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by Margaret A. Farley
from Women Priests, Arlene Swidler & Leonard
Swidler 9eds.), Paulist Press 1977, pp. 310 -315.
Republished on our
website with the necessary permissions
(Margaret A. Farley, RSM, was at the time Associate Professor of
Ethics at Yale Divinity School. She received her Ph. D. in Religious Ethics
from Yale University. She is the co-author of A Metaphysics of Being and
God and has published articles in such periodicals as Journal of
Religion and Theological Studies.)
The
Declaration returns in its closing section to the principle of equality which
it affirmed in its opening paragraphs. Its concern here, however, is to make
clear how it is that the principle of equality among persons is not violated in
the Church by the continued exclusion of women from ordained ministry. The
basic argument put forth in this regard is that the Church is of “another
order” than other societies.(1) While role-differentiation on the basis of
sex may constitute unjust discrimination in other spheres of human life, it
does not do so in the Church precisely because of the nature of the Church as a
special kind of society.
The
Declaration gives three characteristics of the “order” of the Church
which explain why the principle of equality is not violated even though women
are excluded on the basis of their sex from certain roles. First, authority in
the Church, unlike other societies, is never a matter of human choice, never a
human right, never something “due” a person as a person. Even Baptism
“does not confer any personal title to public ministry in the
Church.”(2) Priesthood is always a wholly gratuitous vocation, given by
the Holy Spirit, authenticated by the Church. No persons, then, let alone
women, have any claim on the roles or offices of ordained ministry.
Secondly, equality itself, according to the Declaration, does not mean identity
or similarity when it is used to describe the relation among persons in the
Church. While women and men are equal as persons before God, their roles and
functions are not identical. “Equality is in no way identity, for the
Church is a differentiated body, in which each individual has his or her role.
The roles are distinct and must not be confused; they do not favor the
superiority of some vis-à-vis the others, nor do they provide an excuse
for jealousy.”(3)
The
reason why differentiation of roles is compatible with the principle of
equality, according to the Declaration, is that women and men are essentially
complementary. Given this premise, equality can in fact be realized only
through differentiated functions based on sex. Men as men are suited for
ordained ministry and women as women for nonordained ministry. Each, then, is
equally affirmed by a separation of roles. The Declaration thus opts implicitly
for “similar treatment for similar cases” as its formulation of the
principle of equality, justifying the Church’s differentiation in
treatment of women and men on what it concludes are the differences between
them by reason of their sex.
The
third characteristic of Church “order” which the Declaration asserts
as important for understanding the application of the principle of equality is
the recognition of merit based only on love. “The only better gift, which
can and must be desired, is love. The greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven are not
the ministers but the saints.”(4) Any seeming hierarchy among roles, it
suggests, is irrelevant because love alone constitutes grounds for superiority,
and no one is excluded from such a gift on the basis of sex.
In
the Declaration’s own terms, then, it is an interpretation of the
“new order” of the Christian community which must be assessed if we
are to determine the justice or injustice entailed by nonordination of women.
Each of the characteristics of Church “order” described by the
Declaration must be examined to see if any of them do indeed provide grounds
for gender role-differentiation in the ministries of the Church.
1.
There can be no argument with the Declaration’s description of ordained
ministry as a wholly gratuitous vocation, of which authentication by the Church
is a constitutive part. No one disputes the fact that a specific call to the
office of priesthood is given by the Holy Spirit and mediated through the
Church, nor that the Church has the responsibility to discern the legitimacy of
any individual’s vocation to ministry according to norms which it must
formulate and apply. In arguing only this, however, the Declaration misses the
point of those who invoke the “right” of persons in relation to
ministry. Those who assert such a right in relation to ordination do not argue
simply that any person has a right to be ordained. Rather, they maintain that
all persons by reason of being persons and being baptized have a right to have
their experience of vocation to pastoral office tested. Women and men
have a right to be judged for acceptance or nonacceptance by the same norms.
The
Declaration’s exclusion of women from the possibility of an authenticated
vocation to ordained ministry must rest on the presupposition that since the
law of the Church (based presumably on sound reasons) excludes women as a class
from ordination, it is not necessary to test individual cases of women’s
possible vocation. This is to say that since a call to pastoral office is
mediated through the Church in a way that gives no one an a priori claim
to be admitted to pastoral offce, the existence of overriding reasons and
Church law excluding women renders it impossible a priori that
any woman receive an authentic call from the Holy Spirit to such ministry. But
to say this is to beg the question of the validity of the reasons and the
justice of the laws which exclude women as women from ordination. Only if the
reasons can be validated and the laws justified can it be maintained that women
as a class have no right to have their experience of a call to ordained
ministry tested by the Church community.
2.
Other articles in this volume consider various reasons offered by the
Declaration as justification of the continued exclusion of women from
ordination. The argument which must be addressed in particular here, however,
is the argument by which the Declaration tries explicitly to maintain the
principle of equality in the face of the unequal opportunity of women to have
their vocations tested. As we have seen, the Declaration attempts to do this by
introducing the principle of “complementarity.” What we must
determine, then, is whether or not complementarity can qualify the meaning of
equality in such a way that equality is nonetheless preserved.
First
it must be said that the mere assertion of"difference" between women and men
cannot justify differential treatment—certainly not in a way that
guarantees equality in any ordinary sense of the term. The Declaration itself,
for all of its insistence that priesthood does not imply “any personal
superiority . . . in the order of values, but only . . . a difference of fact
on the level of functions and service,”(5) nonetheless goes on to talk
about the “real and pre-eminent place of the priest in the community of
the baptized.”(6) Even if there are good reasons for opening the office of
priesthood to one class of persons and not another on the basis of sex, it is
difficult to see how this fulfills the principle of equality in any way beyond
a Platonic and Aristotelian notion of “equitable
inequalities,”—equal opportunity for equals (men), and
proportionately unequal opportunities for unequals (women in relation to
men).(7) The Declaration’s “similar treatment for similar cases”
yields the very weakest form of a principle of equality.
It
cannot be assumed, moreover, that there are in fact good reasons for
restricting roles in the Church to persons of one sex. If there are not good
reasons then such a restriction constitutes discrimination—an unjust
violation of the principle of equality. But how can it be determined whether
sexual differentiation of roles does indeed constitute discrimination? As in
any issue like this one, we must ask whether the facts of sexual identity are
morally relevant when they are brought to bear against claims to equality of
treatment. One way to evaluate the moral relevance of sexual differences in
relation to equality of opportunity vis-à-vis ordination in the Church
is to examine those characteristics which are said to be sex-related and then
to determine whether they do indeed justify significant role distinctions.
Though the Declaration affirms that “in human beings the difference of sex
exercises an important iníluence, much deeper than, for example, ethnic
differences,”(8) it does not delineate the sex-related characteristics
which are relevant to ministry. It builds implicitly, however, on the detailed
descriptions provided by other recent Vatican statements such as Paul VI’s
“Women/Disciples and Co-workers” and the Pastoral Commission of the
Sacred Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples’ “The Role of
Women in Evangelization.”(9) Characteristics such as hopefulness,
sensitivity, intuition, fidelity, patience, sympathy, contemplativeness are
said to make women suitable for all ministries which are not properly
sacerdotal.(10) At first glance, it is difficult to see how this assertion is
not discriminatory. The roles open to women on the basis of their
“feminine qualities” are limited to the private sphere, and are
clearly subordinate to those open to men. Claims to the contrary (that, for
example, the roles are not inferior, are of equal importance though different,
etc.), as we have seen, have little credibility in a context here, for example,
decision-making at all levels is reserved to those in pastoral office.
It
must, nevertheless, still be asked whether the characteristics identified as
distinctive to women are in fact morally relevant to the circumscription of
roles. One way to probe this question is to ask whether a man who has a
hopeful, sensitive, contemplative, sympathetic, patient nature should be
excluded from ordination. The almost obvious answer to this question points to
the conclusion that these characteristics are unsuitable for the ordained
ministry only when they appear in women.
In
addition, the fundamental question of whether or not distinctive
characteristics can in fact be delineated at all for men and women must be
raised. Evidence from the behavioral and social sciences, as well as from
personal ex perience, points overwhelmingly in the direction of our inability
to characterize masculine and feminine traits with any accuracy or
adequacy.(11) Traditional efforts to do so have proved distortive to our
understanding of persons and injurious to human relations. They inevitably end
in lists of traits such as those given in the document on Evangelization.(12)
Their deficiencies become apparent as soon as they are made exclusively
applicable to one sex. Even as general sketches of dominant sex-related
features they prove vague, subject to exceptions sufficient to disprove the
rule, and importantly culture-conditioned. Short of such listings, there can
only be an appeal to biological differences between men and women. The
irrelevance of such differences to role differentiation leads to the sure
conclusion that there are no morally significant reasons for excluding persons
from major roles in Church ministry on the basis of sex.
3.
Finally, we must assess the significance of the Declaration’s proposal
that it is only the gift of love which determines the superiority or
inferiority of persons in relation to one another (and equality in every other
respect either is unimportant or can be maintained despite apparent differences
in roles). Once again, few would dispute the argument that love, as gift and
response, is what ultimately gives meaning and worth to human persons and their
lives. To say this, however, neither resolves nor neutralizes the problems
raised by the violation of the principle of equality regarding access to
ordained ministry. There are, in fact, at least two ways in which the primacy
of love gives urgency to the need for structures in the Church which reflect
and realize the principle of equality among human persons.
First, the Declaration uses the concept of the gift of love to suggest that
anyone seeking access to pastoral office on the grounds of equality of persons
can only be motivated by a desire for “social advancement.” It admits
that “women who express a desire for the ministerial priesthood are
doubtless motivated by the desire to serve Christ and the Church,” but
reminds them that such a desire has no connection with principles of
equality.(13)
What
the Declaration misses, however, is the relevance of an ethical principle which
might be formulated thus: whenever a person has a fundamental duty, he or she
has a right to whatever is necessary in order to fulfill that duty. The point
is not, of course, that a fundamental duty can never be qualified by lack of
capability, etc. It is, rather, that precisely because of a call to service and
love, women may argue that they must not be barred from what would allow them
to respond faithfully. What demands the elimination of sexual discrimination is
not women’s own desire or even claim to honor or authority or
participation in decision-making, but the claim of those who have a right to be
served in and by the Church, those whose needs constitute for women as well as
men an urgent call to the duty of ordained ministry, to a love which pours
itself out in the “service of God and the Church.”(14)
More
than this, the Declaration fails to take seriously the relation between justice
and love which is deeply embedded in the tradition of the Church. What is
required of all Christian persons and of the Church is a just love, a love
which corresponds to the reality of those loved and which affirms for
individuals and for the community what is needed in order to grow into the
fullness of the life of faith. Now it is here that the Declaration’s
overall interpretation of the “new order” in the Church must be
examined. If the Declaration is mistaken in its understanding of this
“order,” then any affirmation in love of the individuals within that
order and of the order as a whole will entail distortions or at least
inadequacies in the lives of persons and the community.
On
the one hand, the Declaration perpetuates false notions regarding the reality
of women. It accepts uncritically a description of the nature of woman which
relegates her on the basis of “feminine qualities” to the private
sphere (at least in the life of the Church) and to subordinate roles. On this
understanding of woman, patterns for relations between persons continue to
mirror what must be called not the “new order” of grace but the
“old order” of sin.
On
the other hand, then, the order in the Church that is presented by the
Declaration is an order in which, despite disclaimers, essential human equality
remains hidden and distorted by sin. The Declaration argues that New Testament
announcements of the equality of all persons in Jesus Christ refer only to the
universal call of persons to “divine filiation, which is the same for
all,”(15) and not to “specific and totally gratuitous” calls to
ministry in the Church. Yet the call to a shared life in Jesus Christ is surely
also wholly gratuitous, and it is by God’s choice that it is offered to
all, without discrimination on the basis even of sex. The reversion, then,
within the community of believers to an “old order” marked by
domination and exclusion, by male headship and female subordination, can only
be just in a sense that takes no account of the new order of grace. Men and
women are still given their “due” by affirming them in hierarchically
ordered relations based on sexual identity. Here there is no recognition of
what is due the children of God, chosen and graced, restored to equality in
Christ Jesus. The Declaration builds on an inadequate doctrine of creation an
inadequate doctrine of redemption, and it can point, thereby, only to an
inadequate doctrine of love.
The
Declaration’s efforts to hold together the principle of equality and
sexual role-differentiation in Church ministries finally fails. We are left
with clear inequality of opportunity, an inequality that is not justified by
morally relevant factors. This is to say that we are left with sexual
discrimination, the violation of rights, and an overall unjust order in the
Church (with the further consequence that the prophetic voice of the Church is
silenced in relation to society). New perceptions of the nature of women, of
the needs of human persons, and of the reciprocal character of interpersonal
and social relations are missing. We have here no recognition of the growing
moral imperative regarding fundamental values of equality and mutuality. We
have here so very little understanding of the “new order” which the
Declaration wants to embrace. The Declaration. then. must be critiqued and
corrected, in the name of justice and love.
Notes
1.
Declaration, pars. 35 and 38.
2.
Declaration, par. 36.
3.
Declaration, par. 39.
4.
Ibid.
5.
Declaration par. 30.
6.
Declaration par. 33.
7.
See, for example, Plato, Gorgias 508a; Republic 558c Laws
744 and 757a; Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 1131a. For a general
discussion of various formulations of the principle of equality, see Gregory
Vlastos, “Justice and Equality,” in Richard B. Brandt, ea., Social
Justice (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962), pp. 31-72.
8.
Declaration, par. 31.
9.
Paul Vl, “Women/Disciples and Co-workers,” Origins, Vol. IV
(May 1, 1975), pp. 718-719; Pastoral Commission of the Sacred Congregation for
the Evangelization of Peoples, “The Role of Women in Evangelization,”
Origins, Vol. V (April 22, 1976), pp. 702-707.
10.
“The Role of Women in Evangelization,” p. 703.
I I.
See, for example, Margaret Mead, Male and Female (New York William
Morrow, 1949), pp. 345-360.
12.
See above, note 10.
13.
Declaration, par. 38.
14.
Declaration, par. 36.
15. Ibid.
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