Francis Martin

And you saw it in Chicago at the one convention, you know, where they were giving abortion pills to people right outside.

So somehow, um, when a culture of death emerges, I remember, uh, Father Francis Martin used to say, "You know a, a culture of death has begun to emerge when death itself becomes the answer to our most intractable problems."

Right.

Unwanted baby, aging parent, whatever it is, this is the answer for us, these, these troubling things.

It was not out of the ordinary.

So what then of the third of the reasons given in Inter Insignioris, the constant tradition of the church? As Francis Martin writes in his work, The Feminist Question, an excellent and very fair work, one which men in the seminary should read just to learn how to do theology.

Quote, it is certainly fair to refer to this tradition as a constant practice, though I do not deny that some evidence of women being ordained to office may be recovered from the past.

The amount of energy expended in finding such examples and the paucity of the acknowledged results show that, if they are attested at all, they are extremely rare and isolated instances of a departure from a universal practice.

This wondrous capacity, regardless of whether or not she ever has sexual intercourse with a man or carries a child in her womb, profoundly marks her personality.

It is this capacity that makes woman to be so much better equipped than man to prophetically call our world back to the priority of love.

To be sure, there are some, as Francis Martin writes, quote, who seek to ignore this and to describe the difference between men and women as a question of mere body parts, external to their essential manner of existing, unquote.

Such a line of thinking is not Christian.

And this document on the role of the Christian family in the modern world is really wondrous.

Father Francis Martin wrote a book called The Feminist Question, which is really a great look at feminist theology in light of Christian tradition.

Michelle Schumacher, who's an excellent writer, has put together, this is a collection of different essays and whatnot entitled Women in Christ Toward a New Feminism.

Edith Stein, who's really a hero of the 20th century, one of the great minds of the 20th century.