In the News

Exiled from my condo by asbestos remediation, I am sitting in my local Starbucks. My famous – or infamous – Starbucks. There are six marked and unmarked police cars outside. I recognize them from endless SEPA WOC demonstrations. No protesters yet. Today in here there are more white than black people, but nobody is denied service, with very full staffing, including outside management. I know this because I earned gold status coming here when I had a fire in my former condo. We had no heat or water as we cleaned out our stuff, so I became a regular in a circular pattern: bathroom, coffee, condo, bathroom, coffee, condo, hotel.

I never saw anyone denied service. I saw plenty of people I judged to be homeless regularly sitting in the comfortable chairs, which were taken out before the recent incident. I talked with others hanging out, black and white. I am friendly. So I am sad for what happened here. I have had enough anti-racism training, including with WOC, to know how much prejudice affects all white Americans, and how easy it is to rely on ingrained fears in moments of perceived crisis. I hope what Starbucks does in a month helps all the staff deal with theirs.

When I came home yesterday I flicked on the TV to check on my DVR, and there was Bill Cosby leaving the courthouse and then a drone – I imagine – followed him all the way home to Elkins Park. That’s where SEPA WOC and my intentional Eucharistic Community of the Christian Spirit meet, at the Women’s Center of Montgomery County. I don’t know where the Cosbys live, but the end of an ideal also makes me sad. Cosby was a larger-than-life presence at Temple University graduations, where I taught for many years. Our mostly working-class students appreciated having a celebrity at their ceremony. He was Temple all the way, and they – and I – were proud. #TimesUp.

All the police cars are gone and there was no demonstration. Management staff are still here, as am I.

I have been reading about clericalism, which we have to think about as people favoring women’s ordination. What exactly do we want? A fascinating exchange in Commonweal shows how different theologians from Catholic universities think very differently. William Shea of Holy Cross argues for “desacralizing the clergy entirely.” Among the radical changes he proposes is:

Ending the Ontological Sign. Clericalism is reinforced by the doctrine that the sacrament of orders causes a “sign” to be placed on the soul of the recipient marking him eternally as clergy with a special status in the church, in the Kingdom of God, and even in Hell should he go there. I would argue, however, that ministers are simply Christians who share, like all Christians, in the priesthood, the prophetic office, and the reign of Christ. Ministers should be called and accepted by the community to perform a specific service such as presiding at the Eucharistic table. The “priestly people” are the church, not the clergy.

In seeking ordination for women, are we willing to go that far and abandon the sacrament of Holy Orders for that of Baptism, shared by all? Shea’s other reforms include “Ending Christendom,” which should be tempting enough to get you to read the whole article.

Then David Cloutier of Catholic University presents another vision, of “super-sacralization,” by which he means Vatican II’s “identification of the church’s entire life as a sacramental sign for the world.” He concludes by talking about ordination specifically, and I have taken the liberty to cross out some of his jargon, which may help or hinder your understanding of his final point:

What is the purpose of the church? What is the church for? If it is merely a vehicle for individual spiritual journeys and some good social reform, desacramentalization may make sense. But insofar as the church is not simply instrumental but sacramental, involving a profoundly spiritual and material eschatological mission of the realization of the new creation in the midst of the old, then desacramentalization is in fact one of the worst directions for the church to go. The visibility and particularity of ordination—and of all the sacraments—is the making real of the promise of redemption, not simply for isolated individuals after death, but for the whole world. … it is part of the larger conviction that God, though spirit, does not disparage matter or even abandon it, but seeks always to save, renew, transform, and elevate it. The practice of ordination can become an idol. The answer is not to abandon the practice, but to re-situate it within the super-sacramental understanding of the church that Vatican II so richly proclaimed.

So Cloutier expresses the traditional Catholic view of the sacraments, and definitely does not want to do away with ordination. Where do you stand?

Joe Holland, in the ARCC news, suggests a distinction between the “sacrament of orders” and the “clerical state,” the first being the understanding of the early Greek church and the second being the Roman imposition in the era of Constantine. He winds up his historical review with this theological compromise to the Shea/Cloutier conundrum, with which we might be confortable:

 The sacrament of orders needs to be rescued from the legal overlay of clericalism that today blocks its spiritual power and fosters a bureaucratized caste system. At the same time, the entire Catholic laos needs to recover its apostolic mission and sacred identity, which clericalism has frequently obscured. Declericalizing the Western Church would not secularize it – or desacramentalize it, as David Cloutier fears. On the contrary, it would return the church to its roots and remind it that the entire laos is sacred and chosen.

Is that what we in WOC called for when used to say “a renewed priestly ministry in a renewed church”? Now the WOC Vision Statement is much more complex and worth reviewing if you have not in a while. But it gets to the same question that Shea and Cloutier debate: what does ordination mean for ministry? The old bumper sticker said, “Ordain women or stop baptizing them,” and I certainly argue that whether or not there is ordination, we want women to be able to minister as they are called.

“All Are Welcome” at Starbucks and everywhere else. All know when “TimesUp.”