For the second time in two weeks, Time has published an article trumpeting women who are pretending to be genuine Catholic priests. As we noted last week, Dawn Reiss was the culprit in a flimsy piece. Now the bleary-eyed Tim Padgett is in on the act.

There's little that separates the two articles, except Padgett accidently pulls the cover off the real agenda at play for these renegade women. The truth is that these so-called "Catholics" aren't very Catholic at all. Padgett notes:

The Womenpriests use a liturgy that stresses gender neutrality ("In the name of God our Father and Mother …"), and they don't toe the Vatican line against birth control and abortion, endorsing instead the Catholic tenet of informed individual conscience. They also favor the kind of new-age, Mother Earth music that can grate on even progressive Catholics.

Oy.

Like Reiss, Padgett fails to note that the ordination of women in the Catholic Church is simply not a possibility. Like Reiss, Padgett makes no mention of John Paul II's 1994 Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, which reiterated the Church's assertion that it simply does not have the authority to change the nature of sacraments, which Christ himself instituted. The issue will never be "up for a vote."

Yet according to a truly warped article by Dawn Reiss in Time magazine (9/25/10), it's already happened. In fact, "three women have entered the priesthood" in the Chicago area alone, says Reiss.

Is this true? Is Alta Jacko (rhymes with "wacko"), "the mother of eight children" whom Reiss profiles, really "an ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Church"? No. Jacko is as much a Catholic priest as she is the Vice President of the United States.

But Weiss' falsehoods don't end there.

Weiss asserts that "Biblical passages refer to female clergy." Uhh … No, they don't. Weiss advances the common feminist gobbledegook that a reference to a possible "Junia" in Romans 16:7 signifies women "clergy" in the early Church. (For clarification on this passage, read this and this.)

Then there's the laughable photo and caption that accompanies Weiss' piece. The caption in part reads, "Alta Jacko’s ordination to be a deaconate on Nov. 1, 2008." As Mollie Ziegler at the GetReligion blog smartly pointed out, "[Weiss] managed to not just misuse the word diaconate but misspell it, too." D'oh!

Most notably, however, Weiss misleads her audience by giving readers the false impression that the issue of "women ordination" is simply a case of "waiting it out" until another Pope comes along and "changes policy." Although Weiss and others may wish otherwise, this will never happen. The issue is will never be "up for a vote."

In the Catholic Church, the ordination of priests occurs through Holy Orders, a sacrament. The Church maintains that sacraments were instituted by Christ himself. As Pope John Paul II reiterated in his 1994 letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, the Church simply does not have the authority to change the nature of something that Christ instituted. The authority in this matter is not a Pope or anyone else; the authority is Christ. Indeed, "this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful," as Pope John Paul II wrote.

Take the sacrament of baptism. The very nature of the sacrament requires that the individual be baptized with water. The Church could not decide tomorrow to baptize with orange juice. Baptisms are done with water. In the same manner, Jesus chose only men to be his apostles, and the Church guards what it believes to be a visible sign of God's grace.

The Church also asserts that the priesthood is about role, not power. In his Letter to the Romans (Rom. 12:4-8) and his First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 7 (all)), Paul teaches readers about roles in the Church.

Although it may seem uncharitable to say, Weiss' article is simply bad, bad journalism.

The article is, "Pilfering Priests," by Tim Padgett. (Online, the title is "When Priests Pilfer.") The heading below the main title warns, "the Catholic Church is facing another crisis: clergy who steal money from their parishes." Interesting. But what are the facts?

To start, Padgett cites four specific cases that have panned out in the last couple of years in which priests have acted deplorably and stole from their parishes. OK. Fair enough. But I don't see a "crisis" yet.

Padgett then turns to a December 2006 study from Villanova University (pdf file), which reported that 85% of the 78 U.S. Catholic dioceses responding to a survey (out of 174 queried) experienced embezzlement cases in the last five years.* Padgett uses this info to elaborate on "the increasing number of clergy getting caught with the hands in the offertory." He then surmises that "priestly arrogance" or a sense of "entitlement" may drive priests to "pick-pocket[] parishioners."

Here's the problem: The Villanova study did not ask who stole the church money (source)! The study also clearly states that in the cases of discovered embezzlement, it was most often the parish priest who was "responsible for detecting the theft"! (To his credit, Padgett notes the latter fact; but why didn't he stop and rethink his premise?) The study says nothing about any "crisis" of priests pilfering money. It also did not even investigate whether embezzlement is a growing problem or not. (The study's actual title is, "Internal Financial Controls in the U.S. Catholic Church.")

In other words, Padgett cites four cases of embezzling priests. He then misuses a study to give the impression that priests are increasingly out of control and relentlessly dipping into the offertory, even though the study says no such thing at all.

Even though one priest stealing from a parish is terrible, Tim Padgett's assertion of a "crisis" in the Catholic Church to be measured alongside the sexual abuse atrocities is flat-out bogus. (The heading to his article in the print edition reads, "Still recovering from the sexual abuse scandal of five years ago, the Catholic Church is facing another crisis: clergy who steal money from their parishes.")

[* - In a blog, a lawyer named Jack Siegel made an important observation regarding the study's figures. I wanted to make the same point, but he worded it well (bold mine): "Some caution is required when reviewing the data. Specifically, the survey was sent to dioceses, which are not specific church parishes. For examples, the Archdiocese of Chicago is comprised of 378 individual parishes. Consequently, the numbers should not be taken to mean that there have been thefts at 85% of the thousands of individual churches making up the Catholic Church in the United States." (link; although I strongly disagree with his title for the same reasons I've outlined above.) Me: Also remember that only 45% of U.S. dioceses even responded to the survey. By the way, there are about 19,000 Catholic parishes in the United States (source).]