Dr.Drane wrote an offensive and illogical editorial. As a bio-ethicist, he should restrict his pontificating to areas of medicine and its moral application. Instead, he attacks the Roman Catholic Church with ad hominem and non sequitur false arguments.
Pejorative slanders like calling the bishops ‘theologically unsophisticated’ and naïve do not prove his premise. He implies that the Catholic hierarchy is sexist and discriminates against women. That would only be true if Holy Orders were a right every baptized human being enjoyed. On the contrary, clergy (deacons, priests and bishops) are ordained men by divine institution. Jesus Christ established ordained ministry as a gift and not as an entitlement. No Catholic male can even demand the call to Holy Orders. There must be discernment and affirmation by the Bishop who is a successor of the Apostles. It is infallible teaching that Holy Orders is reserved to baptized males only as Pope John Paul the Great taught in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.
The Pope and Bishops alone have teaching authority, called the Magisterium. It is not extended to theologians or bioethicists. Furthermore, faith and morals are not subservient to public opinion or contemporary culture. Hence, the Church’s doctrines on marriage being reserved to one man and one woman; on the sinfulness of abortion, euthanasia and contraception; etc., are not open for debate as they are based on the truth of the immutable Natural Moral Law. Fidelity and loyalty are neither conservative nor liberal, they are just right.
