 |
 |
 |
|
|
|---|
|
by Dr. Dorothea McEwan; see credits
published in Pogranicza Wrazliwosci w Literaturze i
Kulturze Dawnej Oraz Wspolczesnie-Konfrontacje, Szczecin, 2-4 June 1997,
Poland; here re-published on www.womenpriests.org with permission of the author
and the publisher. For the Polish translation, see
here.
Introduction, ‘Feminism’, ‘Tradition’ and
‘Theology’
Feminist theology offers an analysis of theology, a critique of theory, thought
patterns and of the praxis of religion and a model for doing theology in a
transformative way. To illustrate this threefold task I chose as a case in
point the topic of the ordination of women to the ministerial priesthood in the
RC church.
The
ekklesia, the community, founded by Jesus Christ, called to end discrimination
between women and men, slaves and free, foes and friends (Gal 3:28), has in its
long history become an instrument of exclusion for half of its members. The
offices of deacons, priests and bishops are closed to women and are narrowly
maintained by men, celibate men. The clerical upper caste denies women access
to and exercise of the ordained offices on the basis of one-sided
interpretations of ‘tradition’, ‘authority’ and gospel
teachings. These, in fact, only show the whole breadth of sociological,
pyschological and anthropological arguments of fear, cementing the very
discriminations which Jesus Christ wanted to dismantle.
The
vision of equality and entitlement has got stuck in rhetoric. Today, women and
men want to take part in decision making. They want to safeguard rights and to
control their own lives. In the social and political arena this has led to
wider social movement, in the theological arena to the emergence of liberation
theology, i.e. the fundamental idea that the poor, in the Latin American
context, can do theology, can engage in theological reflections which issues in
the radical process of participation. They have learnt and understood that
personal life decisions cannot be left to outsiders or defined by experts, be
they religious, educational, professional etc. In fact, the opposite happens,
if decisions are left to ‘experts’: decisions become harmful when the
ideas and visions of the people themselves are termed wrong, and the
‘right’ decisions are imposed on them from outside. The text, the
gospel, is important, but also the context, the field in which it is sited,
lived and taught. And once people understood that decisions taken in Rome or
somewhere outside their context are harmful, are not meeting their local needs,
these same people have realised that their spiritual needs are no longer met
through existing structures.
However, while the liberation theologians were acutely aware of the unjustices
done to the people in their care, they did not see that a similar set of
injustices were perpetrated by state and church against women. Out of this
realisation feminist theology was born.
In
order to get a grip on our topic, we need to prepare our tools, we need to
define feminism and feminist theology. ‘Feminism sees patriarchy as a
multi-layered system of domination, centered in men’s control of women,
but including class, race, and generational hierarchies, clericalism, war, and
the domination of nature’ (3).Feminism, thus, is an analysis of society
from a woman’s point of view, the radical notion, that women are people
and not animals, legal minors, beasts of burden. Feminist theology defines
women and men as created equal and ‘denounces male domination of women as
sin’(4). The task of dismantling the patterns of patriarchal Christianity
is to reconstruct a radically different understanding of the key teachings
(God, humanity, male and female, sin and fall, Christ and redemption).
Christian Feminists of both sexes are working to root religious experience in
the here and now and to place theological insights in the here and now. If one
believes in the message of salvation, the faith message of Christianity, then
feminism offers a critique of contemporary patriarchal and kyriarchal theology.
The task for the hierarchy is not that it is asked to share power, but that it
is asked to change its views. If the church as institution cannot reform itself
and move with the times,it may, in fact, cease to provide the spiritual
leadership and be left behind while the essential church, the church as people,
will move on, leaving the old wineskins behind, much as Christianity left
Judaism behind.
Feminist theology supplies the tools to make the shift from seeing religion as
controlling life or the world to seeing religion as valuing the contribution of
each and everyone. Feminism is not about making the world woman-centred, but
about bringing the world into balance, offering a way out of age old dualisms
and discrimination to inclusion and mutuality.
‘Tradition’, the handing over of tales, beliefs, practices, is a
healthy way of incorporating the wisdom of our foremothers into our
experiences. It becomes unhealthy when the past is only allowed to live on in
one-sided presentations of the past, called ‘truth’, and the present
with all its flux and flow is deemed to be disruptive of that which is termed
truth. But truth cannot be escaped from, historic facts will come to light,
they are facets of the picture which we have to strive to complete. Gustav
Mahler famously spoke up against a slavish adherence to tradition by coining
the phrase ‘tradition is not the worship of the ashes, but keeping the
fire alive’ (5)
Much
of what tradition calls ‘theology’ is supposed to happen ‘from
the neck up. What characterizes Feminist Theology for me is the inclusion of
the rest of our selves and our experiences in the doing of theology....to do
theology with our minds and our bodies and our experiences and to build
communities that have space for all us’(6). And as women’s historical
experience ‘is normative insofar as it judges as partial traditional
presentations of “human” experience and adds whole new dimensions to
that experience’, women’s experience ‘exposes a patriarchal
theology for what it is, half a theology’ with the aim for feminist
theology, as expressed by Pamela Dickie Young for ‘making half a theology
a whole theology’ (7).
Structure and Development
I
come from a misogynist tradition, the tradition of exclusion in the R.C.
church. Our problem as women in the churches was the problem of relationship of
the church as structure and its development. There it was, the almighty
structure, meting out laws and rules and woe to those who broke them. And at
the same time there was resistance, non-conformism, dissent, the healthy
attitude of posing questions: why do those in power, the structure, want me to
behave in a particular way when my own experience tells me that I am right and
you are wrong?
The
history of resistance, of dissent, of thinking for one self is as old as the
history of the church. Only swept under the carpet, or to use a modern word,
those who insisted on it were marginalized, were declared heretics, confused,
even God-less, heathens, members of sects. Here I have only time to use
shorthand expressions - church history was written by the winners. Men and
women and children were slaughtered in the Crusades in the 12th and 13th
centuries, mostly women were persecuted and burnt in the witch craze in the
16th and 17th centuries, Protestants were expelled from their homesteads in the
17th and 18th centuries and were allowed to emigrate and Jews were annihilated
in the wake of antijudaist and antisemitic progroms in the 19th and 20th
centuries. The history of the church is also a history in the name of
persecution of people who were termed outsiders, others, foes. The mechanism of
exclusion is still extant against homosexuals and lesbians who are taught to
live in a particular way and in general against women who are told they are not
material for priesthood. Those who do not conform have to reckon with
punishment. But thanks to the insistence, the stubborn attitude of many women
and men borne of experience there is development, even if painfully slow.
The process of metanoia
The
technical term of ‘enlightenment shift’, the understanding that the
individual determines the structure and not vice versa, this shift, which
happened in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and which freed the human
mind from psychological obstacles, in time triggered developments in societies
and churches. Vital developments by women in religion are characteristic of
late twentieth-century life. Women posed questions, women centred their
concerns not only on small segments of their society, but on all of society,
women established the notion of feminism, that radical notion, that women share
full humanity with men. This notion, first, the awareness of women’s
oppression and exploitation in society, at work, within the family, decreed by
the churches and secondly, the conscious action by women and men to change this
situation, developed the thinking of personhood, of personal value, of the
value of personal experience. Not those in authority can and should dictate to
others, but authority has to be opened up, has to be newly defined as
empowerment, taking power for oneself. Not any longer a dictate to love
authority, but to love with authority (8).
This
ushered in a fundamental change ‘in understanding replacing the privatized
notion of religion with a communal one, rejecting the “power over”
model in favor of letting people be religiouos in a variety of ways, and
rejoicing in the fact that religious traditions are made up of sisters and
brothers who share equally and uniquely in the development of their
content’ (9).
Through this enlightenment shift, societies have become more open, more
democratic or contributive and accountable. This became a challenge to the
churches. Some have accepted this shift, my church has ignored it. In my
tradition believers are told that the church is the expression of God’s
will, that the theology is fixed and new insights cannot be gained.
Furthermore, in my church we women are told that even before we were conceived
my church knew that we were not to be ordained into ministerial priesthood.
Women experience God’s call, but the church does not allow women to answer
the call. Women bake the bread, but cannot break the bread, full access to the
priesthood is denied to women simply because we are women. Unlike Christ, who
loved everybody, the church does ot love those of us who want to live their
call to the priesthood. Nowhere else do women willingly agree to their
oppression in any other respect of their life. But women are here on the horn
of a dilemma: How can women be active in their churches, when they do not have
equal rights? And how can women not be active in their churches, when they love
their churches? The answer has to be that women and men are the church; we
therefore need an inclusive model of church, not the dichotomy of ordained and
non-ordained, a hierarchically stratified model. If the church-as-structure
does not accept both women and men, it cannot live and breat fruit and give
witness. A holding strategy will no longer do.
Let
me quote some examples from history when the church-as-structure saw the
necessity to change its views and to move with the faithful, with the times,
with the needs of ordinary people: The first is the abolition of slavery. Until
the 19th century the Church believed that slavery was a god-given state in
society; only reluctantly, in the wake of civil legislation, it accepted the
shift in thinking. The second is the scene at the enthronement of every new
pope in the Middle Ages. ‘The elders of the Jewish community in Rome had
to present him with the Torah, which, being identical with the Pentateuch, he
acknowledged with the words “We confirm the Law, but we condemn the Jewish
people and their interpretation” (confirmamus sed non consentimus)’
(10). The ceremony occurred for the first time in 1119 and was last performed
under Leo X in 1513. In later years it was transferred indoors to shield the
Jewish delegates from ill-treatment by the crowd. And the third example: It
took the R.C. church until November 1992 to declare that Galileo, the great
Italian mathematician, who died in 1642, was right and the church was wrong:
the earth is not flat, it is, in fact round. I do not point out these facts,
because I want to rubbish the church, I point them out to show that there is
development of argument, but painfully slow. And I believe the church has to
move faster, much faster.
Manifestations of Misogyny in Societies and Religions
Every
form of religion has degraded women, socalled societal norms quoted religious
ideas to underpin a variety of measures which were actually hurtful to women:
in China the practice of footbinding, in India the practice of suttee, the
burning of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands, in Islamic countries
genital mutilation, in Judaism and Christianity a stifling of creativity
because the faith systems tells us women who and what we are, notably that we
are second-class, sinful and seductive, in need to be ‘kept’ by men.
The fact is that sexism, a stereotyping because of sex, ‘is part of the
intricate web of oppression in which most of us live, and that having attuned
ourselves to it does not make it any less a fact of oppression’ (11) or to
speak in the words of Ivan Illich ‘a hitherto unthinkable individual
degradation of one half of humanity on socio-biological grounds’
(12).
In
the R.C. church we are confronted by teachers teaching the law rather than the
gospel, by teachers questioning the personal vocation by reminding those with a
vocation that the institution cannot accept such vocations, by the
inconsistency that the church’s call is more important to the institution
than God’s call. And yet, in the last 25 years, thousands of Catholic
women have entered the public ministry of the church. The understanding of what
constitutes valid ministry and who qualifies for it has shifted. Women teach
and research, women educate the priests to be, yet these same women do not
share full participation in the life of the church according to their God-given
talents. And yet, this is precisely how feminism in general and feminist
theologies in particular understand the direction our church has to take for
the church to become inclusive.
But
we do not understand by full participation only presence in a system which
still despises us. We stand for a different understanding of priesthood and
ministry. Ministry as making use of the God given talents of hearing and
listening, healing and teaching, feeding and sharing, and priesthood as the
community- given-power of enabling, empowering God’s presence amidst us.
This is development required from an enfleshed or incarnational faith in its
visible structure and its personal action. We had a morality of submission and
obedience; this is no longer enough. The feminist vision points to a new
morality of justice and equality and the celebration of rich variety.
For
the whole discussion of ministries must be a discussion of equality, a
situation beyond discrimination. Taken by itself, the question of ordination is
not a particular important one. But it serves as prism though which to look at
the whole are of relationships, right relationships and leadership and then it
becomes the touchstone for the credibility of the church’s rhetoric.
Rosemary Radford Ruether put the spotlight on the ordination question not
merely by focusing on sociological points of view but by spelling out what is
wrong with the papal statement ‘The Dignity and Vocation of Women’
(13) in which Pope John Paul II described women as ‘equal but
special’.
The
contradiction in this statement goes back to a Declaration by the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith ‘On the Question of the Admission of Women
to the Ministerial Priesthood’ (14) and Canon Law 1024 ‘only a
baptized man (vir) validly receives sacred ordination’. Ruether states:
‘In the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, women were fundamentally unequal in
nature. He borrowed the false biology of Aristotle to declare that women were
defective or “misbegotten” humans who lacked full normative human
nature. For this reason they could not represent human nature in any leadership
position in society. Only the male could represent full or normative huaman
nature’ (15). ‘Since only men possessed full normative human nature,
it followed that Christ had to be male to possess the fullness of humanness.
Only men in turn could represent Christ in the priesthood. Thomas’s
patriarchal construction of anthropology, christology and priesthood were
coherent. Only on the soteriological level did Thomas diverge from this
patriarchal construction. In keeping with ancient Christian tradition he
assumes that this inequality of women is overcome by the grace of salvation won
by Christ. Thus women are included in salvation, despite their incapacity for
full humannes.’ (16). Or, in other words: ‘Women are said to be fully
equal to men in the image of God and yet incapable of imaging Christ.’
(17)
Why
not and why are women incapable of imagining Christ? The traditional view as
espoused by the church fathers displayed a contradiction between its creational
anthropology and its christology. It used to be that ‘women were presumed
to be unequal and fundamentally inferior in nature, but equal in the order of
grace’ (18) But as baptized Christians we understand that this disability
was washed away, ‘in Christ this inequality had been annulled. In the
language of Gal.3.28, in Christ there is neither male nor female’. And, in
fact, we see, that in modern secular societies this formula of
non-discrimination is accepted. We can no longer speak of anybody’s
inequality in nature. Societal experiences simply do no longer subscribe to
such an interpretation. But in order to justify the continued exclusion of
women from ministry, modern Catholic teaching now accepts women as
‘equal’ in nature, i.e. secular society, ‘but unequal in
grace’ (19). The creational image-of-God interpretation includes women,
whereas the image-of-Christ interpretation - as put forward in the discussion
on ministry - excludes women. This neat theological switch is still the reason
for women’s exclusion from formal ministry in the R.C. church (20).
The
teaching that the woman is baptized in the image of God, but not the image of
Christ, is rejected by many women. Theology means finding a value, the value of
communion of the community. ‘To be in the image of God is to be in
community. It is not simply a man or a woman who can reflect God, but it is the
community in relationship’ (21). This empowers us to overcome
individualism and empowers us to live in right relationships.
In
their demands for equality women point to the need for right relationships
between people and the need for re-imaged relationships. ‘I dream of a
church that enables its community to burst the cage bars of oppression and
self-hatred and move with winged hope towards a liberated world, a world not
off in some distant future, but lived into existence in the now. It is a Church
grounded in the wisdom of collective self-empowerment and communal
responsibility, committed to the healing of divisions and the honoring of
diversity...’ (22) Such a radical new understanding of relationships
along the lines of the social teachings of the church is an imaginative way of
expressing worship, of ministering to each other, of being a religious agent
and thinking ourselves into the present, valuing our experiences and not
devaluing them.
Sources from Early Christianity
Many
denominations have accepted a female ministry. They point to Joel 3:1-2 which
says ‘I will pour out my Spirit on all of you! Your sons and your
daughters will prophesy... and I will pour out my Spirit even on your slaves,
men and women alike’. Let us explode the notion that the Bible renders
female ministry impossible. And let us explode the notion that celibate male
priesthood is superior, let us say that it is, at the very least, inadequate
for the pastoral needs of the church, of the women and men making up the
community.
Our
struggle is a long one and we will persist. The role of women in our church was
crucial, from the proclamation at the grave of Jesus to today. Let us remember
the sentence: Only that is new which has been forgotten. We must not forget the
many women who ministered, they showed us the way, into a ministry of equality.
Patricularly on this last argument, we know from research by Professor Giorgio
Otranto (23) and Mary Ann Rossi (24) that there were women who celebrated the
Eucharist. The American classical scholar Mary Ann Rossi, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, has translated and commented upon the research by Professor
Otranto who provided ample grounds for reconsidering the role of women in the
priesthood of early Christianity He challenged scholars dealing with the
problem to question the omission of such evidence, and to search for the
reasons for its omission. Otranto’s clues for the reconstruction of a
fragmented historical picture are based on a letter from Pope Gelasius I
(492-6) to all the bishops of Southern Italy and Sicily. It was concerned with
the organisation of the local churches, in particular the clergy. No 26,
towards the end of the list of decrees, stated ‘We have heard to our
annoyance that divine affairs have come to such a low state that women are
encouraged to officiate at the sacred altars, and to take part in all matters
imputed to the offices of the male sex, to which they do not belong’
(25).
Further, Otranto uses pictorial evidence from the fresco in the catacombs of
Priscilla in Rome, painted in the second century. We see in the Cappella Greca
seven people around a table, one blesses the chalice, one the bread and one the
fish, the symbol of Jesus Christ. The baskets either side refer to the miracle
of the multiplication of the loaves in the desert, so confirming the faith in
the more hidden miracle of the Eucharistic communion. One person wears a veil,
a married woman or a widow. The others look like women. The figure on the left
is definitely not a man, the presiding male priest, but a woman.
Otranto also refers to the 5th century tomb in Bruttium (Calabria) with the
inscription ‘sacred to her memory, Leta the presbyter lived 40 years, 8
months, 9 days, for whom her husband set up this tomb’. Because scholars
until recently could not accept the possibility of women priests, this has been
explained as Leta being the wife of a Presbyter. Apart from the evidence of
women priests in the letter by Pope Gelasius, there is no other parallel of a
priest husband not referring to himself as a priest in a tomb prepared for his
wife (26).
Archaeological evidence is also presented by the mosaic of ‘Theodora
Episcopa’, above the east doorway of the Zeno chapel in the Basilica of
St. Praxedis in Rome. The mosaic portrays four female heads, the Virgin Mary
standing between St. Pudentiana and St. Praxedis, daughters of a Roman family
who endowed the first church on the site. The figure on the left, with a square
halo, is identified by the inscription ‘Theodora Episcopa’. From
evidence of other inscriptions it is clear that she is shown here as one whose
financial help went to repair or extend the church. This inscription of
‘episcopa’ has been explained away as meaning a bishop’s wife.
However, married women were always specifially designated as such by the use of
words such as ‘coniux of’ or ‘gune of’ or ‘sumbios
of’ followed by a man’s name. The suggestion that Theodora is a
bishop’s wife is particularly inappropriate as her headdress makes it
clear she is not married (27)
We
have the affirmation in a fourth century document by St. Athanasius, a Doctor
of the church. In De Virginitate, he gives directions to a community of
virgins. After saying grace at a midday meal, he says ‘If there are two or
three virgins with you, let them give thanks over the bread together with
you’ and he added that any catechumens present had to leave at this point,
as is still done in Greek liturgies today (28). Southern Italy, the area where
women priests are attested, was culturally connected with Greek and Byzantine
areas where, from the third century onwards, women exercised the diaconate, and
at the end of the fourth century women were equated with male clerics,
receiving diaconal ordination by the laying on of hands with a ritual involving
juridical conditions and precise obligations.
Atto,
Bishop of Vercelli (between the 9th and 10th centuries) gave an explanation for
the meaning of presbytera and diaconia in the ancient canon. He referred to
women receiving holy orders, quoted Phoebe and added that at the Council of
Laodicea presbyteral ordination was prohibited for women in canon 11: ‘it
is not allowed for those called prebytidas to be appointed to preside in the
church’. Prebytidas means presbytera (29). A letter from Firmilian of
Cesarea (Mauretania) to Cyprian around 235 in Asia Minor condemns the
acticivity of a woman who was attracting a number of believers and who was
baptizing and celebrating the eucharist according to the ritual of the church
(30).
At
the time when Christian belief and practice evolved under many competing
cultural influences, not least that of misogyny, the sexist bias of church
leaders moved away from egalitarianism of the early house churches (31). The
relative freedom which women seemed to enjoy in the earliest church (hosting
the meeting, providing for the meeting, leading, presiding over the eucharist),
became, in time, tightened and circumscribed. This process started towards the
beginning of the second century but was not total - the young communities were
very much on their own wherever they met. Hence the existence of groups where
women had prominent roles side by side with groups, house churches, were they
had no roles. The dynamic behind this was the shift from the early private
sphere of the housechurch movement into a more formalized public space, which
sociologically problematized the idea of women’s leadership. The
theological justification followed and attempted to legitimate a process based
on the workings of social conventions. This bias still affects us today. The
prohibition on women priests in documents from early church councils make one
thing clear: they would not have been issued had the practice not been
widespread.
The example of the Church of England
From
the history of the women in the ‘Movement for the Ordination of
Women’, the British organisation for ordination into the Anglican church,
we know the arguments which have been used against women. The argument of the
kairos, that time was not ripe or that Christ only ordained men or that
tradition has it that there are only male priests. The time is never ripe,
Christ did ordain neither men nor women, traditionally there were men and women
in priestly roles.
The
Anglican situation was in many ways very important to be witnessed by catholic
women. The Anglican women said: the kairos is now, let us no longer entertain
any talk of unripe time. Why is the time never ripe for us? We have waited,
because we have believed that we will be ordained. We have done everything the
male hierarchy required from us, in our training, in our studies. It still was
not good enough. The men have increased the conditions from one church synod to
the next. The men have spoken about solidarity with the poor, the
disenfranchised, the disadvantaged, in other countries, but they have not seen
those of us in their midst. They said: what might Rome say? although they never
asked the same questions when other developments were decided. They have
discredited women with all the problems the church enocuntered, they made the
women into scapegoats, into obstacles on the way towards a true ecumenical
understanding. And yet, we women achieved ordination despite all obstacles
(32).
What
the Anglican women achieved was truly remarkable. The theologians had to
concede that there were no theological reasons which would stand up scrutiny.
The research has been done, the catholic women can draw on it. But the way to
achieve ordination will be a different one from the Anglican way.
The
Church of England is a democratic church, that is, decisions are reached by
majority voting. The decision making bodies, called Synods, meet regularly and
prepare legislation and vote on it by a show of hands. The Church of England is
a state church, that is, it is not a supra-national church like the R.C.
church. Decisions taken in one country are not binding on other countries. Each
country’s synod has authority in the decision making progress, in fact,
the Episcopalian church, the equivalent of the Church of England in the US,
voted for women priests in 1974, the Church of England only in 1992.
The
R.C. church is international and does not work along democratic decision making
processes. The development therefore will be somewhat different, the women
campaigning for ordination need to build networks and platforms from which to
engage the whole church in dialogue. This is a learning process, which will
happen sooner or later in every country. Today it is no longer a question
whether or not feminism and with it the ordination of women as justice agendas
can be ignored, it is only a question how long they can be ignored. The
academic research is done, there are many women with degrees in theology, ready
and willing to build the solidarity networks and structures in society and
church to help the Good News to reach people, because society is convinced that
‘Priestly People Come in Both Sexes’ (33).
The Practice of Priestly Ministry Today
But
ordination into a woman-hating system is counter-productive if the acceptance
to ordain women is only grudgingly given, if male bishops and priests can opt
out to work with women, if equality is achieved at the expense of excellence.
Catholic women are therefore also working on reworking the understanding of
priesthood, the priesthood of all believers. Catholic women work towards a
transformation of church structures, based on a transformed understanding of
women in the creational plan of God. They want to carry the process of
enlightenment into the church and they want to end every form of
discrimination.
The
practice today is widespread again. Women are ministering, are living a
tradition of accepting each other as they are, not according to some convoluted
notion of femininity and complementarity of sexes, so beloved by the Vatican,
but according to their new understanding of equality as human beings, made in
the image of God. Women have been accepted as priests in the Anglican
tradition, 1957 women or more than 10 % of clergy in the Church of England are
women, without them, many parishes would be without priest. The diocese with
the largest number of women is Oxford with 101 followed by Southwark and St.
Albans. The Bishopf of Ely, whose diocese has the highest population of women
in charge of parishes, writes: ‘I am happy to bear testimony to the warmth
of the welcome given by many different types of parishes to the ministry of
women priests. It is very encouraging to note that in such a short time, there
are so many ordained women serving the Church of God and in relatively
significant posts. As anticipated, there is a marked enrichment of the life of
the Church of England through these developments at every level’
(34).
They
have gone beyond the texts, the prescriptions and assumptions, these women and
their female and male co-parishioners have gone to meet and make the community.
In this way they and we will bring a one-sided tradition into balance again.
The
organisations working towards ordination in the R C church are called in the US
‘Women’s Ordination Conference’ (WOC), their journal is
‘New Women-New Church’, in Germany ‘Maria von Magdala’, in
The Netherlands ‘Vrouwens’, in Great Britain ‘Catholic
Women’s Ordination’, in Ireland ‘Brothers and Sisters in
Christ’ or BASIC, in Australia ‘Ordination of Catholic Women’
and ‘Women of the New Covenant’, in New Zealand ‘Catholic Women
Knowing Our Place’, in South Africa ‘Women’s Ordination in South
Africa’ or WOSA, in Austria ‘Frauenforum Feministische
Theologie’. All these organisations are base groups, networks, with their
study days, training days, journals, research facilities, campaign volunteers.
They started in the 1970s and ever more countries join in a worldwide umbrella
organisation called ‘Women’s Ordination World-Wide’ or WOW, as
launched at the First European Women’s Synod in Gmunden, Austria, in 1996.
The interest in the topic does not decrease, despite the fact that the papal
document on this topic ‘Ordination Sacerdotalis’ of 1994 expressly
forbade every further discussion of the topic. The letter by Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger in response to a ‘Dubium’ makes the prohibitions far more
dubious and the agenda more and more urgent and not less and less important.
In
April 1997, a conference on ‘Diaconate - An Office for Women in the
Church’ brought together hundreds of delegates to discuss this first step.
The conference was told that some American bishops had started to prepare
documents called indults to have the ban on women lifted. What comes through is
the wish to go ahead, the feeling of solidarity among men and women who want to
see development of our church. They want to be Christians, mature and
responsible. They no longer conceive of a division of values, women being
called prostitutes, sirens, maenads, witches on the one end of the pole and on
the other angels, mothers, sweet souls, pious widows, virgins. A church
obsessed with sex, with its interpretation of purity and sin, has produced a
socially -induced sexual dysfunction which the church has always regarded as
essential in maintaining its power and authority. Some would go so far as to
believe that without its ability to manipulate the immense forces of fear and
hate engendered by sexual repression, the church would cease to exist. It
certainly has to leave behind the sexual teachings with its wrong theology
based on a wrong understanding of human physiology.
R.C.
women stand for ordination, not subordination. We want ordination into a caring
community, not a caste system full of rules and regulations because you only
need laws when you are disconnected from yourself. When I talk to women priests
in the Anglican church, they say: ‘suddenly it does not feel like enemy
territory any more’ (35) (Kath Burns, who, though English, went to the US
to be ordained as she did not want to wait for ordination in the UK), ‘I
myself am surprised how much it mattered to me that women can now be
ordained’ (Hannah Ward), ‘not the winning shaped me, but the twenty
year long struggle, which made me go back to the sources, made me query things,
made me fearless’ (Anthea), ‘the people of Israel were shaped in the
desert, in the experience of strive’ (Kath Burns), ‘we were outsiders
and they were in, now we are in and they are outside and whingeing’
(Monica Furlong on the priests who do not wish to work alongside women). Their
experiences of suffering have made them into victims, but their experiences of
hope have moved them on to become survivors.
And
these visions and hopes can be loosely grouped into three areas:
- a, women and
men want the social teaching of the church, the ‘Love your neighbour’
command radically enacted, radically, going to the roots, taken up and lived.
We see it in the Base communities in Latin America and in experimental worship
groups in Great Britain and in many other countries.
- b, women and men
use imaginative methods to change their way of participation, their status as
religious agents, their understanding of doing theology and being church. It
might be language, which is inclusive, it might be action, which is inclusive
in the life of the community, it might be a lifestyle.
- c, women and men
want to put a history and tradition of misogyny behind them. When the bishops
quote the tradition of the R.C. church of not having women priests, they only
refer to a tradition of exclusion and woman-hatred, of hurt being done to
women, which is a-Christian to the core and the sooner we put it behind us the
better. For, if we look closely at ‘tradition’, we know that a number
of shifts have occurred. We have to ask the bishops what they mean by
‘tradition’.
The following
topics were once condemned by the church, but are no longer condemned:
- freedom of
conscience,
-
democracry,
- demanding
interest on loans,
- bible
study,
- mass in the
vernacular language,
- worshipping
with non-Catholics,
- the crucifix as
blasphemous.
And
topics which were once accepted by the church but are no longer so:
- all sexual
desire is sinful,
- torture and
burning of heretics,
- perseceution of
Jews,
- married
priests,
- women
priests,
-
slavery,
- the sun
revolving round the earth.
Christianity has a vision of making living together possible, the loving
pursuit of making right relationships, interacting on a personal and societal
level beyond classism, racism and sexism. This is the agenda for the present.
We believe as women we can help the church structure to develop and we believe
that we as women priests can enhance the lives of our communities in a new
understanding of priesthood.
Cardinal Basil Hume of Westminster, London, in responding to the document
‘We Are Church’, specifically stressed that the central substance of
faith is deposited in the Creed and in church documents (36). The agenda of the
ordination of women to the priesthood, however, has not been prohibited either
in the Creed nor in church documents. I take hope from this.
Dorothea McEwan
Notes
3. Rosemary Radford Ruether 'Created Second, Sinned First. Women,
Redemption, and the Challenge of Christian Feminist Theology', Conscience, Vol.
XVIII, no.1, Spring 1997, Washington DC, p.4).
4. R.R.Ruether, op. cit., p.3.
5. Author's translation.
6. Paula Kowalke 'What Can you Expect to Learn in Study/Action', Women's
Theological Center, Newsletter, Dec. 1989, vol 7, no 4, Boston, p.2.
7. Pamela Dickie Young Feminist Theology/Christian Theology, In Search
of Method. Minneapolis: MN Fortress Press, 1990, p. 67.
8. Dorothea McEwan 'Ich liebe nicht die Autorit@t, ich liebe mit
Autorit@t. Die Voll-Macht der feministischen Theologie', in Frauen und Macht.
Dokumentation der 1. Deutschen Frauensynode. Frankfurt am Main: Spener
Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, 1994, p. 41-48.
9. Mary Hunt 'Spiral not Schism: Women-Church as Church', in: Religion
and Intellectual Life, Fall 1989, vol VII, no.1, p. 85.
10. Ernst Gombrich The Visual Arts in Vienna Circa 1900 and Reflections
on the Jewish Catastrophe, London: The Austrian Cultural Institute, Occasions
1, 1997, p.32, quoting Ferdinand Gregorovius Das Ghetto und die Juden in Rom,
1853, reprinted in Wanderjahre in Italien, Fritz Schulman(ed.), Dresden, 1923,
p.286-7.
11. Mercy Oduyoye Reflections from a Third World Woman's Perspective,
quoted in Chun Hyung Kyung Struggle to Be the Sun Again, Introducing Asian
Women's Theology, London: SCM Press, 1991, p. 25.
12. Ivan Illich Gender, London: Boyars, 1983, p. 34.
13. 15 August 1988.
14. 15 October 1976.
15. R.R.Ruether, 'Women's Difference and Equal Rights in the Church' in
Anne Carr and Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza (eds.) The Special Nature of
Women?, London: SCM Press, Concilium 1991/6, p.15; cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa
Theologca, I, 92.
16. R.R.Ruether, op.cit., p. 15.
17. R.R. Ruether, op.cit., p. 13.
18. R.R.Ruether, op.cit., p. 14.
19. R.R.Ruether, op.cit., p. 14.
20. cf. D. McEwan, Review of Anne Carr and Elisabeth Schssler
Fiorenza (eds.) The Special Nature of Women?, Concilium 1991/6, in Feminist
Theology, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, no 2, January 1993, p. 127-132.
21. Elizabeth Dominguez 'A Continuing Challenge' in Virginia Fabella:
Mission of Women in the Church in Asia: Role and Position, In God's Image, Dec.
1985/ Feb. 1986, p. 7.
22. Kari Sandhaas: 'Of Wings and Webs. Envisioning a Liberated Church
and Inclusive Ministry', in: Daughters of Sarah, Spring 1993, Chicago: Women in
Ministry, vol. 19, no.2, p. 32.
23. 'Note sul sacerdozio femminile', in Vetera Christianorum, 19,
341-60.
24. 'Priesthood, Precedent and Prejudice', Journal of Feminist Studies
in Religion, 7.1:73-94 and 'Presbytera' in L. Isherwood and D. McEwan (eds.) An
A to Z in Feminist Theology, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996,
186-187. Cf. also the 'Everyman' Programme, BBC The Hidden Tradition, 8
Nov.1992, London.
25. A. Thiel, Epistulae Romanorum Pontificum Genuinae, New York, 1974.
26. E Diehl, Inscriptiones Latinae Christianae Veteres, 11-92,
Dublin/Zurich, 1970.
27. cf. Dorothy Irvin, 'The Ministry of Women in the Early Church: The
Archeological Evidence', in Duke Divinity School Review, Spring 1980.
28. Patrologia Graeca, 28, col. 267.
29. Patrologia Latina, 134.114.
30. Ep. 75.10, Corpus Cipreaneo, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum
Latinorum.
31. cf. Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, London:SCM
Press, 1983.
32. cf. Monica Furlong A Dangerous Delight. Women and Power in the
Church, London: SPCK, 1991.
33. A message printed on T-shirts, umbrellas, shawls etc. worn at
campaign meetings, demonstrations, liturgical celebrations etc. by Church of
England and R.C. women.
34. Communication by Caroline W. Landrum to the Feminist Theology List
on the Internet, 10 May 1997.
35. Opinions expressed to the author after ordination, in London, 1994.
36. Cardinal Basil Hume, 'Observations on the Declaration "We Are
Church"', 28 November 1996, London, letter to ten radical R.C. organisations in
the UK.
Join our Women Priests' Mailing List
for occasional newsletters:
An email will be immediately sent to you
requesting your confirmation.
Please, credit this document
as published by www.womenpriests.org!