I read some interesting articles this week on women and the Catholic church. I doubt that there will be any progress towards "developing" the doctrine of "complementarity" that essentially declares that women are meant (by God) to be submissive, passive, and subservient to men - in the church and home, but perhaps the HS will get through at some point.
From NCR online about an article in L'Osservatore Romano
The question must be asked: "Doesn't the Marian-Petrine principle express an ideology and rhetoric of sexual and gender differentiation that has now been exposed as one of the covers for patriarchal privileges?" wrote Marinella Perroni, a retired professor of biblical theology at the Pontifical Atheneum of St. Anselm in Rome......
Using the binary Petrine principle and Marian principle is "seductive" because it is simple, Perroni said.
But it is problematic because it stereotypes the differences between men and women and gives them a hierarchical value, she said. The feminine is presented as domestic, interior, welcoming and spiritual, while the masculine is presented as ministerial, authoritative and powerful.
However, Perroni wrote, it is "quite clear that forms of the mystical exaltation of the feminine are directly proportional to the refusal of public recognition of women's authority."
"The masculine-feminine bipolarity," she said, featured "obsessively" in Catholic theology when it was "totally androcentric and patriarchal," but it has lost credibility "since women first became the 'women's issue' and then, having shaken off this offensive expression, became full protagonists in social, political and ecclesial life."
In this week's Commonweral about the Synod and women
The synod is an exercise in ecclesial listening. Synodal listening is not,...merely an “instrumental action,” a wildly complicated multi-year public opinion survey. To listen is to emulate God’s own fundamental disposition toward God’s people. When it comes to the status of women in the Church, we will know that such listening has been genuine if its fruits...shatter the intractable pattern of speaking about women as though what can be said of one can be said of all. ... I found myself heartened ... both for the universality of its call to rethink women’s participation in the Church and for the multiplicity of voices and perspectives ...The section on women begins in a striking way: “The call for a conversion of the Church’s culture, for the salvation of the world, is linked in concrete terms to the possibility of establishing a new culture, with new practices and structures. A critical and urgent area in this regard concerns the role of women and their vocation, rooted in our common baptismal dignity, to participate fully in the life of the Church.” The document refers to the “vocation” of women in the singular. But here, the vocation in question is the call to full participation in the life of the Church, the fulfillment of our common baptism. By locating the need to reconsider women’s roles within a deeper and broader call for ecclesial conversion, the document suggests a sense among the faithful that the status quo not only represents a problem for women but, fundamentally, for the mission of the Church.
Conversion begins in confession, and the DCS’s paragraphs on women tell some uncomfortable truths. Among the most striking ...: “Those who were most committed to the synod process were women, who seem to have realized not only that they had more to gain, but also more to offer by being relegated to a prophetic edge,...” The line stunned me ...—not because it contained a new or radical sentiment, but because it was included in a document of this kind at all. It gives the lie to sentimental glorifications of the place that women occupy in the Church. Women don’t offer unique insight because of our natural humility or our maternal capacity for caregiving, but because the “prophetic edges” are the only ground from which we can speak. The report from the Superiors of Institutes of Consecrated Life is even more stark in its assessment ..... Prevalent “sexism in decision-making and Church language” leads to the exclusion of women “from meaningful roles in the life of the Church,” their report states. It indicts the treatment of women religious as “cheap labor,” and decries the tendency to “entrust ecclesial functions to permanent deacons” rather than allowing women to share in responsibility for ecclesial communities. ...
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/women-church-synod-francis-catholic
Also in NCR - today-
Good point about "...'the prophetic edges' being the only ground from which we can speak".
ReplyDeleteThere are two cement road blocks which are placed in the way of any progress towards women's ordination. One of them is the document "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis" in 1994 by Pope John Paul II, in which he said that it isn't possible for the church to ordain women (which is of course a true statement if they refuse to even entertain the possibility). And the other cement road block is the doctrine of papal the infallibility. Which doesn't mean what a lot of people think it means. But which can be used as a kind of circular justification for a particular viewpoint ("what is true is what I said was true, because I said it")
As far as the diaconate being open to women, there is basically no theological obstacle to it except "mort main" the dead hand of the past.
The notion of a Marian (feminine) and Petrine (male) principle dividing the church is really absurd. It says that all of us, man or woman, became church ladies by baptism. Some of us may become male by ordination. Therefore. Jim is the only male among us. (Assuming that deacons are male, but some dispute that so deacons may not be masculine after all) Stanley and I are church ladies along with Anne and Katherine.
ReplyDeleteAll of this thinking about ecclesial masculinity and femininity appears to me to be far more on the weird side than anything the gender theorists are putting forward about flexibility.
I think if most Catholic men really understood this theologizing about masculinity/femininity they would be more upset by it than women. Not only do we have a many clergy who are gay, and some who are pedophiles, and many who concealed pedophiles, many of them have been exposed to some very disturbing ideas of what masculinity and femininity means theologically.
All of these theological ideas about ordination seem to me to be besides these very practical points: 1) we need more priests and can get them by ordaining married men to the priesthood. 2) we need more deacons and can get them by ordaining women to the deaconate. 3) during both 2 and 3 will not put us at odds with the Orthodox since they ordain married men and have an ordination ritual for Woman Deacons (although they have used it only rarely in recent centuries).
The issue of women priests would cause us problems with the Orthodox and be very divisive internally. I don’t think it is ripe for doing.
I also think it is important to make baptism more important that ordination in the church. (Ordaining married men and women deacons will not empower laity in the church or world).
Personally, I think that I and other laity could do much more for the church and society if we took up the role of prophet rather than that of priest or deacon. Dorothy Day has had more an influence on Americans and the American Church than most bishops.
That last article, about priests who abuse adult women being shown leniency, along with the appearance of conflicts of interest, is very upsetting. This is exactly the kind of thing that Francis was elected to address: to root out the clericalism and lack of proper controls in the institution. He needs to find the will and energy to do something about such circumstances before advocates and the media shame him into action.
ReplyDeleteDoes the Church want women to be its ally? What would it mean for women to be recognized as protagonists in the Church, as full subjects, diverse in every respect, with the agency to respond in freedom and creativity to the call of the Gospel?
ReplyDeleteDoes the Church (the clergy) want laity, men as well as women, to be its ally? To be protagonists in church and society, not simply employees, volunteers, or donors?
One evening several years ago in our local Commonweal community, most of the men who were present were like me, men who had spent at least a couple of years on the road toward the priesthood. We all expressed satisfaction in the ways that we had expressed our faith in our secular vocations, but all expressed dissatisfaction with our roles in the church. As one person put it at some point clericalism had either spit us out, or we had spit clericalism out, or a little of both. We all saw our talents as being rejected or underutilized in the Church by clericalism.
I have spent a lot of time with the Catholic women leaders in Cleveland who want women to be clergy. Never doing that time did they lament how underutilized my talents were in the Church, because of course they would have had to recognized that they had never utilized my talents in their organizations. They were all very happy to have me show up and applaud what they were doing. But they never saw what I was interested in, e.g., the Divine Office, as being what they were about. They were interested in their own ambitions to be priests not in utilizing the talents of laity who did not want to be priests.
During the time I worked for the mental health system, it was completely transformed from a largely male run system to one in which women were the chief protagonists at the state, county and agency level. That occurred not because the women made women an issue, but because they took leadership on all the critical issues that the system faced.
If the result of woman participating in the synod is that woman’s participation becomes the issue, it will likely fail. If the result is that women become agents for all laity to become protagonists in the church to undo clericalism, then it will succeed. I got very tired of going to meetings largely of women who characterized the problem in the Church as men (patriarchy) rather than clericalism.
Coincidentally, I ran across this article this evening. The person being interviewed, Deacon Dominic Cerrato, apparently is a member of the pope's theological commission investigating the possibility of women becoming deacons. That said, he takes pains at the top of the interview to state that he's speaking to the reporter, not as a member of the commission, but as a private theologian. It's a neat distinction, although I think we may be forgiven for wondering, in good faith, where one side of his identity ends and the other begins.
ReplyDeleteAt least when wearing his private theologian hat, the views he expresses aren't particularly congenial to the proposition that women can be deacons. Having been around the block a few times, I've run across most of his points and arguments before. The body of his argument constitutes the conventional institutional-conservative position, I think.
He is just one member of a larger commission, and the Holy Spirit may take him, and the rest of the commission, in directions that none of them can foresee.
At any rate, here is the interview. I hope it is not behind a paywall.
https://www.oursundayvisitor.com/can-and-should-women-be-ordained-to-the-diaconate-an-interview-with-a-member-of-a-vaticans-commission/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_email=Omeda&utm_campaign=NL-The+Deacon+Dispatch&utm_term=6911F9565389B3Z
Thanks for linking the article, Jack. It wasn't behind a paywall. From your intro, I had an idea where Deacon Cerrato was going to go with this. And, bingo. I wasn't wrong. As you say, we can wonder where one side of one's identity ends and the other begins. For instance, I can have an identity as a laywoman and a deacon's wife, and also an identity as as a grandmother and a godmother. And guess what, the two identities talk to each other.
DeleteBut more about that later. First about Deacon Cerrato's predictable bottom line. Basically it is that the ordination of women deacons in the early church wasn't the same as the ordination of men. It wasn't Holy Orders. Which is likely true, because the theology of Holy Orders wasn't fully developed yet at that time. So the deacon maintains that we'd be making up something new if we ordained women to the diaconate today. At the bottom, though it's unstated, it's the "camel getting it's nose inside the tent" argument. The traditionalist argument against women being in any degree of Holy Orders is that it isn't possible. We just can't do it.
Okay, here are my two identities speaking. First my laywoman/deacon's wife one: This identity says, I don't care. I have never felt called to the diaconate. I am quite glad to be supportive to my husband in his role and help him however I can.
Now in my grandmother/ godmother role. It so happens that I have a goddaughter (who is also my niece) named Phoebe. Phoebe in Acts of the Apostles has always been her patron saint. She would be very disappointed if Phoebe's role is down-translated from "deacon" to just meaning "servant" . My Phoebe is a lawyer now. She has always been passionate about justice and equality. I also have three granddaughters. They are pretty young yet. I don't know if my niece, or any of my granddaughters, will ever feel called to any degree of Holy Orders. But if they do, I am going to have a hard time explaining to them why women can't be ordained (to either the diaconate or the priesthood!) when, for our whole lives, we have been exhorted to pray for vocations because we are in dire need of clergy.
Oops, sorry , it was Jim who commented with the article link rather than Jack.
DeleteKatherine, my objection to the church’s refusal to ordain women is that it hurts the church, not just the individual women who feel called to be priests. Personally, I have never had even the slightest interest in becoming a priest. God forbid! But it is not actually God who forbids, but human men. The men are desperate to keep their exclusive hold on clerical power and privileges. They see it slipping away as the acceptance of women in positions of authority, influence, and - yes - power- has risen dramatically in almost every vocation that was once denied to women. The total absence of the feminine mind, feminine genius as JPII called it, ironically, has resulted in distorted teachings, ranging from the claim that the ordained are ontologically superior to everyone else to the ban on effective, modern birth control.
DeleteThe church’s denial of the priesthood on gender alone is a sin. It is a sin because it hurts people - all the people who are “the” church. It is simply a 2000 year long hangover of patriarchy, a distorted theology that has become just a way to justify keeping women subservient to men.
I hope that the priesthood is opened up to women. I hope that it would be a declericalized priesthood, if that is possible. Otherwise, it's like women wanting to be CEO's and presidents. No help to the rest of us if they're only replacing curs with bitches.
ReplyDeleteAs they say, it's a dog eat dog world. I agree that this isn't the outlook we want to bring to the priesthood or the church. The Isaiah readings in Advent point to a different reality. Like the line in one of today's readings, "...come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!"
DeleteUnrelated, a few days ago I was touting Paxlovid as a get-out-of-jail-free card for Covid. And for a lot of people it actually does work that way, such as for my husband. But a caveat is in order, contrary to my doctor's office people, who said a return to positive test after a negative may not actually mean anything, sometimes it does mean that your symptoms come back. Which they did in my case. So basically I just pushed the "pause" button. At no point have I been seriously ill, so really no complaints. Just back to quarantining and ringing the leprosy bell. As my husband pointed out the Paxlovid probably was responsible for the milder symptoms. But what I am reading are statistics that about 25% of the people who take Paxlovid experience a rebound after almost recovering. It does however seem to be effective at keeping people from serious illness.
ReplyDeleteAntivirals are quite the accomplishment. I understand they are used to mitigate shingles attacks. They are like antibiotics for viruses.
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