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by Marie Louise Uhr
This paper was first given as a talk to the Australian
Feminist Theology Foundation, then in updated form to the 2000 AGM of the
Ordination of Catholic Women. It was published in WomenChurch 28 (2001)
pp. 11-16. It is here re-published with permission of the author (given on 14
May 2001) who, unfortunately died soon after. ‘Women-Church’ can be
ordered from Irene Stevens (irenes@compassnet.com.au) or from GPO Box 2134,
Sydney, NSSW, 1034, Australia.
Introduction:
In September 1993, Zoe Hancock and I set up the group
Ordination of Catholic Women (OCW) to be an Australian group working nationally
for the ordination of women into the Catholic Church. It is clear to anyone
following the fortunes of the Catholic Church that we have not achieved our
goal. So, after seven years as National Convener, and with the goal seemingly
nowhere in sight, I’d like to try to express what the struggle has meant
for me and why, indeed, I think we have to struggle at all.(1) As I have said
elsewhere,(2) be in Holy Saturday time, held between Good Friday and Easter. It
is what George Steiner once called ‘the long day’s journey of the
Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and
the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other’.(3) Those of us
struggling for the full inclusion of women into the Church know suffering,
aloneness and feelings of unutterable waste only too well; we also dream of
tomorrow’s liberation and the church’s rebirth
1. my faith and feminist theology/ies
Yet, in spite of all the recent Vatican pronouncements,
I remain a card-carrying member of the Catholic Church. To remain a person of
faith, I need to remain in community. My faith depends on the faith of others;
I believe we go to God in community. The community into which I was born was
christian/catholic, my heritage is judeo-christian, my understanding of God
comes from and through this community. If I’d grown up in another faith
community, I’ve no doubt I’d be Jewish, or Hindu, or Buddhist.
Regardless of how difficult I find it at times to remain
within this community, I hold to what I see to be the principal tenets of my
Christian faith: that God is in someway equal persons in loving relationship
(and not a lonely monad); who desire closeness, intimacy, relationships; who
choose to be present in the finality and frailty of human beings and enter into
their sufferings and life experiences; that Christ is our shining symbol of
this God. I suspect we’ve barely begun to understand incarnation or to
consider its deep theological implications.
It needs no demonstration here that many traditional
theological interpretations and structures built on our judeo-christian
heritage are gravely hostile to health and well-being. Critical analysis of
this heritage is essential; feminist theology/ies are desperately needed. I
like Lucy Tatman’s comment,(4) that ‘theologies are a vital,
necessary part of "life abundant": that life is somehow not whole without a
sacred dimension’ and it’s the job of the theologian to ‘try to
put the sacred momentarily into words’. It is a sacred charge. And I agree
with her that theologies should ‘not become displaced or silenced in
favour of tales of individual spiritualities’, which concentrate on the
personal and the private at the expense of the public. The work of activists
and/or scholars trying to remake the world is public work. And remaking the
churches is a fundamental part of that remaking, for whether we want it or no,
churches are a large part of that world, and affect the lives, thoughts and
world-views of many people.
2. why work for women’s ordination
But the next question is why, in staying, I choose to
work for women’s ordination. After all, not all Catholics deeply troubled
by the Vatican’s position and longing for a church of equals deem this a
sensible thing to do. Some, particularly I think many of the Religious, reject
it. Some insist that the church is too hopelessly patriarchal for them to want
to see women aspiring to leadership roles: for them the church must change
first. But if we stay outside an organisation because it’s deemed too
patriarchal, we must absent ourselves from most professional activities, from
medicine, from the law, from academia to name a few.
Others argue that first priority must be given to a
re-ordering of all ministry before the specific issue of the priesthood can be
dealt with.(5) But unless it is agreed at the outset that women are included
fully and equally in all ministries, then re-ordering them or re-naming them
seems pointless. And it is this for which we are struggling. Yet other women
see no need for any ordinations, whether of women or of men; some declaring
they are ‘beyond it’. Many of these have been celebrating small home
eucharists without aid of the ordained for years. Now I don’t deny the
patriarchal nature of the church and I’ve no objections to small home
eucharists or rituals of other types. What does concern me is limiting
community worship to private liturgies — even when these are led by women.
However liberating these liturgies are for the group concerned, I think that
the church is fundamentally a public place (even if Rawls etc put it in a third
category between public and private).
A traditional argument against women’s ordination
has always been that women don’t belong in the public world. Nineteenth
and twentieth century feminists struggled to achieve a world in which women
could take their rightful public leadership roles. Marilyn Lake has recently
told the story of feisty Australian women and their battles for equality in her
book Getting Equal.(6)In working for women’s ordination, I believe
we are continuing that struggle and must continue to do so until women have
access to church leadership roles and are able to celebrate public liturgy with
a public community. Retreating to the private world is a backwards step. Indeed
I believe that such private eucharists are unwittingly supporting the present
structures and upholding hierarchy — and I suggest the silence of the
bishops on these Eucharists confirms this.
It is fascinating how the Vatican continues to recite
its ‘mantra’ about how the church does not have the authority to
ordain women, quoting bits of scripture in support, in spite of about 30 years
of work from scripture scholars and theologians round the world who have
pointed out, over and over again, the poverty of the scholarship. Not one move
is made to meet the scholarly objections. Only power and authority are used.
Yet the Report on the participation of women in the church shows that calls for
women’s ordination continue to come from committed Catholics all round the
country.(7) Clearly the Vatican fails to persuade and yet refuses to change its
tune.
In the absence of logic and articulate discussion, the
puzzled faithful start to look for underlying reasons and subconscious
attitudes which form the Vatican’s position. Perhaps the question should
be: of what is it afraid? Does a woman as priest or presbyter challenge
Rome’s understanding of the nature of women; would she threaten their
understanding of priesthood; or would an ordained woman weaken the separation
of the catholic church from other churches and from the world?
3. the work to be done:
I believe our work in OCW is two-fold. First we need to
remain active in the public sphere, as visible signs of our refusal to accept
the unscholarly teachings of the Magisterium on this issue; visible signs, if
you will, of our refusal to obey, a challenge in this way too to their ever
more repeated claim as to the virtuous nature of obedience.(8) In our public
stance for women’s ordination, we need to make it plain that we are part
of a world-wide movement — Women’s Ordination Worldwide (WOW) has
allied groups in Europe (including Britain and Ireland), North America, South
Africa, India, Japan, South America, New Zealand, and of course Australia. So
news and plans for public actions are spread rapidly round the world. The
public actions aim to be gentle, colourful, and prayerful. A symbol such as the
purple stole, recently introduced from Europe and taken up by OCW at its 1999
conference, fits the bill: it is simple, cheap, and challenging; and turns the
priestly symbol around. With this pope, and with the next and probably the one
after, we need to keep acting — in the wonderful phrase that Heather
Thomson gave us at that Conference — with SHEER HOLY BOLDNESS. And I have
great hope of change.
Second, we need to continue to search for the
psychological and theological bases for the Vatican position, and continue to
try to have open conversations about this. The decision by the Australian
bishops in their response to the Report to put out guidelines for dialogue with
such as us should give us good openings for such conversations. And at these,
we have to present alternatives to the present hierarchical system, the
Father-Son system on which their whole theology seems to be founded; for which
I like the phrase of Jacques Lacan, the Law of the Father. Clearly we depend on
professional theologians to lead the way.
This work requires challenging the present symbolic
world, placing women at the centre of the symbolic system: Luce Irigaray’s
‘feminine divine’ is one way to express it. The resistance to this
are enormous, as all who have worked for change for many years are aware. I
suspect feminist theologians will still be struggling with this many years from
now.
4. some considerations — priesthood, sacrifice
and boundaries.
Publicly we seem stuck in Father Law and Father/Son
theology — church fathers and civic fathers hold fast to it. Where is the
mother-daughter relationship? Irigaray says that in order to ‘re-establish
elementary social justice … we must restore this missing pillar of our
culture: the mother-daughter relationship. … This will require changes to
symbolic codes, especially language, law and religion’.(9) Much work to
challenge the traditional structures, though not necessarily in this language,
has already been done, especially by such fine theologians and scripture
scholars such as Elizabeth Johnson and Elaine Wainwright.
Two questions particularly concern me: the powerful
symbol of a sacrificial priesthood, and in the placing of boundaries; and I
think these are connected with one another and with the prohibition on
women’s ordination. Which is why I think confronting the prohibition on
women’s ordination is central to trying to change the whole symbolic
system.
The meaning of sacrifice, its place in Catholic theology
especially Eucharistic theology, and its implications for women are under
serious consideration today. One problem is that there is no agreed definition
of sacrifice. For the influential scholar Girard,(10) all sacrifice is based on
violence, on the collective killing of a human who is made the community’s
scapegoat for its envies and hatreds, with subsequent ritualization.
Unfortunately his work includes no analysis of gender. This led the sociologist
Nancy Jay to her classic work on gender and sacrifice, work which includes a
helpful division of sacrifice into expiatory sacrifices in which a victim is
killed and offered up — these are the only ones Girard really considers
— and communion sacrifices in which food is consecrated and shared.(11)
Other scholars, including William Beers(12) and Kelley Raab,(13) have used a
psychological or psychoanalytical approach, while Mary Condren, who started as
an activist working for ordination, uses especially the work of Julia
Kristeva.(14) Of particular help to me has been the work of a recent doctoral
student from the University of Sydney, Damien Casey, who working with the
philosophy of Irigaray, found himself caught up in the issue of Women’s
Ordination — and kindly sent me draft of his thesis chapter on Sacrifice
and Sacramentality which I shall use here.(15)
My question is: is a theology of eucharist which
stresses eucharist as an expiatory sacrifice one of the subterranean supports
for the categorical refusal of the Vatican to consider women’s ordination.
If so, of course it operates as a hidden idea in the sense that no-one says
women can’t be ordained because they can’t offer sacrifice. But
scholars such as Kelley, Condren and Casey are suggesting a link.
Nancy Jay’s sociological analyses of sacrifice and
priesthood revealed that women are not allowed to offer sacrifice in cultures
in which sacrifices have a hegemonic function. Moreover, she found that in all
sorts of societies, ‘sacrificing produces and reproduces forms of
inter-generational continuity generated by males, transmitted through males,
and transcending continuity through women’.(16) This sounds just like
apostolic succession.
In his study, William Beers considered sacrifice from a
psychoanalytical perspective and concluded that fear of women and of their
generational power lies behind the determination of men in most religions to
limit sacrificial priesthood to men. Now, as I understand it, psychoanalytic
orthodoxy considers that the primary function of sacrifice, both communion ones
and expiatory ones (to use Nancy Jay’s terms), is to constitute identity
and community through integration and separation. It creates culture; its logic
founded upon the binary logic of A/not-A. It is a social creation supported by
nothing in nature. This means it requires continual maintenance. Moreover,
Casey says that ‘The maintenance of masculine identity, and the symbolic
order as isomorphic with that identity, requires that it is women that need to
be overcome and their power appropriated and controlled’.
The universality of sacrifice, moreover, tells us that
simply repudiating it is not enough; we need to understand why humans cry out
for this mode of commerce with the divine; only then can we be free from it
— and I would hope understand how the life, death and resurrection of
Jesus, ‘who refused to sacrifice individuals to the universal claims of
the Law’, can transform our symbolic system.
In the world of the early church, sacrifice was a
principal means of communicating with the divine and christians were suspected
of atheism because they did not offer sacrifice as those around them understood
it. ‘Sacrifice’ in the New Testament is primarily noncultic —
the whole community is called priestly — and those presiding over the
Eucharist in the early church were not called priests and their activities were
not considered priestly, at least not in the cultic and hierarchical sense.
And if, in the culture of the times, only males could
offer priestly sacrifices, perhaps it is not surprising to find that an
understanding of Eucharist as expiatory sacrifice paralleled the exclusion of
women from leadership in the early church. Casey contends ‘that so long as
the religious authority of women was affirmed, Christianity would maintain some
immunity to the logic of sacrifice. … The presence of women at the altar
or even at Calvary, may have been enough psychologically to circumvent the
logic of sacrifice’. He concluded that there was a relationship between
the presence of women in leadership positions within the early Church and the
non-sacrificial orientation of that Church.
But with the ascent of Constantine and the acceptance of
the Church as official public religion, the Eucharist began to function as
official state sacrifice — and women were excluded from leadership. Casey
sums up what is happening when he writes that ‘The Eucharist in the
maintenance of the Empire is conscripted to construct and maintain
boundaries’.
Which brings me to my second question: the creation and
upholding of boundaries and women’s ordination. Is this what it is all
about?(17) We have had a plethora of Vatican documents recently insisting on
the importance of boundaries.
The Catholic Church by its stance on Women’s
Ordination is demonstrably separating itself from many other Christian
denominations by insisting that women may be in the image of God but cannot be,
sacramentally, in the image of Christ. Both Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II
have reminded the Anglican Communion that ordaining women raises obstacles to
church unity.
Mark Chaves has suggested that more than
interdenominational boundaries are at stake.(18) He suggests that the real
reason for the Vatican’s stance might lie in a determination to uphold the
boundaries between the sacred and the secular. He suggests that the Catholic
Church is again fighting the anti-modernist battles of the nineteenth century.
If battles over the separation of Church and State and Darwinian evolutionary
theory are lost, a new stand can be made on the issue of gender equality. In
upholding gender inequality the Vatican ‘continues the long-term effort to
mark a boundary between a sacramental world and the liberal world’,
between the sacred church and the dangerous secular society.
The importance of boundaries to Rome can be seen in the
very metaphors they choose to describe God and church. Increasingly, this
Vatican is returning to asymmetric gendered images, with a male, father, God
and a dependent, female people; Mother Church and the Bride of Christ. And, as
Mary Douglas work demonstrates,(19) such body images are boundary images. The
first boundary delineated is that between Christian denominations; and the
Rules on the reception of communion mark this boundary (the body of Christ as a
boundary marker). The second boundary is between the church and the world.
What mark both boundaries are the bodies of women. The
idealized abstractions of women which are used as metaphors for Church are
creations of men, products of the male gaze. One wonders to what extent they
reflect the longings and aspirations of their creators; they certainly fail to
reflect the truth about women. Meanwhile, the bodies of real women endure real
suffering. They bear the brunt of abuse and rape by fathers; of genital
mutilation; of bearing and nurturing more children than their bodies or spirits
can nourish; while the official church, silent on so much of this, thunders
about the wickedness of contraception and abortion, which have become, along
with the ordination question, boundary questions separating the church from
secular society.
The two Curial documents, the Instruction on Certain
Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-Ordained Faithful in the
Sacred Ministry of Priest (released August 1997) and the Statement of
Conclusions directed at the Australian church,(20) would seem to confirm
this. Both call for a return to structures and practices which distinguish
Catholics from the rest of the world. They call for the setting up and
reinforcing of boundaries, for demarcating and separating what the Vatican sees
as essential differences between the ordained and the lay; the sacred and the
secular; the church and the world. The Vatican defines and patrols the
boundaries; the local bishops are enrolled as subsidiary guards. Moreover, this
emphasis on boundaries of lay-priestly differentiation is usually accompanied
by a greater emphasis on the Eucharist as a sacrifice.
In the statement to the Australian bishops, women are
portrayed as a danger, and feminist theologians are accused of challenging
traditional Christology and anthropology. The boundaries are drawn to exclude
and silence women, who are seen as out of their kitchens, out of their
convents, out of control. Women are again (or still are) the tempters. Now the
temptations to lead others astray are theological rather than sexual — Eve
is a feminist theologian.
5. conclusion:
These thoughts bring me back to OCW and why we continue.
There are multiple reasons, of course. Some members are energised by their own
sense of call to ordination, a call they cannot ignore. Supporting them is an
essential part of OCW’s work. Others are driven by a sense of justice;
they seek the clear and unequivocal recognition of the true equality of women
and men in the church. Others emphasise the enormous problems they have with
the all-male image of God which the all-male priesthood and present liturgies
uphold, and hence see women’s ordination as a liberating act. Others long
to see the gifts of all the people of God being used in the Church’s
ministry.
I believe we must have women at the heart of the
symbolic system: going for priesthood is going for the centre of that
tradition. Casey notes that Irigaray sees Eucharist as ‘a concrete site
for the transformation of the Symbolic order’.
To me the present papal ‘no’ is not firmly
founded on Scripture or Tradition, nor based on proper, widespread consultation
with the whole church; it is harming relationships with other Christian
churches and with the wider world; and, above all, is causing deep hurt and
great distress to the people of God. I am tired of the pain. But I believe we
need to continue to work for a church in which all ministries are open to women
and to men, to single, married, celibate, divorced; to people chosen from their
communities for leadership regardless of sex, gender, race or class.
For me, this means public action as well as it means
theoretical considerations. We work for transformation and we join in
conversation with many others in struggling to envisage what those
transformations might be. Logos becomes dialogue.
Notes
1. This paper is based on a talk first given to the
Australian Feminist Theology Foundation at its 1999 AGM, and also in updated
version to the 2000 AGM of OCW.
2. Uhr, Marie Louise, ‘Women’s Ordination and the Report: A
Saturday Journey’, National Outlook, 22, September 2000,
20-21.
3. Steiner, George, Real Presences (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1991) p.232.
4. Tatman, Lucy, ‘Thoughts and Hopes on the Future of Feminist
Theology/ies’, Feminist Theology, 22, 93-100, 1999.
5. For example, see Ann Tuohy, ‘Responding to the Response’,
National Outlook, 22, October 2000, 4-5.
6. Lake, Marilyn, Getting Equal: The History of Australian
Feminism, Allen & Unwin,. St Leonards, 1999.
7. Macdonald, Marie, et al., Woman and Man: One in Christ Jesus.
Report on the Participation of Women in the Catholic Church in Australia,
HarperCollinsReligious, Melbourne, 1999.
8. For a consideration of obedience as virtue, see my article, ‘Obedience a Questionable Virtue’, St
Mark’s Review, 173, 3-9, 1998.
9. Luce Irigaray, The Forgotten Mystery of Female
Ancestry Thinking the difference for a peaceful Revolution, Routledge, New
York, 1994, 112.
10. See for example, Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred, The Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore, 1979; Things Hidden since the Foundation of the
World, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1987, The Scapegoat, The
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1986.
11. Jay, Nancy, Through Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion
and Paternity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992, 32.
12. Beers, William, Women and Sacrifice: Male Narcissism and the
Psychology of Religion, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1992.
13. Raab, Kelley A., When Women Become Priests: The Catholic
Women’s Ordination Debate, Columbia University Press, 2000.
14. Condren, Mary, ‘Mercy Not Sacrifice: Toward a Celtic
Theology’, Feminist Theology, 15, 31-54, 1997; ‘Women, shame
and abjection: reflections in the light of Julia Kristeva’, Contact
130, 10-19, 1999.
15. Casey, Damien, personal communication.
16. Jay, op. cit., 32.
17. I’ve considered this in more detail in Uhr, Marie Louise,
‘Fixing the Boundaries: Traditional Asymmetric Gender Imagery of Church
and its impact on women’ in Developing an Australian Theology,
Peter Malone, ed., St Pauls Publications, Strathfield, 1999, 149-164.
18. Chaves, Mark, Ordaining Women. Culture and conflict in Religious
Organizations, Harvard University Press, Mass., 1997, 126.
19. Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger (London: Ark Paperbacks,
1984).
20. The Statement of Conclusions is a document written by the
Vatican Curia as a summary of discussions in Rome in December 1998 between some
Australian bishops and some senior Curial officers about the state of the
church in Australia as they saw it.
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