Kate Kelly helps to ordain a female Catholic priest

I’m not making this up:

http://www.sltrib.com/home/3075882-155/salt-lake-city-woman-is-first

(For those who may not recall, Kate Kelly founded “Ordain Women,” and was excommunicated in June 2014.)

To my untutored eye, at least, Ms. Kelly’s joining in the ordination suggests a rather different view of priesthood — whether that be Catholic or Latter-day Saint priesthood — than most Mormons (or most Catholics) hold.

Where, for example, did she obtain ordination such that she can transmit it to anybody else?  Where, in particular, did she gain Catholic ordination?  In what sense is she Catholic, or authorized to insert herself into matters intimately involved not only with the administration of the Catholic Church but, much more significantly, with its most holy sacraments and liturgy?

This sort of thing, in my judgment, should strengthen the suspicion of many orthodox members in the pews that partisans of the women’s ordination movements in Mormonism and Catholicism don’t really believe in cardinal principles of the faiths in which they seek ordination.  It suggests, yet again, that they’re not merely seeking incremental reform of their traditions but creating, wholesale, some kind of new religion or religions of their own.

Does Kate Kelly, who has now laid her hands upon a woman to consecrate her as a Roman Catholic priest, actually accept the primacy of the Pope or the doctrine of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“no salvation outside the Church”)?  Does she regularly attend mass and make confession?  Does she believe in the “real presence” of the body and blood of the Son at communion?  Does she venerate the saints?  Or, from another angle, does this action of hers reflect any conviction on her part that, after centuries of apostasy and lack of divine authority on the earth, John the Baptist restored the Aaronic priesthood, and that Peter, James, and John restored the Melchizedek priesthood?  Does it suggest any belief on her part that the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only person now living on the earth who both holds, and is authorized to exercise, all priesthood keys?

My strong suspicion is that Ms. Kelly’s seemingly divergent theological views haven’t emerged of a sudden, after her excommunication from the Church, but that they were present, if not openly expressed, for quite some time before that.

The Parliament of the World’s Religions is a fascinating event, but it’s also very much of a grab bag, and, on the whole, it leans decidedly leftward in politics and theology.  At this one, (at least nominally) Catholic and Mormon advocates of the ordination of women weren’t exactly in short supply, along with Wiccans, advocates of New Age spirituality, Scientologists, and many other interesting folk.  Such antics as this “ordination,” if they become hallmarks of the Parliament, will tend to skew the Parliament’s participants yet further to the left, because mainstream believers won’t come and mainstream religious organizations won’t support it.