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by John Wijngaards
from: The Ordination of Women in
the Catholic Church. Unmasking a Cuckoo’s Egg Tradition, London
2001, Darton, Longman & Todd, pp. 113 - 120.
In recent years the authorities in Rome
have produced a new argument for the non-ordination of women, one that was
unknown to antiquity. It is based on the symbolic relationship between Christ
and the Church as the bridegroom and his bride. The imagery was commented on in
Tradition, of course, but never in the context of excluding women from
ordination. Also, Rome admits that this is not an argument based on facts, but
an argument of ‘congruence’, an ‘analogy of faith’.(1) Let
me explain what this means.
We believe in the Blessed Trinity: Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. The theological rationale for this can be found in Scripture and
Tradition. But theologians add their arguments of congruence: reasons why it is
‘fitting’ that there should be three Persons in God. One of them was
the popular notion that the Father by knowing himself generates the Son,
and that Father and Son generate the Spirit by their mutual love. Such
reasoning is no more than a pious reflection, or a useful image from our own,
limited human experience. Arguments of congruence will never prove that
there should be three Persons in God.
Such, by Rome’s own admission, is the novel
argument based on symbolism. It aims to show that ‘it makes good
sense’ for women to be excluded from the priestly ministry. So what do the
Roman documents say? In brief the ‘argument’ comes to this:
- At creation God gave men and women a distinct dignity and vocation.
- When God concluded the covenant, he (!) was the Bridegroom and Israel
his bride. In the same way Christ is the Bridegroom and the Church his bride.
- This symbolism is so important that Jesus Christ had to become
human as a man.
- Jesus wanted this symbolism to continue by insisting that only
male priests represent him at the Eucharist.
Let us examine this in more detail.
What makes a woman a woman?
Pope John Paul II, while
repeatedly stressing that he recognises the equality of women and men, states
that women are ‘different’ because of the ‘femininity’ they
received at creation.
“The personal resources of feminity are certainly
no less than the resources of masculinity: they are merely different. Hence a
woman, as well as a man, must understand her ‘fulfilment’ as a
person, her dignity and vocation, on the basis of these resources, according to
the riches of the femininity which she received on the day of
creation.”(2)
The Pope then continues to fill in the specific nature
of femininity. Woman is first and foremost ‘mother’, a person
dedicated to be open to new life. “Motherhood is linked to the personal
structure of the woman and to the personal structure of the gift [of
life].” “The biblical exemplar of ‘the woman’ [= Eve] finds
its culmination in the motherhood of the Mother of God.” This puts women
in a special category.
“Motherhood has been introduced into the order of
the Covenant that God made with humanity in Jesus Christ. Each and every time
that motherhood is repeated in human history, it is always related to the
Covenant which God established to the human race through the motherhood of the
Mother of God.”(3)
After talking about virginity as the other major
vocation of woman, the Pope identifies ‘love’ in the sense of
‘self giving’ as the characteristic feature of womanhood.
“[Love is] decisive for the dignity of women both
in the eyes of God - the Creator and Redeemer - and in the eyes of human beings
- men and women. In God’s eternal plan, woman is the one in whom the order
of love in the created world of persons takes first root. The order of love
belongs to the intimate life of God himself, the life of the Trinity . . . It
enables us to grasp in an essential manner the question of women’s dignity
and vocation: the dignity of women is measured by the order of love . . .
Unless we refer to this order, we cannot give a complete and adequate answer to
the question about women’s dignity and vocation . . . This concerns each
and every woman, independently of the cultural context in which she lives, and
independently of her spiritual, psychological and physical characteristics, as
for example, age, education, health, work, and whether she is married or
single.”(4)
Now such spiritual philosophising turns out to be highly
dangerous. For it imposes a particular understanding as absolutely normative,
since it is supposed to derive from woman’s created nature. But can we
truly say what constitutes a woman’s identity? Studies in the fields of
anthropology, psychology, biology, history and sociology show that “far
from being fixed and immutable from conception onward, gender identity is in
fact variable and diverse and arises over a long period of time as a result of
the interplay of complex cultural and other forces.”(5) The Pope’s
definition excludes women from large realms of human experience. “In our
ecclesiastical jargon we run the risk of confining the feminine to an
essentialist cage. Woman is presented first as mother, then as virgin. Nothing
is said about woman as partner. The ‘essential’ difference between
man and woman is highlighted, and the nature and task of woman is seen as care
and concern for others. A professional life is not envisaged for her, for that
would involve concern about herself.”(6) It is the first step to banning
women from the priestly ministry.
The ideal of ‘selfless love’ which the Pope
proclaims to be woman’s vocation sounds like another attempt by men to
curtail women’s full human growth. “The characteristics of the
eternal woman are opposed to a developing, authentic person, who will be
unique, self-critical, self-creative, active and searching. By contrast to
these authentic personal qualities, the eternal woman is said to have a
vocation to surrender and hiddenness; hence the symbolism of the veil.
Selfless, she achieves not individualization but merely generic fulfilment in
motherhood, physical or spiritual.”(7) It is time for women “to wake
up, to bid farewell to passivity, to kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye and take
responsibility for their lives”.(8)
The symbolism of bridegroom and bride
The Pope now turns to
scriptural imagery which, in his view, expresses a key truth about the nature
of God’s relationship to humanity, and the specific roles God gave to men
and women. Already in Old Testament times God is presented as the husband,
Israel as his wife. This symbolism reaches its climax in Christ.
“Christ is the Bridegroom; the Church is his
bride, whom he loves because he has gained her by his blood and made her
glorious, holy and without blemish, and henceforth he is inseparable from her.
This nuptial theme, which is developed from the Letters of Saint Paul onwards
(cf. 2 Cor. 11 :2, Eph. 5 :22-23) to the writings of Saint John (cf. especially
Jn 3:29, Rev. 19:7, 9), is present also in the Synoptic Gospels: the
Bridegroom’s friends must not fast as long as he is with them (cf. Mk
2:19); the Kingdom of Heaven is like a king who gave a feast for his son’s
wedding (cf. Mt. 22:1-14). It is through this Scriptural language, all
interwoven with symbols, and which expresses and affects man and woman in their
profound identity, that there is revealed to us the mystery of God and Christ,
a mystery which of itself is unfathomable.”(9)
The main source for this nuptial theme is found in
Ephesians. It requires further discussion. The ‘church’ in this text,
as everywhere else in the New Testament, stands for ‘the community of
believers’.
“Be subject to one another out of reverence for
Christ. Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is
the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is
himself its Saviour. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and
gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the
the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself
in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy
and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their
own bodies. He who loves his wife, loves himself. For no man ever hates his own
flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we
are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and
be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one.’ This is a great
mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the church; however, let
each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she
respects her husband.”(10)
The text is part of the socalled ‘household
codes’ that contain practical instructions for masters and slaves, parents
and children, husbands and wives.(11) This means that the example of
Christ’s wedding serves the purpose of inculcating the right attitudes
between husband and wife. A metaphor has here grown into an allegory. Like a
groom Christ loves his church. He cleansed her from sin through baptism -
reference to the bridal bath before the wedding. He nourished her through the
Eucharist - reference to the wedding meal. He became one flesh with her -
reference to intercourse during the wedding night. The quotation from Genesis
‘the two shall become one flesh’ gives the author an opportunity to
remark: “This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and
the Church”.
The symbol of Christ’s ‘marriage’ to the
community of believers should be seen in the context of rabbinical imagery that
described the coming of the Messiah as a wedding feast.(12) Perhaps there is an
allusion to the ‘sacred marriage’ - hieros gamos - the
marriage of a god with a human being, that was found among hellenistic writers
and that would become a major theme in 2nd and 3rd
century Gnostic sects.(13) The image of marriage, of ‘becoming one
body’, comes naturally to the author of Ephesians because he is concerned
about the building up of the body of the church in Christ, who is its head.(14)
Why does he call the union of Christ and his church a
‘great mystery’? Ephesians makes this abundantly clear. The mystery
is God’s purpose with the whole of humankind which has now been revealed,
namely “to unite all things in Christ”.(15) The stress here is on
all. In the past the Gentiles had been excluded from the Covenant.
God’s great mystery now revealed is that the Gentiles too can be members
of Christ’s body. “You can perceive my insight into the mystery of
Christ, which was not made known to people of other generations as it has now
been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets through the Spirit, that is,
how the Gentiles are co-heirs, members of the same body and partakers of the
promise in Christ Jesus.”(16) This explains the remark in the text on
husbands and wives. As the author speaks about Christ loving his body, the
church, he sees ‘the great mystery’ already foreshadowed in the
creation passage. “A man [= Christ, the Son of Man] leaves his father and
mother [= incarnation] and clings to his wife [= the whole of humankind]. The
two become one flesh [= one church].”(17)
So far so good. Rome, however, sees the ‘great
mystery’ in another light. It seems to think that the ‘mystery’
reveals something about sex and gender, about God being somehow male and
humankind female, about the created difference between men and women. Rome sees
a cosmic nuptial symbol that transcends imagery because it is real. The
bridegroom passage in Ephesians describes reality rather than speaking only in
metaphors. And this reality has enormous consequences for the incarnation. For
Christ, as the divine Bridegroom, had to be a man and only men
can represent him at the Eucharist.
“It is through this Scriptural language, all
interwoven with symbols, and which expresses and affects man and woman in
their profound identity, that there is revealed to us the mystery of God
and Christ, a mystery which of itself is unfathomable.”(18)
“The fact that Christ is a man and not a woman is
neither incidental nor unimportant in relation to the economy of salvation . .
. God’s covenant with men (!) is presented in the Old Testament as a
nuptial mystery, the definitive reality of which is Christ’s sacrifice on
the cross . . . Christ is the bridegroom of the Church, whom he won for himself
with his blood, and the salvation brought by him is the new covenant. By using
this language, revelation shows why the incarnation took place according to
the male gender, and makes it impossible to ignore this historical reality.
For this reason, only a man can take the part of Christ, be a sign of
his presence, in a word ‘represent’ him (that is, be an effective
sign of his presence) in the essential acts of the covenant.”(19)
“The Bridegroom - the Son consubstantial with the
Father as God - became the Son of Mary. He became the ‘son of man’,
true man, a male. The symbol of the Bridegroom is masculine . . . . The
Eucharist is the sacrament of the Bridegroom and the Bride . . . Since Christ,
in instituting the Eucharist, linked it in such an explicit way to the priestly
service of the Apostles [who were all men], it is legitimate to conclude that
he thereby wished to express the relationship between man and woman, between
what is ‘feminine’ and what is ‘masculine’. It is a
relationship willed by God both in the mystery of creation and in the mystery
of redemption. It is the Eucharist that expresses the redemptive act of Christ
the Bridegroom towards the Church the Bride. This is clear and unambiguous when
the sacramental ministry of the Eucharist, in which the priest acts in
persona Christi, is performed by a man.”(20)
In other words: the image of the Bridegroom, Rome says,
is so important that the Son of God had to become human as a man. When the
‘Word became flesh’, the Word could not have lived among us as a
woman. This symbolism may not be lost in the Eucharist which re-enacts creation
and redemption. A male groom, Christ, presides at his wedding feast. Therefore
he excluded women and chose only men to represent him as his priests.
Symbolism run amock?
We may begin by observing
that the conclusions drawn from Ephesians 5,21-33 regarding the nuptial mystery
go beyond the meaning of the inspired text. In no way does the
‘mystery’ consist in God revealing that he wants to save people as a
male. The masculinity of the bridegroom may be part of the image; it is not
part of the contents. When Jahweh calls Israel his ‘wayward wife’,
does it follow that God is truly male or God’s people truly female? The
image speaks about relationship, not sex and gender.
Images can be instructive, of course, but they remain no
more than images. They are metaphors. Christ is compared to a bridegroom in
three Gospel passages, but he is also compared to a shepherd, a judge, a rabbi,
a light, a door, a vine, a loaf of bread, a path, a servant, a mother hen and a
thief who comes in the night. Some of these images could be worked out as at
least equally important to the bridegroom image. The Old Testament often sees
God as the owner of a vineyard.(21) This is a rich symbol involving owner,
workers, vines, wine. Jesus frequently refers to the image.(22) That Jesus
supplied the wine at Cana is highly significant from the perspective of
creation, redemption and the outpouring of the Spirit.(23) Moreover, the sign
is directly eucharistic. By applying the symbol of ‘the vine nurturing the
branches’ to Jesus, the Gospel of John adopts female imagery as elsewhere
in the Gospel.(24) The nurturing with ‘flesh and blood’ which is more
truly eucharistic than ‘presiding as the bridegroom’ could much
better be represented by a woman than by a man. Why should one symbol prevail
over the other?
But if we take the Pope’s eucharistic imagery
seriously, the symbolic significance of the phallus is now emphasised as it has
never been in Christian tradition. “To argue that Christ’s
eucharistic gift of self is the action of the bridegroom in such a way that it
requires a male body, is to make it an act of coitus and not of self giving in
death. The symbolic function of the priesthood is therefore no longer primarily
concerned with death but with sex, since male and female bodies both die and
therefore either sex could represent the death of Christ.”(25) With the
masculinity of the Bridegroom taking central stage, Christ’s
kenosis (self emptying) at Mass assumes the overtones of a male orgasm.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of Rome’s theological advisers, has made the
image quite explicit. Von Balthasar was a member of the Papal Theological
Commission since 1967 and became one of Pope John Paul II’s favourite
theologians. The Pope named him a Cardinal in 1988, a few days before he died.
Von Balthasar does not mince his words.
“The priestly ministry and the sacrament are
means of passing on seed. They are a male preserve. They aim at inducing in the
Bride her function as a woman.”(26)
“What else is his eucharist but, at a higher
level, an endless act of fruitful outpouring of his whole flesh, such as a man
can only achieve for a moment with a limited organ of his body?”(27)
Tina Beattie adds this comment:
“The ‘what else ... but’ implies that
it is nothing else. This is the eucharist understood not primarily as
Christ’s identification with the universal human tragedy of death, but
rather as the identification of Christ’s death with the uniquely male
experience of penile ejaculation . . . The justification given for the
essentialisation of the male priesthood has reduced the symbolic richness of
the Mass so that it is indeed nothing but a cosmic male orgasm, as von
Balthasar suggests. The female body, lacking the ‘limited organ’
which allows for this experience, cannot represent Christ in the eucharist.
Ultimately this means that women have become bystanders in the metaphysical
consummation of homosexual love, a marriage between men and God in which the
male body is both the masculine bridegroom and the feminine bride, the
masculine God and the feminine creature, the masculine Christ and the feminine
church. This makes Catholic theology more explicitly phallocentric than has
been the case in the past, since the phallus has become the defining symbol of
Christ’s giving of self in the Mass.”(28)
Beattie calls it homosexual love, because whereas
the Pope excludes women from representing the bridegroom, he explicitly
includes men when talking of ‘the bride’. “All human beings -
both women and men - are called through the Church to be the ‘Bride’
of Christ, the Redeemer of the world. In this way, ‘being the bride’
and thus the ‘feminine’ element, becomes a symbol of all that is
‘human’.”(29) Men have it all, women have nothing.(30)
Making sense of it all?
There is much more that
would need to be said about the symbolism proposed by Rome. For one thing, by
insisting that only a male priest can represent Christ as the masculine
Bridegroom, women are effectively cut off from the symbolic support they need
in their own journey of faith. “The woman at the altar enlarges
people’s understandings and imaginings about God. In prayers and in
celebration, the ordained person is representative of the people to God and of
God to the people. If the image is always male, God is represented only as
male. As women are included symbolically as representative people, the image of
God is larger. The feminine becomes more than the Spirit dimension. Sonship
begins to include daughters.”(31)
Analysing the experience of women priests in other
Christian denominations and probing the Catholic search, Kelley Raab has
convincingly demonstrated the absolute need of female identity persons in the
Catholic Church of our time. Women priests are now psychologically required for
a healthy spirituality and a truly Catholic liturgy. It is a dimension I am not
able to do justice to in this book, but it exposes the male-only symbolism
still defended by Rome to be injurious to the Church.(32)
By Rome’s own admission, the symbolism of the
Bridegroom and the bride is no more than an ‘argument of congruence’.
And, as Thomas Aquinas (1224 - 1274 AD) pointed out, “a theology based on
symbols does not prove anything”.(33) Moreover, our reflections
have shown that the symbolism, in its sexual application, does not have a valid
scriptural basis and does not make sense.
Rome often mentions the bridegroom ‘argument’
in one breath with the argument based on acting in persona Christi which
we discussed in the previous chapter. It clearly attempts to present the
traditional argument in a new garb. But even with this face lift the argument
fails. Women can represent Christ, as validly and as fully as men can.
John Wijngaards
Notes
(1) Inter Insigniores, § 24; Commentary on Inter
Insigniores, § 81-82.
(2) Mulieris Dignitatem (15 August 1988) § 10.
(3) Mulieris Dignitatem § 18-19.
(4) Mulieris Dignitatem § 29.
(5) Joanna Manning, Is the Pope Catholic?, Toronto 1999, pp.
69-70; see also Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering:
Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley 1978; Judith Butler,
Gender Trouble - Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York 1990;
Sarah Coakley, ‘Creaturehood before God - Male and Female’,
Theology 93 (1990) pp. 343-354.
(6) Roger Burggraeve, ‘De schepping van de mens als man en
vrouw’, Collationes 3 (1997) pp. 243-281.
(7) Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, Boston 1985, p.
149; see also Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Boston
1978.
(8) Mary Grey, Redeeming the Dream, London 1989, pp. 15-19; see
also Carolyn Heilbrunn, Reinventing Womanhood, London 1979, pp. 125-170;
Jean Majewski, Without a Self to Deny: Called to Discipleship When We Were
Yet Un-Persons, Chicago 1984.
(9) Inter Insigniores § 29-30.
(10) Ephesians 5,21-33 (italics are mine). The letter is now
commonly attributed to a disciple of Paul.
(11) Colossians 3,18-22; Ephesians 5,21-6,9; 1
Peter 2,18-3,7; Titus 2,1-10; 1 Timothy 5,1-6,2.
(12) Isaiah 61,10; Exodus Rabba 15,30; 4 Esdras
10,40-43; 1 QumranIsa 61,10; Pesiq 149a; J. Gnilka,
‘Bräutigam - spätjüdisches Messiasprädikat?’,
Trierer Theologische Zeitschrift 69 (1960) pp. 298-301.
(13) Philo of Alexandria, Abraham 99; Cherubim 40-44;
Vita Moysis 2,69; see R.A. Batey, ‘Jewish Gnosticism and the Hieros
Gamos of Eph 5,21-33’, New Testament Studies 10 (1963/64) pp.
121-127.
(14) Ephesians 1,23; 4,1-16; E. Best, One Body in Christ,
London 1950.
(15) Ephesians 1,9-10; 6,19; cf. 2,11-22.
(16) Ephesians 3,4-6, 8-10; A.E.J. Rawlinson, Mysterium
Christi, London 1930, esp. pp. 225-244; J.T.Trinidad, ‘The Mystery
hidden in God’, Biblica 31 (1950) pp. 1-26.
(17) E.Neuhäusler, ‘Das Geheimnis ist gross’,
Biblisches Leben 4 (1963) pp. 155-163; J. Cambier, ‘Le grand
mystère concernant le Christ et son Église’, Biblica
47 (1966) pp. 43-90, 223-242; J.Gnilka, Der Efeserbrief, Freiburg 1971,
pp. 273-294.
(18) Inter Insigniores § 29-30.
(19) Commentary on Inter Insigniores § 100 - 102.
(20) Mulieris Dignitatem § 25-26; see also Christifideles
Laici § 51.
(21) Isaiah 5,1-7; 27,2-5; Jeremiah 2,21; 5,10, 6,9;
Ezekiel 15,1-8; 17,3-10; Psalm 80,8-18; etc. etc.
(22) Matthew 20,1-16; 21,33-46; Luke 13,6; John
8,37; etc.
(23) John 2,1-10; L. P. Trudinger, ‘The Seven Days in the
New Creation in St. John’s Gospel’, Evangelical Quarterly 44
(1972) pp. 154-158; J. A. Grassi, ‘The Wedding at Cana (Jn II 1-11): A
Pentecostal Meditation?’, Novum Testamentum 14 (1972) pp. 131-136;
K. T. Cooper, ‘The Best Wine: John 2:1-11’, Westminster
Theological Journal 41 (1979) pp. 364-380; R. F. Collins, ‘Cana (Jn.
2:1-12) - The first of his signs or the key to his signs?’, Irish
Theological Quarterly 47 (1980) pp. 79-95; V. Parkin, ‘On the third
day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee (John 2.1)’, Irish Biblical
Studies 3 (1981) pp. 134-144; etc.
(24) John 15,1-7. Cf. “You are in me”; J. Wijngaards,
The Gospel of John, Wilmington 1986, pp. 195-203; M. Vellanickal,
‘Divine Immanence in St. Jobn’, Biblebashyam 1 (1975) 312-332;
J. Dupuis, ‘Cbristus und die advaita-Erfahrung’, Orientierung
41 (1977) 168-172.
(25) Tina Beattie, God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate. A
Gynocentric Refiguration of Marian Symbolism in Engagement with Luce
Irigaray, Bristol 1999, p. 64.
(26) H. U. von Balthasar, Wer ist Kirche? Vier Skizzen, Freiburg
1965, p. 24; Hedwig Meyer-Wilmes has called von Balthasar’s reflections
“male daydreaming that comes closer to ecclesiastical soft porn than to a
theological treatise on the Church”; ‘Vater Gott und Mutter
Kirche’, in Marie-Therese Wacker (ed.), Theologie feministisch,
Düsseldorf 1988, p. 150.
(27) H. U. von Balthasar, Elucidations, trans. John Riches,
London 1975, p. 150.
(28) Tina Beattie, ib. p. 65.
(29) Galatians 3,28; Mulieris Dignitatem § 25.
(30) About the ‘bridegroom’ argument, see also: P. Lakeland,
Can Women be Priests?, Dublin 1975, pp. 64-65; C. Stuhlmueller,
‘Bridegroom: a Biblical Symbol of Union, not Separation’, in Women
Priests, Leonard Swidler and Arlene Swidler (ed.), New York 1977, pp.
278-283; J. R. Donahue, “Women, Priesthood and the Vatican,”
America, 136 (April 2 1977), pp. 286-287; R. Radford Ruether, Sexism
and God-Talk, London 1983; D. Coffey, ‘Priestly Representation and
Women’s Ordination’, in Priesthood. The Hard Questions ed. G.
P. Gleeson, Dublin 1993, pp. 79-99.
(31) J. Morgan, Women Priests, Bristol 1985, p. 171.
(32) Kelley A. Raab, When Women Become Priests, New York 2000;
see also Mary D. Donovan, Women Priests in the Episcopal Church: The
Experience of the First Decade, Cincinnati 1988; Sue Walrond-Skinner,
Crossing the Boundary: What Will Women Priests Mean?, London 1994;
Hilary Wakeman (ed.), Women Priests: The First Years, London 1996; B.
Brown Zikmund et al., Clergy Women: An Uphill Calling, Westminster
1998.
(33) “Symbolica theologia non est argumentativa”; Thomas
Aquinas, I Sententiarum prol. Q.1; dist. 11, q.1. ; I am indebted to
René van Eyden for this reference.
John Wijngaards
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