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by Dr. Tina Beattie (see
credits)
From The Month 257 (December 1996) pp. 485 -
493. With permission of the author and editor here published for the first time
on the Internet.
In
exploring the idea of Mary as priest from the perspective of the contemporary
Church the author defines the need to develop a coherent theology of women
’s priesthood ‘that would not simply absorb women into male
hierarchies’.
ON
CHRISTMAS Eve 1904, Mother Claret of la Touche had a vision of Mary’s
priesthood. After having described Mary’s youth as her diaconate, she
continued:
“On the day of the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit coming upon [ Mary ], . .
. she received by divine unction thc sublime character of Mother of God; thus
the priest, on the day of his final ordination, is marked through the Spirit of
love by the priestly character, divine and indelible. She became a priest that
day, the Immaculate Virgin; she received, as well as priests, the power to
sacrifice Jesus, the right to touch his body; the duty . . . to give him to
souls. . . Then she rested for nine months . . . preparing herself for her
first offering.”
“Jesus came into the world . . . for the first time she took him between
her virginal hands, and lifting him towards the heavenly Father, offered
herself her first sacrifice. Oh! This first mass of Mary in the silence of the
stable .. the infinite cost of this sacrifice.” (1)
Mother Claret was one of a number of victim souls, women who in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century felt a profound longing to be priests,
allied to an unchallenged conviction that this was impossible because they were
women. In the 1840’s, Caroline Clement wrote, ‘How I regretted that
my sex does not allow me to offer the holy Sacrifice! . . . My sorrow was such
that it sometimes made me ill. . . It was tearing at my soul.’(2) In the
end, these women (who included Thérèse de Lisieux), solved what
appeared to be an insurmountable problem by becoming quite literally the
soulmates of male priests, devoting themselves to lives of prayer and victimal
spirituality to support good priests, and to make up for the deficiencies of
bad priests. Their ideas about the form and meaning of this spiritual
priesthood accorded central significance to Mary’s role in relation to
Christ, drawing on maternal imagery of giving life and nurturing. According to
Réné Laurentin,
‘They sense that all this leads not to a second official priesthood, but
to a sort of spiritual maternity.’ (3)
In
what follows, I explore the idea of Mary as priest from the perspective of the
contemporary Church. I am asking if the tradition of the Marian priesthood
does amount to the revelation of what might be called ‘a second
official priesthood’, with the emphasis on maternity and birth rather than
on sacrifice and death. Would this allow for a pluriform understanding of the
priestly role which would enable women to be incorporated into the sacramental
priesthood in a way that affirms rather than negates the symbolic significance
of sexual difference?
Since
Vatican II, there has been uncertainty as to the role of the priesthood, and a
searching for appropriate models. As I see it, the solution does not lie in a
liberal democratic model of Church with a non-sacramental ministry of
leadership (which is an essentially Protestant ecclesiology), nor in an
androgynous model of priesthood that incorporates women into existing
structures (which is the Church of England’s solution). Rather, I think we
need a new appreciation of sacramentality that can grasp the enormous
significance of God mediated to humanity through the material realities of the
created world, and supremely through the embodiment of the human being as male
and female in God’s image. How we understand this sexual embodiment in
terms of the sacramental priesthood is the main focus of my paper. Some of you
might be familiar with Janet Martin Soskice’s 1994 paper, Blood and
Defilement, which forms a subtext running through this paper. Soskice says
that:
“it is not simply a matter of ‘equal
treatment’ to ordain women in churches with a sacramental notion of
priesthood. It involves a major challenge to received symbolisms.” (4)
This
paper seeks to reclaim some of Catholicism’s received symbolisms that
appear to have been returned to sender.
The
title of my paper was chosen before the recent contoversy surrounding Tissa
Balasuriya’s book, Mary and Human Liberation. Balasuriya has been
requested to sign a Profession of Faith on pain of being stripped of his status
as a Catholic theologian by the Vatican. It seems that one of the concerns of
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith about this book is its treatment
of the priesthood with regard to Mary in particular and women in general.
Balasuriya says of Mary:
“ Should she not have been worthy to fulfil the
functions of thc Christian priesthood such as preside at the Eucharist and
share in the teaching of the doctrine of Jesus and administration of the
community’? If she was good enough for Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Cana, and
Calvary, was she not good enough for (presiding over) the breaking of bread and
the sharing of goods’? A well developed mariology can be one of the best
supports for the causes of equality of women and men in the Church at all
levels.” (5)
The
extent of the controversy provoked by Balasuriya would suggest that the
question of the Marian priesthood is both topical and sensitive.
Mary’s priesthood — the theology
The
Virgin Priest is a relatively rare marian title, but the question of
Mary’s priesthood has had a long history which is of particular relevance
to the Church today. The first part of my paper constitutes a critical
engagement with Laurentin’s extended dissertation on the theology of the
Marian priesthood. (His earlier doctoral thesis explores the history of the
Marian priesthood since the time of the Church Fathers.) (6) Having considered
his theological interpretation, I explore a number of contemporary theories
that might suggest a different solution to that put forward by Laurentin.
In
1873, Pope Pius IX said of Mary, ‘She was so closely united to the
sacrifice of her divine Son, from the virginal conception of Jesus Christ to
his sorrowful Passion, that she was called by some Fathers of the Church the
Virgin Priest’. (7) In fact, no evidence of this titlc has heen found in
patristic texts, although Laurentin suggests its origins might be traced back
to some of the poetic allusions used by the Greek homilists. Laurentin
demonstrates with painstaking rigour in his historical thesis that the question
of the Marian priesthood — is Mary a priest and what form does her
priesthood take? — has been increasingly widespread and troubling in the
Church’s tradition. A priestly role is most commonly attributed to Mary in
the Nativity, in the Presentation at the Temple, and on Calvary. In a broader
sense, to quote Caroline Walker Bynum,
“Mary is priest because it is she who offers to ordinary mortals the
saving flesh of God, which comes most regularly and predictably in the
Mass.” (8)
The
problem as Laurentin sees it lies in the persistence with which this idea
suggests itself to theologians and mystics alike, allied to a profound
reluctance to probe its theological implications. This means that potentially
fruitful explorations of what Mary’s priesthood might mean tend to
collapse into incoherence and irresolution.
Perhaps it is not surprising that after the growing popularity of the title
‘Virgin Priest’, culminating in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, Rome should start to display signs of unease. In 1916 the
Holy Office decreed that pictures of Mary in priestly vestments were forbidden,
and in 1927 it curtailed discussion of the issue because ‘souls not
enlightened would not understand it properly’. (9) Discussion revived in
the nineteen forties among Spanish theologians, and as I mentioned, the Marian
priesthood was the subject of Laurentin’s doctorate in the nineteen
fifties. It has received sparse treatment since Vatican II, although some of
the maternal images associated with Mary’s priesthood have resurfaced in
feminist theology without reference to the historical tradition. (I shall
return to this later.)
Laurentin asks if the Marian priesthood is an elucidation or a perversion of
Marian doctrine, and he proceeds to offer a carefully argued defence of such a
concept if it is understood, not in terms of the sacramental priesthood, but in
terms of the priesthood of all believers. He says that its essential nature
lies in two formulae: ‘1) Mary did not receive the sacrament of orders
because she was a woman. 2) She is superior to sacramental priests.’ (10)
Laurentin identifies ‘two antinomical tendencies’ between which none
of the authors he has studied seems able to decide clearly:
“the propensity to affirm the Marian priesthood is a logical
process. The censure is an intuitive process. A thousand
reasons lead towards affirming the priesthood of Mary, a sort of diktat which
does not give its reasons blocks the affirmation.” (11)
He
describes this as ‘a spontaneous movement of recoil, like the instinctive
flight of an animal at the first encounter with an enemy of its breed’.
(12) What threat could be so powerful as to prompt this flight of the
intellect? The answer — Mary is a woman. This, says Laurentin, is a point
on which there is a mysterious silence, beyond the acknowledgement by some
writers that being female precludes her from the priesthood. (Mother Teresa of
Calcutta neatly turns this into a circular argument. When asked why women were
not admitted to the priesthood, she replied, ‘because Mary was not’ .
)(13)
Unexamined instinct
Having identified the fact that the reluctance to attribute ordination to Mary
is due to an unexamined instinct against women priests running through almost
the entire theological tradition, Laurentin sets out to explain why this
instinct is theologically sound. He writes:
“ In Christian doctrine, the symbol of man and
woman expresses the rapport between God and the redeemed creature. The man
represents God: initiative, authority, stability, creative power. The woman
represents humanity: power of welcome and receptivity where the all-powerful
initiative of God ripens and bears fruit.” (14)
He
identifies one feature that is common to all the authors he has studied. and
that is that Mary’s motherhood is the essence of her priesthood. All the
priestly functions attributed to her are construed in maternal terms. Mary is,
he says, essentially mother, and ‘that which is priestly in her is an
aspect of her maternity’.(15) He therefore rejects the term ‘Virgin
Priest’ in favour of a more nuanced understanding of Mary’s maternal
role. The conflation of maternity with priesthood obscures the balance between
the unique calling of men to the sacramental priesthood, and the unique calling
of women to motherhood.
Although he was writing more than a decade before the Vatican II document
Lumen Gentium incorporated mariology into ecclesiology, Laurentin sees
the solution to the Marian priesthood as lying in the rediscovery of the
relationship between Mary and the Church which developed during the patristic
era and began to emerge again in the nineteen forties and ftfties. A true
understanding of Mary’s priesthood entails a reaffirmation of the
community of the Church as the priesthood of all believers.(16) Mary’s
priesthood is the supreme and pre-eminent example of the priesthood of all
believers, a sacrifice of praise that responds to but does not initiate the
sacrifice of Christ. But because she was present on Calvary, because by her
compassion she intimately participates in Christ’s Passion, her position
is higher than that of the sacramental priesthood. Mary is unique because she
‘possesses in herself, personally and in fullness, the priesthood which
simple Christians possess as a collective title, as members of the priestly
body of Christ which is the Church’. (17)
Laurentin’s argument is however deeply flawed. Even putting aside the
extrapolation of gender roles from a mistaken medieval notion of woman’s
biological passivity in the act of generation, scripturally the identification
of man with God and woman with creature seems impossible to justify. Genesis 1
tells us that God created humanity in God’s own image as male and female
(cf. Gen 1:27). Galatians tells us that in the baptismal community there is
neither man nor woman (cf. Gal 3:27-8), and even if we do not read that as
obliterating sexual difference, we must surely read it as equalising man and
woman before God. Indeed if we push the distinction between man/God and
woman/creature too far, we might ask how Christ or any man can possibly be
fully human, just as we might ask in what way woman can possibly be made in the
image of God. Moreover, Laurentin’s argument locks women into a position
of biological predeterminism from which men are excused. For instance, he says:
“If one can rigorously affirm that the hierarchical
priesthood is by nature manly, the femininity of the communal priesthood calls
for a more nuanced approach. While women are excluded from the hierarchical
priesthood, men enter into the ranks of the communal priesthood.” (18)
Hans
Urs von Balthasar uses very similar arguments.(19) Even the instigators of the
new orthodoxy indulge in gender-bending when it allows men to move freely
between the sexes, so long as women stay put. Is this kind of male colonisation
of femininity really what we understand by the Christian dignity and freedom of
both sexes?
In
setting out to justify the instinct against women priests running through the
Catholic tradition, Laurentin proves himself prey to the same instinct, which
is put forward as an a priori fact that must then be given theological
justification. The taboo against women priests has remained largely unexamined
until our own age, when theologians have been confronted with the task of
justifying it. What is intriguing is the extent to which the arguments change
but the conclusion remains the same. In our own time, when excuses based on
women’s moral inferiority or creaturely dependence are deemed
unacceptable, we find the maleness of Jesus elevated to an ontological status
that by its very nature excludes women from participation in the priesthood.
Maternity: a form of priesthood
I now
want to look more closely at the long tradition of seeing in Mary’s
maternity a form of priesthood. Because the tradition of the maternal Marian
priesthood has been repressed, its language and imagery are not well-known
today. However, the idea has not died in the Christian imagination. Consider,
for instance, this contemporary poem by Frances Croake Frank:
Did
the woman say,
When she held him for the first time in the dark of a
stable,
After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,
‘This is
my body, this is my blood’?
Did
the woman say,
When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a
hilltop,
After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,
‘This is
my body, this is my blood’?
Well that she said it to him then,
For dry old men,
brocaded robes
belying barrenness
Ordain that she not say it for him now.” (20)
María Clara Bingemer movingly suggests a connection between motherhood
and the function of the priesthood in the context of life in Latin America. She
writes:
“It is women who possess in their bodiliness the physical possibility of
performing the divine eucharistic action. In the whole process of gestation,
childbirth, protection, and nourishing of a new life, we have the sacrament of
the Eucharist, the divine act, happening anew. . . Breaking the bread and
distributing it, having communion in the body and blood of the Lord until he
comes again, means for women today reproducing and symbolising in the midst of
the community the divine act of surrender and love, so that the people may grow
and the victory come, which is celebrated in the feast of the true and final
liberation.” (21)
So
although Laurentin sees something fundamentally wrong in describing motherhood
in priestly language, it seems that the Catholic imagination is repeatedly
drawn to do just this. These maternal images often suggest a different
understanding of the Eucharist. The language of sacrifice is used in a context
that opens the imagination not primarily to the dead and bloodied man on the
cross and the violence that surrounds him, but to the mother’s love for
her child, a maternal sacrifice of love and care for the salvation of the
world. In exploring the implications of this, I ask how it might affect our
understanding of the Mass and the priesthood.
Implicit in this is another, potentially more troubling question: why is it
that educated men will fall over themselves in the rush to flee like frightened
animals from an idea which Laurentin admits seems like a logical conclusion
— that Mary is a priest? I think that fundamental to this is an issue of
blood, an issue for which we have still perhaps to receive a healing touch. To
begin to unpack this claim, I ask if the symbolism of blood, so intimately
associated with the Eucharist, might be profoundly affected by sexual
difference.
Consider Réné Girard’s description of the significance of
blood:
“When men are enjoying peace and security, blood is a rare sight. When
violence is unloosed, however, blood appears everywhere — on the ground,
underfoot, forming great pools. Its very fluidity gives form to the contagious
nature of violence. Its presence proclaims murder and announces new upheavals
to come. Blood stains everything it touches the colour of violence and death.
Its very appearance seems, as the saying goes, to ‘cry out for
vengeance’.” (22)
This
is an interpretation based on an exclusively male relationship to blood, and it
suggests a surprising degree of oblivion with regard to the significance of
blood for women. For a man, the sight of his own blood must always be
associated with trauma and violence. Men’s bodies do not bleed unless they
are wounded. But for a woman, the sight of her own blood is routine, and the
messages it gives are usually to do with fertility and birth.
In
order to suggest ways in which the symbolism of blood pertains to a feminine
priesthood, I am going to appeal to certain insights offered by Girard, Julia
Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Soskice. Although I refer to Kristeva and
Irigaray’s psychoanalytic theories to do with the maternal body, I am not
suggesting that theology should submit to psychoanalysis nor am I
unquestioningly endorsing the psychoanalytic perspective. I do however think
that psychoanalysis can shed light on some of the dilemmas that arise with
regard to women and the priesthood.
‘A defiling potency’
Girard argues that sacrificial violence is the universal foundation of every
social order, in mythology and pagan religion and also in the modern political
order, with social equilibrium being maintained by a vicious circle of
cathartic acts of violence against randomly chosen victims (scapegoats).(23)
Only in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures does Girard see a source of
revelation capable of exposing and therefore subverting this order of violence
that has humanity in its grip. The role of religious sacrifice is to channel
and thereby contain violent forces which constantly threaten the social order,
and this means that blood, and in particular women’s blood, is seen as
having a defiling potency through its association with violence. Referring to
the near-universal taboos that surround menstruating women, Girard writes:
“The fact that the sexual organs of women periodically emit a flow of
blood has always made a great impression on men; it seems to confirm an
affinity between sexuality and those diverse forms of violence that invariably
lead to bloodshed.” (24)
He
argues that not just in overtly violent sex acts, but in childbirth and in the
violence provoked by sexual infidelity, for instance, there is an inherently
violent aspect to sexuality:
“We are tempted to conclude that violence is impure because of its
relation to sexuality. Yet only the reverse proposition can withstand close
scrutiny. Sexuality is impure because it has to do with violence.” (25)
In
other words, he is suggesting that women’s blood is defiling because its
sexual associations imply violence.
Irigaray criticises Girard for perpetuating a masculine understanding of
religion that fails to examine the possibility of an alternative religious
order based on women’s values.(26) Citing the fertility cults of the Greek
goddesses, she suggests that women’s religion would be founded not on
sacrifice but on natural fecundity. Only the continued silencing of women
allows the Girardian emphasis on sacrifice over fertility to go unchallenged.
I
think Girard’s interpretation of the significance of women’s blood
bears out much of what Irigaray is saying. Surely, the blood of menstruation
and childbirth symbolises fertility and not sacrifice? My answer to this is yes
and no. While I think few women would agree wholeheartedly with Girard’s
description, nevertheless it is important to recognise that for women as well
as for men, fertile blood has the power to create feelings of fear and shame
and it does not represent an uncomplicated celebration of fecundity. Fertility
needs to be redeemed from its associations with violence. Irigaray tends to put
a romantic gloss on the fertility cults that ignores their darker aspects. If
women’s blood suggests the promise of new life, it also suggests sexual
oppression, the terror of childbirth, and the vulnerability of the mother and
her child. God tells Eve
“ I will multiply your pains in childbearing, you
shall give birth to your children in pain. Your yearning shall be for your
husband, yet he will lord it over you.” (Gen 3:16)
Christianity has emphasised (some might say destructively), the problems that
surround women’s sexuality in its association between Eve, women and
fallen nature, but it has also recognised that this curse is undone in Mary.
Gregory of Nyssa wrote, ‘The woman hath made an excuse for the woman. . .
The one through the wood brought in sin: the other through the wood brought in
against it a blessing.’ (27) Even Augustine, in typically condescending
fashion, sees sexual difference as significant for the understanding of
salvation:
“ It was necessary that the liberation of man
should be made manifest in both sexes. Therefore, since it was fitting that he
should take the human nature of man, the more honourable of the two sexes, it
remained for the deliverance of the female sex to be shown by the fact that
this man should be born of a woman.” (28)
I am
suggesting that the undoing of Eve’s curse in Mary and the deliverance of
the female sex has not yet been fully recognised in all its implications by the
Catholic Church. There is a deeply buried connection between
Christianity’s rejection of pagan sacrifice and the exclusion of women
from the altar, based on a latent fear of the relationship between violence and
blood. If we would heed the injunction repeated so often in the New Testament
— ‘Do not be afraid’ — this terror has to be confronted,
not by adopting an androgynous model of the priesthood which simply masks the
problem, but by daring to ask what it is about women’s bodies that makes
them such a threat to the male priesthood.
Breaching taboos
I am
going to return to Laurentin now, because he refers briefly to a factor which I
think is of great significance. In his analysis of Mary in the writings of the
Fathers, he demonstrates how christological titles such as king, prophet,
victim and mediator had feminine equivalents in Mary, but ‘priest’ is
conspicuously absent from this list. He suggests that the avoidance of the word
‘priestess’ is associated with an instinctive reaction against the
pagan priestesses in the cults that surround the early Church, allied to
Christianity’s perpetuation of the exclusively male Jewish priesthood.
(29)
If,
as Girard suggests, women’s blood is closely associated with violence in
men’s minds, and if Christianity supremely rejects the sacrificial
violence of pagan religions, then it seems a small step for Christian men also
to reject women’s bodies, which not only have associations with paganism
but which also have a disturbing tendency to bleed. But Christianity represents
the ending of divisions between the Jewish and Gentile worlds and the breaking
down of the rituals and taboos that kept these worlds apart. Why, in this great
act of reconciliation, does the taboo against women priests persist? Moreover,
if Christianity is about the liberation of both men and women from the violent
shedding of sacrificial blood, why is this act of liberation achieved more
easily when dealing with the relatively bloodless male body, than when dealing
with bloody women?
Kriesteva offers a psychoanalytic insight which might shed light on why there
is a Judaeo-Christian taboo against the maternal priesthood. Analysing taboos
relating to childbirth in the Book of Leviticus, she argues that at the base of
all the Levitical codes of defilement is the fundamental necessity for the
people of Israel to separate themselves from the maternal cults of paganism in
order to become the people of God. The chaotic fecundity of the maternal
pagan cults is replaced with a logic of speech and identity based on ever-more
elaborate ritualistic distinctions and differences. She says, ‘Far from
being one of the semantic values of that tremendous project of
separation constituted by the biblical text, the taboo of the mother seems to
be its originating mytheme’. (30) Kristeva also argues that part of this
movement away from paganism by Israel was a rejection of sacrifice. The sacred
would no longer be sought through sacrificial rites but through respecting laws
based on social rituals associated with purity and impurity.
I
realise that there is debate among biblical scholars as to how Levitical codes
and their relationship to the New Testament should be interpreted, as there is
regarding the role of sacrifice and the influence of Canaanite cults on the
religion of the Old Testament. I am not, therefore, suggesting a rigid
framework of interpretation, but something fairly allusive which offers
important insights if handled with care. (31) For instance, it does seem that a
longing for the maternal body finds expression in a number of Old Testament
writings that refer to Zion and Jerusalem in maternal language. (cf. Isa
66:9-11) That this might primarily relate to the sense of alienation created by
exile from the land, need not preclude it from also suggesting a growing
separation from the maternal embodiment of pagan religion.
Kristeva argues that in Christ’s breaching of Levitical codes associated
with separation from the maternal flesh (variously symbolised by taboos
relating to blood, flesh, food and diseased or dead bodies), he achieves within
himself reconciliation between the maternal substance of paganism and the
linguistic order of Israel.(32) Christianity has, she says, failed to live out
this reconciliation. Christ alone achieves perfect heterogeneity between the
divine law of the Jewish world and the maternal flesh of the pagan world. The
rest of us live in a state of internal division and conflict owing to the
repression in Christian culture of the relationship to the mother’s body.
In
fact, there have been moments in Christian history, particularly in the Middle
Ages, when a powerful maternal element has pervaded the Church. In
Soskice’s essay Blood and Defilement that I referred to earlier,
she demonstrates how there were associations in the medieval mind between the
imagery of the cross and the imagery of childbirth, with the Church being
pulled from the wound in Christ’s side. John’s Gospel describes blood
and water flowing from Christ’s side — fluids which occur together
more commonly in childbirth than in death. In some medieval paintings, these
fluids flow either directly into the mouths of the faithful, or into a chalice
held by angels. Soskice argues for a greater appreciation of the fluidity of
Christian symbols of sex and gender, pointing to ‘the symbolic
identification . . . of the crucified Christ with the human female body, both
in giving birth and in feeding’.(33) She suggests that the restoration of
women’s embodiment is supremely achieved on Calvary where Christ’s
own body takes on womanly features and functions, subverting Levitical taboos
through the symbolic association between the fluids of childbirth and the
crucifixion. There is, she says, ‘abundant sense in seeing Christ as our
mother’.(34)
As I
said at the beginning, Soskice’s paper has stimulated many of the ideas
that I explore in this paper. However, I think there is a problem in suggesting
that the end of taboos relating to women’s defilement is adequately
symbolised by the feminisation of Christ’s body on the cross and its
association with birth. If reconciliation with the maternal is symbolically
represented by the male Christ taking on womanly features, this seems to
perpetuate the denial of the mother’s body rather than reconcile us to it.
I am left wondering if this confirms Irigaray’s claim that the founding
order of western culture, including Christianity, is an act of
‘matricide’ which leads to the obliteration of sexual difference.(35)
It is a small step from seeing Christ as mother to the virtual elimination of
the woman’s body from the symbols of salvation. The fact that ideas which
seemed obvious to the medieval Church have almost disappeared from Catholic
consciousness today, would suggest that focusing on the body of Christ alone
might not keep alive the maternal dimension of the crucifxion. Its sacrificial
role begins to dominate, and the imagery of blood and birth that came so
naturally to embodied medievals seems far more problematic in a culture that
has effectively repressed its relationship to the maternal body.
Symbolic reconciliation
John’s Gospel, which describes the flow of blood and water from
Christ’s side, locates Mary at the foot of the cross as central to the
drama of the crucifixion. Several times during his public ministry Christ seems
to deprive Mary of her status as mother, calling her ‘woman’ instead
and identifying her with his other disciples (cf. Jn 2:4; Mk 3:31-5; Lk
11:27-8). On Calvary, she remains ‘woman’ in relation to Christ but
she is reinstated as mother in relation to the beloved disciple. Jesus says,
‘Woman, this is your son,’ and to the disciple, ‘This is your
mother’. (Jn 19:26) Mary’s presence on Calvary seems to carry more
than one meaning, but what concerns me here is the fact that the dying Christ
restores Mary to the role of mother, in a way that in the Catholic tradition
has always symbolised the birth of the Church. Might this be the moment of
symbolic reconciliation between Jew and Gentile, between the maternal pagan
cults and the religion of Israel, between the Law of the Father and the body of
the mother which have up to this point developed in growing isolation from one
another? In the moment of dying, Christ bequeaths to the beloved disciple his
relationship to the maternal body, no longer represented by the biological
motherhood of Mary but made present through the symbolic motherhood of the
Church. If Irigaray is right, the significance of this act has yet to be fully
recognised and celebrated in Christian culture.
The
maternal priesthood of Mary symbolises the rehabilitation of the maternal flesh
through the salvation of the pagan world. But only if we can demonstrate that
the connection between women’s blood and violence has been broken, might
we aspire to the religious celebration of fertility rather than sacrifice that
Irigaray envisions. Girard refers to ‘the bestial monstrosities of
mythological births’.(36) When we contemplate the tradition of Mary’s
maternal virginity, we see a rupture in the identification of the female body
with violent sexuality. Free from sexual domination and (according to
tradition) giving birth without pain Mary represents the breaking of the
connection between women’s blood, sex and violence. Of course, many see
Mary’s virginity as a denial of women’s sexuality, and I think it has
functioned in such a way. Nevertheless beneath such cultural distortions, there
is a truth of the utmost significance. Mary symbolises not the denial of
woman’s sexuality but its redemption.
The
salvation of woman’s embodiment is made real by the participation of Mary
in the events of the cross reminding us that the blood of the incarnation is
shed for the world in birth as well as in death. The anguish of mother and son
on Calvary lays before us the terrible reality of sacrificial violence, a
reality that we confront nightly on our television screens, on our city
streets, and behind the closed doors of the family home. But the symbolism of
the cross also promises that in the moment of Christ’s death we are born
into a new maternal community, the Church, bound together not by sacrifice and
violence but by love, forgiveness and reconciliation. If we exclude Mary from
the cross, we risk forgetting its fertility and focusing only on its violence,
which might amount to the same thing as privileging the man’s religious
perspective over the woman’s, in Irigaray’s terms.
In an
Angelus address, Pope John Paul II says that Mary is present in the sacrifice
of the Mass:
“Every Mass puts us into intimate communion with her, the Mother, whose
sacrifice ‘becomes present’ just as the sacrifice of her Son
‘becomes present’ at the words of consecration of the bread and wine
pronounced by the priest.” (37)
This
Marian dimension of the Eucharist is surely best represented by the woman
priest, supported by a theology which makes clear that women are not simply
being incorporated into the existing male understanding of the priesthood? The
Mass already symbolises fertility as well as death with the maternal activity
of nurturing the faithful. St Cyprian said of the Church, ‘of her womb we
are born, of her milk we are fed, of her Spirit our souls draw their
life-breath’. (38) Such maternal imagery makes the exclusion of women from
the priesthood indefensible on symbolic grounds. Is not a female priest
naturally more suited than a male priest to perform the function of feeding the
faithful with the body and blood of Christ, mediated to humankind through the
maternal body of Mary and the Church?
But I
want to add a proviso. I am not advocating a reductive biological understanding
of the priesthood so that only women can represent the priesthood of Mary, and
only men can represent the priesthood of Christ. This merely perpetuates our
present problem of biological literalism. Even today the Church is well able to
understand sexual identities in analogous terms when it comes to incorporating
men into the so-called feminine, Marian Church. There is a need for a
conceptual shift from the present celebration of biological motherhood in some
Catholic quarters, to a celebration of the Church’s maternal calling to
protect and nurture the poor, the weak and those who are increasingly uncared
for in our world. This understanding would be far more in keeping with the
Church’s tradition than the present romanticisation of childbearing women.
Catholic Christianity offers a richly gendered symbolism which neither
obliterates sexual difference nor locks the believer into a rigidly
pre-determined biological destiny. There is a delicate balance between
over-privileging the significance of the sexed body and eradicating its
significance altogether.
Many
see the Catholic Church’s refusal to consider the question of women’s
ordination as an almost insurmountable problem. I see it rather as an
opportunity and an incentive to develop a coherent theology of women’s
priesthood that would not simply absorb women into male hierarchies. The
Church’s own symbolism leads along the path of a maternal priesthood. What
is it that some men are really afraid of when they contemplate women priests?
They have yet to come up with a convincing argument that justifies their fear.
Note on the author. Dr. Tina Beattie is at present a
part-time lecturer at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies of the
University of Bristol, UK. She wrote:
- Rediscovering Mary - Insights from the Gospels, Burns &
Oates, Tunbridge Wells 1995,
- and God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate, ‘A
Gynocentric Refiguration of Marian Symbolism in Engagement with Luce
Irigaray’, University of Bristol 1999.
Footnotes
1.
Quoted in René Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol.
1, Essai sur le Développement d’une Idée Religieuse
(Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1952), pp.429-30. Ellipses as
given. All translations of Laurentin’s work from the French are my own.
2.
Quoted in Laurentin, Marie, L‘Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol. l,
p.423.
3.
Laurentin, Marie, L ‘Église et Le Sacerdoce, Vol II,
Étude Théologique (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1953),
p.SI.
4.
Janel Martin Soskice. ‘Blood and Defilement’, p.5. (References arc to
an unpublished version of Soskice’s paper, given to the Society for the
Study of Theology Conference. Oxford. April 11-14, 1994. For published
versions, see Soskice, ‘Blood and Defilement’ in ET: Journal of
the European Society for Catholic Theology [Tübingen: Heft 2, 1994],
abridged in Bulletin of Harvard Divinity School, January 1995).
5.
Tissa Balasuriya OMI, ‘Mary and Human Liberation’, Logos, Vol
. 29 Nos. 1 & 2, March/July 1990, p.99.
6.
These two studies are published as Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce,
Vols. 1 and 2, referred to above.
7.
Quoted in Michael O’Carroll, Theotokos — A Theological
Encyclopedia af the Blessed Virgin Mary (Collegeville, Minnesota: The
Liturgical Press, 1982), p.293.
8.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption —Essays on Gender
and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books. 1992),
p.l01.
9.
Cf. O’Carroll, Theotokos, pp.293-4.
10.
Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol . 2, p.37.
11.
Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol. l, p.630. His
italics.
2.
Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol. l, p.632.
13.
Quoted in Helmut Moll,. ‘Faithful to her Lord’s Example’ in
Helmut Moll (cd.). The Church and Women — A Compendium (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 161-76, p.l74.
14.
Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol.1, p.644.
15.
Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol.II, p.200.
16.
Laurentin distinguishes between ‘le sacerdos’, which refers to
the priesthood of all believers, and ‘le prêtre’, which
refers to the ordained priesthood. Michael Richards makes this distinction in
English by using the word ‘priest’ for the universal priesthood, and
‘presbyter’ for the ordained priesthood. Cf. Michael Richards, A
People of Priests— The Ministry of the Catholic Church (London:
Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995), pp.6-7.
17.
Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol. 2, p.48.
18.
Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol. 2, p.75.
19.
Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘Women priests? A Marian Church in a
fatherless and motherless culture’ in Communio 22 (Spring, 1995),
pp.l64-70.
20.
Quoted in Susan A. Ross, ‘God’s Embodiment and Women’ in
Catherine Mowry LaCugna (ed.), Freeing Theology — The
Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: Harper
SanFrancisco, 1993), 185-209, pp.185-6.
21.
Maria Clara Bingemer Women in the Future of the Theology of Liberation’ in
Marc H. Ellis and Otto Maduro (eds.), The Future of Liberation
Theology—Essays in Honor of Gustavo Gutierrez (Maryknoll: Orbis Books,
1989), 473-490, p.486.
22.
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins Press, 1979), p.34.
23.
For a helpful summary of his theory, see Girard, ‘Generative
Scapegoating’ followed by discussion, in Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (ed.),
Violent Origins—Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan
Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp.73-145.
24.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p.35.
25.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p.34.
26.
Cf. Luce Irigaray, ‘Women, the Sacred, Money’ in Sexes and
Genealogies (New York: Cohumbia University Press, 1993), pp.73-88.
27.
Quoted in Thomas Livius, The Blessed Virgin in the Fathers of the
First Six Centuries (London: Burns and Oates Ltd., 1893), p.48.
28.
Quoted in Kari Elisabeth Borresen, Subordination and Equivalence—The
Nature and Role of Woman in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (Kampen: Kok
Pharos Publishing House, 1995). p.74.
29.
Cf. Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol. 1, pp.91 -2.
30.
Iulia Kristeva, ‘Semiotics of Biblical Abomination’ in Powers of
Horror—An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press,
1982), 90-112, pp.l05-6.
31.
Questions also arise as to what extent the reputed violence of pagan cults is
more a product of Christian demonisation than a record of historical reality.
Tikva Frymer-Kensky offers a thoughtful analysis in her book, In the Wake of
the Goddess — Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth
(New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1992).
32.
Cf. Kristeva, ‘Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi’ in Powers of Horror,
pp. 113-132.
33.
Soskice, ‘Blood and Defilement’, p.9.
34.
Soskice, ‘Blood and Defilement’, p.l2.
35.
Cf. Irigaray, ‘Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother’ in
Sexes and Genealogies, pp.7-21.
36.
Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London: the
Athlone Press, 1987), p.222.
37.
John Paul II, Angelus of 5 June, ‘At the root of the Eucharist is the
virginal and maternal life of Mary’ published in L’Osservatore
Romano (13 June 1983), p.1.
38.
Quoted in Monica Migliorino Miller, Sexuality and Authority in the Catholic
Church (Scranton: University of Scranton Press; London and Toronto:
Associated University Presses, 1995). p.153.
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