Mormon Feminists says "Dammit! Catholics worship Mary and my crazy, liberal friend is proof."

Feminist Mormon Joanna Brooks is like those Catholics who are eternally loyal to the "spirit of Vatican III," which remains perpetually just around the corner and is perpetually receding from vision as the '60s generation ages and dies.  Because she is dreaming of a Mormonism that embraces Goddess worship and homosexual ministers, she wants people like herself - people who don't believe in what their religion teaches - to be as authoritative as, you know, 2,000 years of tradition, the entire historic magisterium and 99% of the members of the tradition. 

This time, though, she takes her shot at the Mormon canard that Catholics worship Mary:

Mattingly, an Antiochan Orthodox religion journalist whose Get Religion blog “work[s] with the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life and a philanthropist... with the byline Roberta Green,” has made the criticism of minor usage errors a major concern as of late (Roberta Green is Roberta Green Ahmanson, who, along with her husband Howard Jr., is a significant donor to conservative Christian political causes). For their “sins” in using the term “worship” in place of the orthodox term venerate, Mattingly criticized Edmunds and the Guardian’s copy editors, calling them “ridiculous.”


But Mattingly’s piece reminded me of the day I sat in the back pew of a Catholic church on the eastside of Austin, Texas, with my friend Rose, who is Tejana and Catholic. Pointing to a gorgeous mural of a dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe that spanned the cathedral chancel, Rose smiled at me conspiratorially and said, “I bring my kids here to see God as a big, brown-skinned woman.”

Don’t tell Rose that she doesn’t worship Mary, or that she doesn’t “get” Catholicism, as heretical as her feminist Tejana take on it might be.

It’s worth asking the question of what it really means to “get religion.” Religion scholars long ago acknowledged two valid perspectives on religious experience: one that focuses on religious institutions, their policies, their projects, and the “official” story, and another that focuses on the way religion is lived everyday in “unofficial” yet very real ways by common people of faith

Get it?  Because Brooks knows some crazy feminist who wants to make Mary the fourth member of the Trinity, that must, somehow, be a "real Catholic" position.

News flash for Brooks, it doesn't.  Her friend is formally but not materially Catholic.  If she believes what Brooks says she does, she is both formally and materially a heretic and should get educated and go to confession.

Of course, Brooks hit and run effort of smearing Catholicism with the "Catholics worship Mary" canard is really about Brooks' unhappiness with Mormonism:

A few weeks ago, Mattingly criticized RD for running my story on a recently-installed, openly-gay Mormon congregational leader in San Francisco. Get Religion insisted that this story on Mitch Mayne wasn’t really news, and that it was bad journalism to claim that Mayne’s call to serve indicated “evolving” views of homosexuality in Mormonism, because only orthodox institutional statements from high-ranking Church leaders count as evidence.


But as someone who’s been writing about Mormonism and homosexuality for 20 years, since I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, I stand by my observation that Mormon views on homosexuality are changing.

I'll leave it for Mormons to define their own religion, but Brooks should but out from telling Catholics what constitutes Catholicism.