UPDATE: A rather odd correspondent has accused me of accusing the Sister of expurgating the text of Scripture. I think it should be clear to any reader that this is the opposite of what, in the following, I am implying she may have guiltily done. My view is that she appears to me to be guilty of making the swaggering, macho claim that she expurgates Scripture ... when (since it has already been expurgated in the Novus Ordo) she doesn't!
Context: I would never pay money for The Tablet but in a weak moment I signed up for their you-can-read-online-six-articles-a-month-free offer. I now wish to comment on an article I read: but I can't revisit it to check the facts, having used up my allocation. I rely upon readers to tell me if through poor memory I am doing someone an injustice, so that I can amend or withdraw this post.
Recently I read in the Tablet a piece about a Catalan nun called, I think, Teresa Forcades. In the course of this article, she was reported as saying that, when reading in Church the First Letter of Timothy, she always left out Chapter 2 verse 12 (in which S Paul does not allow women to teach in Church).
What puzzled me here was the fact that, in the Novus Ordo, that verse is not included in the Lectionary ... in other words, the post-Conciliar revisers had already expurgated it from the text, thereby wilfully and wickedly depriving Sister of the fun of expurgating it herself.
How can I be sure of this? Because I checked it up in Matthew P Hazell's Index Lectionum, which enables you to check such things in an instant. If you haven't got this admirable book already, I recommend it highly. ISBN 978-1-5302-3072-3. It reveals the locations of so very many interred corpses.
But perhaps this verse was included in a pericope from the Office of Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours? I checked the index at the end of each of the four volumes: no luck.
I think ... frabjous day! ... I may just have discovered a New Argument against the Novus Ordo ... videlicet:
It deprives radical nuns and progressive layfolk of the simple daily joy of chopping out of Holy Scripture the bits with which they disagree!!
Spoil Sport!
As for Sister ... does she, perhaps, very occasionally, allow her imagination to run away with her?
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4 comments:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/17/teresa-forcades-nun-on-mission
There's nothing wrong with Sister Teresa that couldn't be put right by a few months at St Cecilia's, Ryde. Provided, that is, she was allowed to catch up with the news from Caracas.
If the good Sister really does 'argue for women priests' while wishing to have 'contraception and abortion left to individuals' consciences', then what she thinks of I Tim. 2: 12 is pretty irelevant in my view.
It does appear that 1 Timothy 2 is read in its entirety on Monday in the 27th Week of Ordinary Time in the yearly "1st Biblical Reading" cycle. The Ordinariate in N. America, with the 1961 table, gets it twice a year!
http://catholic-resources.org/LoH/OfficeOfReadings-Biblical-Index.html
I seem to recall, from my last visit to the nuns of Sant Benet (in 1998?) that, in common with most Benedictines, they do not use the Roman Office to which you allude but a Monastic Office that is much longer and fuller. Ours includes a lectio continua by which the whole of the New Testament is read every year, and the whole of the Old Testament every two years. It's a small detail but a telling one, because if Sr Teresa is saying that she is dropping a verse of scripture from the Office readings adopted by the community (on the grounds that it is a non-Pauline interpolation she thinks is redundant?), that strikes me as being a different matter from refusing to read in full the lessons appointed to be read at Mass. The one concerns the monastery; the other the Church.
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