Word: priests
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...Savior Priest...
...made it clear that traditional Church teachings on abortion, female clergy and homosexuality will not be challenged so long as he's in charge. After the release of a new Vatican document that would prohibit any person who was openly gay - even if celibate - from becoming a priest, the writer Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic, said Benedict "has identified a group of people and said, regardless of how they behave or what they do, they are beneath serving God. It isn't what they do that he is concerned with. It's who they are." Yet away from the most...
...Protevangelium of James. Its story runs, in part, like this: the girl Mary, herself the product of a miraculous pregnancy, grows up in the great Jewish Temple receiving food from the hand of an angel. But as she approaches puberty, she can live there no longer, and the High Priest searches for a chaste caretaker to look after her. Under divine guidance, he collects the wooden staffs of all the widowers of Israel and prays over them, awaiting a sign. One by one he returns each rod, unchanged. "But Joseph received the last rod," reads the Protevangelium...
...Protevangelium made his impregnating Mary less likely. By assigning him children from a first marriage, it answered the question of who Jesus' siblings were. The Protevangelium portrays Joseph's initial agitation with Mary far more fully than Scripture. It also tells how the dismayed High Priest later puts them both through a trial by ordeal (they must drink a potentially lethal "water of conviction") before he accepts that the pregnant Mary is still a virgin. A bright light obscures Joseph's view of the birth, but the Protevangelium has already assigned him a beautiful epiphany, beginning, "I ... was walking...
...became sources--centuries later--for both Western art and the miracle plays that were medieval Europe's precursor to modern theater. The plays had fun with Joseph. In one he announces that he is so "olde [that] both myn leggys [be]gyn to fold," while in another the High Priest's waters of conviction simply get Joseph and Mary soused. But the dramas offered a common man's appreciation for Joseph's early fear that he has been cuckolded, and other human touches. In one play, when Joseph renounces his jealousy, Mary allows him a brief, companionable kiss...