Catholics angry as church puts female ordination on par with sex abuse.

You have to wonder sometimes which century the Catholic church is living in.

It was meant to be the document that put a lid on the clerical sex abuse scandals that have swept the Roman Catholic world. But instead of quelling fury from within and without the church, the Vatican stoked the anger of liberal Catholics and women's groups by including a provision in its revised decree that made the "attempted ordination" of women one of the gravest crimes in ecclesiastical law.

The change put the "offence" on a par with the sex abuse of minors.

Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, called the document "one of the most insulting and misogynistic pronouncements that the Vatican has made for a very long time. Why any self-respecting woman would want to remain part of an organisation that regards their full and equal participation as a 'grave sin' is a mystery to me."

Vivienne Hayes, the chief executive of the Women's Resource Centre, said the decision to raise women's ordination to the level of a serious crime was "appalling".

Wanting to ordain women as priests is now the equivalent of child molestation.

It's hard to think of anything more insulting, any way in which the church could signal that it is more out of touch with the twenty first century than through this pronouncement.

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Tags: Catholic Church, women priests