her another teaching post that would not imply any church endorsement. Her sin: in defiance of Christian teaching, Ranke-Heinemann had concluded that Mary...
...Eunuchs title comes from Jesus' teaching in Matthew 19: 12 about men becoming eunuchs (by which he meant forswearing sex) "for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." Catholicism uses these words as a warrant for requiring priestly celibacy. In Ranke-Heinemann's reading, the saying is linked to the preceding verses in which Jesus directs his disciples not to remarry after divorce. The book asserts that twisted hostility toward sex underlies the church's stand against not only married priests and remarriage for the divorced but also birth control, premarital sex and women clergy...
...blaming celibacy for everything that she dislikes in the church, Ranke- Heinemann follows a path already well trod by Protestants, historians and other feminists. However, she displays a polemical and sarcastic flair ("theology increasingly became the business of bachelors") and merrily marshals rather selective evidence of priestly misogyny through the ages. One 12th century divine urged men to remember that a pretty woman starts as "a foul-smelling drop of semen" and is destined to be "food for worms." Ranke- Heinemann's acerbic wit is less impressive when she turns to the modern era. She cannot, for instance, bring herself...
Still, Ranke-Heinemann is not a litmus-test feminist. Although some feminist cults yearn for paganism to supplant Judaism and Christianity, Ranke-Heinemann contends that Catholicism went wrong when it spurned the healthy outlook of the Jewish Bible and absorbed hostility toward sex from certain pagan groups. On abortion, she notes that ancient Judaism and Christianity joined in opposing the pro-choice stance of paganism. Her fury is aimed only at the official Catholic teaching that it is better to let a pregnant woman die than to perform an abortion...