St. Paul’s a Sexist, Irish Bishops Charge

St. Paul’s a Sexist, Irish Bishops Charge

NewsMax.com
Friday, Jan. 5, 2001

St. Paul is a male chauvinist and his words are politically incorrect, say Ireland’s bishops, who sided with the nation’s militant feminists and declared that some of St. Paul’s writings on women ought to be banned from the liturgy.

In "Domestic Violence," a document issued by two commissions of the Irish Bishop’s Conference, the prelates charge that certain passages in the New Testament "are liable to give contemporary society an undesirable impression concerning women," and recommends that such texts "would be better omitted" from the lectionary used during the Mass.

The texts cited are all from St. Paul’s writings, and the bishops echoed the concerns of radical feminists that St. Paul’s advice could be viewed as encouraging domestic violence.

The document raised the ire of John Waters of the liberal Irish Times, who blasted the bishops for falling for the feminist line that women alone are victims of domestic violence when in fact men get battered around by their wives about as often as women get battered by their husbands.

Wrote Waters: "The Catholic Church’s moral credentials have rested on its willingness to treat all comers as equals before God. This changed last week when the church issued a document based on the propaganda of those representing one side of an argument and proposed editing Scripture to fall in with this analysis."

Zeroing in on the fallacy that domestic violence is strictly a male pastime, Waters wrote, "Every independent study in the Western world surveying men and women found that domestic violence is a roughly 50-50 phenomenon, and the issue is not gender but the dynamics of human relationships."

Waters said that the main reason men did not report being victims of domestic violence was because of the "pervasiveness" of feminist propaganda that demonizes men.

"Rampaging males spouting [St. Paul’s letter to the ] Corinthians" after knocking their wives around simply don’t exist, he wrote.

Commenting on the charge that St. Paul approved of husbands mistreating their wives, David Quinn, editor of the Irish Catholic, cited passages from the apostle’s letters that showed him to be anything but a chauvinist.

Writing in the January issue of Crisis magazine, Quinn noted that while "St. Paul gave men authority in the house and the Church … he told men to love their wives as they loved their own body. He told them to treat them as Christ would."

The same advice might be given to the Irish bishops about St. Paul: Treat him as Christ, not the radical feminists, would.

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