Catholics consider the consecrated wafer, the Eucharist, among the most sacred objects in the world and believe it becomes the 'Body of Christ' through transubstantiation. Student Government Senator Webster Cook filed the hazing charges with University of Central Florida administrators shortly after he admitted violating church rules by bringing the Eucharist home from Mass on June 29, then holding it hostage for one week in a plastic bag before returning it. Cook said his hazing complaint cited a UCF anti-hazing policy banning the forced consumption of any food in which the initiation or admission into or affiliation with a University of Central Florida organization may be directly or indirectly conditioned.

On Sunday, June 29, 2008 I attended a mass held by the Catholic Campus Ministry in the Cape Florida Ballroom at the UCF Student Union. I attended the meeting with my non-Catholic friend, Benjamin Collard, in order to teach him about our religion. Approximately forty-five minutes into the meeting, the organization began the communion ceremony, during which crackers and wine were distributed to the people in attendance. I proceeded to the altar and received a cracker along with everyone else. I did not immediately eat the cracker because I wanted to show it to my friend Benjamin first. However, as I walked towards the woman with the wine, a member of the group grabbed my arm from behind. While I was being held from behind, another member of the group stepped in front of me, blocking my path. This group member said, “You need to eat it!” I was intimidated and embarrassed because I was in the front of room of almost 200 people. Although I did not want to eat the cracker, I put it in my mouth because I was physically and mentally forced to do so.

Upon returning to my seat, I removed the cracker from my mouth and held it in my hand. At this point, another member of the group, Michelle Ducker, put her hand on my shoulder and told me “Eat the cracker or I’m going to make a huge scene”. Almost instantly, she grabbed my wrist and began and scratching my fingers. While not exercising any physical force in return, I asked her to “Stop touching me”. Despite my clear protest, she continued to hold my hands, wrists, and arms. She also touched my shorts in order to feel inside my pockets. I had to loudly ask her this three times before she stopped. Although neither of us used or indicated that we would use physical force, a large man was sent to remove us from the room. When he asked us to leave, we promptly complied to avoid a conflict. In the hallway, I told him that I was insulted by their use of force. He informed me that their actions were in accordance with the policies of the Catholic Church. I regularly attended a Catholic Church and Catechism throughout my entire childhood. In all that time, I never learned that failing to immediately consume my cracker during communion would oblige my fellow laymen to use physical force against me. This incident was especially perturbing because I have previously observed members of my church do this without provoking this apparently default repercussion.

Use, possession, sale and/or distribution of alcoholic beverages except as expressly permitted by the law and University rules, and behavior under the influence of alcoholic beverages. During the Catholic Campus Ministry’s communion ceremony, wine was offered to an entire group of students, the majority of whom are under twenty-one years of age. The wine was also given to a number of obvious minors. Serving alcohol to anyone under twenty-one years of age is against the law. Unless there is a provision in federal, state, or local law excluding religious organizations, their actions constitute a violation of this rule.

Since Channel 9 broke the story it's grabbed national headlines. Paul Zachary Myers, an athiest college professor at the University of Minnesota Morris who saw the story, has since pledged to desecrate the Eucharist and post photographic evidence on the Internet in protest of Cook's treatment. The pledge attracted condemnation from the Catholic League, a Catholic civil rights group whose leader, Bill Donohue, suggested that UCF President John Hitt should expel Cook from school even after he returned the Eucharist.

In the Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem, I myself wrote in this regard: "In calling only men as his Apostles, Christ acted in a completely free and sovereign manner. In doing so, he exercised the same freedom with which, in all his behavior, he emphasized the dignity and the vocation of women, without conforming to the prevailing customs and to the traditions sanctioned by the legislation of the time."(5) In fact the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles attest that this call was made in accordance with God's eternal plan; Christ chose those whom he willed (cf. Mk 3:13-14; Jn 6:70), and he did so in union with the Father, "through the Holy Spirit" (Acts 1:2), after having spent the night in prayer (cf. Lk 6:12). Therefore, in granting admission to the ministerial priesthood,(6) the Church has always acknowledged as a perennial norm her Lord's way of acting in choosing the twelve men whom he made the foundation of his Church (cf. Rv 21:14). These men did not in fact receive only a function which could thereafter be exercised by any member of the Church; rather they were specifically and intimately associated in the mission of the Incarnate Word himself (cf. Mt 10:1, 7-8; 28:16-20; Mk 3:13-16; 16:14-15). The Apostles did the same when they chose fellow workers(7) who would succeed them in their ministry.(8) Also included in this choice were those who, throughout the time of the Church, would carry on the Apostles' mission of representing Christ the Lord and Redeemer.(9) Furthermore, the fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, received neither the mission proper to the Apostles nor the ministerial priesthood clearly shows that the non-admission of women to priestly ordination cannot mean that women are of lesser dignity, nor can it be construed as discrimination against them. Rather, it is to be seen as the faithful observance of a plan to be ascribed to the wisdom of the Lord of the universe.

The New Testament and the whole history of the Church give ample evidence of the presence in the Church of women, true disciples, witnesses to Christ in the family and in society, as well as in total consecration to the service of God and of the Gospel. "By defending the dignity of women and their vocation, the Church has shown honor and gratitude for those women who-faithful to the Gospel-have shared in every age in the apostolic mission of the whole People of God. They are the holy martyrs, virgins and mothers of families, who bravely bore witness to their faith and passed on the Church's faith and tradition by bringing up their children in the spirit of the Gospel."(11) Moreover, it is to the holiness of the faithful that the hierarchical structure of the Church is totally ordered. For this reason, the Declaration Inter Insigniores recalls: "the only better gift, which can and must be desired, is love (cf. 1 Cor 12 and 13). The greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven are not the ministers but the saints."(12)

The ceremony, like several others that have taken place around the world over the last six years, was denounced by the Roman Catholic church, and critics said the event was a stunt with no religious significance. The Catholic Church has consistently taught that only men can be ordained as priests, and the Archdiocese of Boston said that the women who participated in today’s ceremony had automatically excommunicated themselves by participating in what it said was an invalid ordination ceremony. But the women who participated in the event, along with the several hundred people who spent nearly three hours in the sweltering, non-air-conditioned Church of the Covenant, said they rejected the excommunications, and believed that the women had been validly ordained. The women were vested with white chasubles and red stoles and greeted with a standing ovation as they were declared to be priests; they then helped preside over a service at which they declared bread and wine to be consecrated and offered what they said was Communion to anyone who wished to receive it.

C.J. Doyle, of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, called the ceremony “a sacrilegious parody of Holy Orders conducted at a Protestant church by a collection of apostates misappropriating the Catholic name.” “One must not only be a male to be a Catholic priest, one must be a Catholic,'' Doyle said. "The performers in this theater of propaganda are neither. These women ought to have the intellectual honesty to admit that they left the Catholic Church some time ago. Whatever publicity value today's exercise has, it must be measured against both the manifest fraudulence and the irredeemable hopelessness of their cause.”

The women did not pledge obedience or chastity – the promises made by Roman Catholic priests. One was introduced to the congregation by her daughter; another by her husband.

The ceremony was held in a venerable Protestant church, the Church of the Covenant, which is affiliated with both the Presbyterian Church and the United Church of Christ. The interim pastor of the church, the Rev. Jennifer Wegter-McNelly, declared the ordination of women “an important part of this church’s identity,’’ and said “we stand with you today.’’ The former president of the Massachusetts conference of the United Church of Christ, the state’s largest Protestant denomination, was among several Protestant clergy who attended the ceremony to express their support for the women seeking ordination as Catholic priests. “If it looks like discrimination, if it acts like discrimination, and if it feels like discrimination, it is discrimination,’’ said the Rev. Nancy S. Taylor, the former conference president, who is now senior minister of Old South Church. “Prejudice in liturgical clothing is still prejudice.’’

To many people, both today and when the encyclical was promulgated on July 25, 1968, the notion simply defies understanding. Consenting adults, told not to use birth control? Preposterous. Third World parents deprived access to contraception and abortion? Positively criminal. A ban on condoms when there’s a risk of contracting AIDS? Beneath contempt. “The execration of the world,” in philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe’s phrase, was what Paul VI incurred with that document—to which the years since 1968 have added plenty of just plain ridicule. Hasn’t everyone heard Monty Python’s send-up song “Every Sperm Is Sacred”? Or heard the jokes? “You no play-a the game, you no make-a the rules.” And “What do you call the rhythm method? Vatican roulette.” And “What do you call a woman who uses the rhythm method? Mommy.” As everyone also knows, it’s not only the Church’s self-declared adversaries who go in for this sort of sport. So, too, do many American and European Catholics—specifically, the ones often called dissenting or cafeteria Catholics, and who more accurately might be dubbed the “Catholic Otherwise Faithful.” I may be Catholic, but I’m not a maniac about it, runs their unofficial subtext—meaning: I’m happy to take credit for enlightened Catholic positions on the death penalty/social justice/civil rights, but of course I don’t believe in those archaic teachings about divorce/homosexuality/and above all birth control.

And so we have a microcosm of the current fate of Humanae Vitae and all it represents in the American Church—and, for that matter, in what is left of the advanced Western one, too. With each passing year, it seems safe to assume, fewer priests can be found to explain the teaching, fewer parishioners to obey it, and fewer educated people to avoid rolling their eyes at the idea that anyone in 2008 could possibly be so antiquarian as to hold any opinion about contraceptive sex—any, that is, other than its full-throttle celebration as the chief liberation of our time. And in just that apparent consensus about the ridiculousness of it all, amid all those ashes scattered over a Christian teaching stretching back two millennia, arises a fascinating and in fact exceedingly amusing modern morality tale—amusing, at least, to those who take their humor dark. “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh,” the Psalmist promises, specifically in a passage about enjoying vindication over one’s adversaries. If that is so, then the racket on this fortieth anniversary must be prodigious. Four decades later, not only have the document’s signature predictions been ratified in empirical force, but they have been ratified as few predictions ever are: in ways its authors could not possibly have foreseen, including by information that did not exist when the document was written, by scholars and others with no interest whatever in its teaching, and indeed even inadvertently, and in more ways than one, by many proud public adversaries of the Church. Forty years later, there are more than enough ironies, both secular and religious, to make one swear there’s a humorist in heaven.

"The coalition is not anti-religious. We have Christians in our midst," she noted. "We want to support the Catholics For Condoms, which is a group in the U.S. We want to support the Rainbow Sash, which is the group of homosexuals within the Catholic Church. We're not anti-Catholic youth. We want to talk to them about these issues so that they can go home and talk to the people in their areas, in their churches about these issues and what Australian young people are saying to them."

The second commandment of the Teaching: "Do not murder; do not commit adultery"; do not corrupt boys; do not fornicate; "do not steal"; do not practice magic; do not go in for sorcery; do not murder a child by abortion or kill a newborn infant. "Do not covet your neighbor's property; do not commit perjury; do not bear false witness"; do not slander; do not bear grudges. Do not be double-minded or double-tongued, for a double tongue is "a deadly snare." Your words shall not be dishonest or hollow, but substantiated by action. Do not be greedy or extortionate or hypocritical or malicious or arrogant. Do not plot against your neighbor. Do not hate anybody; but reprove some, pray for others, and still others love more than your own life.

History further illuminates the Church's position on this subject. Anthropological studies show that means of contraception existed in antiquity. Medical papyri described various contraceptive methods used in China in the year 2700 BC and in Egypt in the year 1850 BC. Soranos (AD 98-139), a Greek physician from Ephesus, described seventeen medically approved methods of contraception. Also at this time, abortion and infanticide were not uncommon practices in the Roman Empire. The early Christian community upheld the sanctity of marriage, marital love, and human life. In the New Testament, the word pharmakeia appears, which some scholars link to the birth control issue. Pharmakeia denotes the mixing of potions for secretive purposes, and from Soranos and others, evidence exists of artificial birth control potions. Interestingly, pharmakeia is oftentimes translated as "sorcery" in English. In the three passages in which pharmakeia appears, other sexual sins are also condemned: lewd conduct, impurity, licentiousness, orgies, "and the like." (Confer Galatians 5:19-21.) This evidence highlights that the early Church condemned anything which violated the integrity of marital love.

Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church's judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful. Invoking an abundance of divine assistance upon you, venerable brothers, and upon all the faithful, I impart my apostolic blessing.

The publication in May 1994 of the apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was followed by a number of problematic and negative statements by certain theologians, organizations of priests and religious, as well as some associations of lay people. These reactions attempted to cast doubt on the definitive character of the letter's teaching on the inadmissibility of women to the ministerial priesthood and also questioned whether this teaching belonged to the deposit of the faith. This congregation therefore has judged it necessary to dispel the doubts and reservations that have arisen by issuing a responsum ad dubium, which the Holy Father has approved and ordered to be published (cf. enclosure).

Dubium: Whether the teaching that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, which is presented in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis to be held definitively, is to be understood as belonging to the deposit of faith. Responsum: In the affirmative. This teaching requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium (cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium 25, 2). Thus, in the present circumstances, the Roman Pontiff, exercising his proper office of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32), has handed on this same teaching by a formal declaration, explicitly stating what is to be held always, everywhere, and by all, as belonging to the deposit of the faith. The Sovereign Pontiff John Paul II, at the Audience granted to the undersigned Cardinal Prefect, approved this Reply, adopted in the ordinary session of this Congregation, and ordered it to be published.

Catholic doctors could be stripped of their right to refuse to arrange abortions under proposals to be debated next week. They will no longer be able to conscientiously object to authorising abortions but instead will be compelled to send any woman requesting the procedure directly to an abortion clinic. The proposal has caused immense anger among the growing number of doctors who have moral objections to abortion - with about one in four now refusing to sign consent forms. Some may launch a test case if, as expected, the move is pushed through the British Medical Association's policy-making body on Thursday.