What are they scared of?
I recently visited Heavenly Bodies at The Met Cloisters with some friends. It was a great combination of religious art and architecture, which I appreciate, and high fashion, of which I know nothing. I love the architecture of churches, especially Catholic churches. It could be from the traveling we did in Europe when my family lived in Germany in the early 1970s. It could be because no matter where I am in the United States, when I walk into a Catholic Church, something feels familiar, like home. Walking through the exhibit, I was particularly moved by the juxtaposition of feminine energy (in the fashions and in much of the representative art) and traditional institutional Christian expression. When I got to the end, I found myself oddly sad and a little angry. One question kept coming up for me, almost out of nowhere: What is it about women that so scares and mystifies the Catholic Church?
When I think about why I’m on the board of the Women’s Ordination Conference and what I can do to support change, I keep coming back to that question. It’s a question I ask about race in this country as well: Why are some people considered such a threat? Is it us, or is it the people who insist on perpetrating acts of prejudice and discrimination? It’s even more mystifying for me within the Catholic Church. For the most part, women are told that we are important to the Church. Priests make a point in their homilies of celebrating the gifts of women. We’re not being actively pushed out of the Church, and most church leaders know that the Catholic Church would cease to exist tomorrow without the contributions and participation of women. We are loved, we are celebrated, we are honored. We just can’t be priests. And I still really do not get it. What is it about us that makes us so scary to the history and traditions of the Church?
This week I attended the funeral of a woman who made a difference in so many lives, including mine. Annie Bleiberg was 97 years old and survived the Holocaust as a very young woman. Her mother helped push her out of a moving train headed to the Belzec death camp. Annie escaped, hid, was betrayed and beaten, and ultimately wound up in Auschwitz. She survived through strength and luck, and never took for granted how blessed she was to have each day of her life. Every time I got to speak with her, or listen to her testimony, I would marvel at her grace and her resilience, and wonder, “Why was Annie, this little powerhouse of a woman, considered such a threat to the Nazi regime?” It makes no sense to me, no matter how much I learn about or teach about the Holocaust, or racism, or sexism.
I’m an educator. I try to help students and other educators understand their world a little better through examining history. The history of discrimination is of particular interest to me. But at the end of the day, I keep coming back to the question of why. I don’t have a satisfying answer that will transform the Church I love, and I have no illusions that just by pointing out the ridiculousness of inequity in our Church that the leadership will wake up one day and say “I get it! So sorry!” But I think of women like Annie, who would not give up, and the countless women and men who I know are working every day to push the Church just a little further, and I remain hopeful that change will come.
7 Responses
Thank you for articulating so well the questions that I have and that mystify me and I also ask myself why am I scared and hold back in challenging the blatant inequality in the church – what is the grip that they have on me? I have decided right now to break free and claim the Church because She does not belong to the Vatican – this is not God’s residential address. The world and galaxies cannot contain God. Writing this response has liberated me thanks to you!
Well-said. After spending a couple of years studying Church history and paying particularly attention to the Councils, I was reminded how much the partriarchy is represented in the language, tone, gesture, habit, doctrine and ritual of the Church. I don’t have answer to your question but I believe men need to be part of this struggle. My small contribution is a novel “Chanting the Feminine Down” about a path for women priests.
It will come. The Theologia Corporis provides the best way to foster doctrinal development pursuant to the ordination of women because it shows that FLESH is ontologically more fundamental than sex/gender. In light of Theologia Corporis, canon 1024 is an artificial contraceptive and abortifacient of female vocations to sacramental ministry. Is the Church really pro-life?
Great article, Tracy!! Thanks so much for the provocative “Why?” that we all are trying to find an answer for…..I would suggest that perhaps part of the answer lies in your saying that women are “celebrated” “honored” – putting someone or something on a pedestal is a way of controlling it/them…..Women obviously DO scare the church and until we are equal in all things, some will not be able to overcome that fear.
Why? Hierarchs may remember history — priestesses, self-castrations by males, sex rituals in temples, and possibly human sacrifice in the back woods — why else the need for Jesus ‘the one and only sacrifice’? Of course they are afraid. Even if you pray to ‘Father-god,’ that is not sufficient for them. They remember priestesses who represented the Queen of Heaven. Jesus the human sacrifice is not a Jewish concept — Yahweh abhorred human sacrifice. Yet it is the core of the reform.
It’s all about inequality. God wants equal justice but males want to keep a male only run Church and until the female half quit financially supporting it we will continue to be ruled by males which is not God Intent according to Article 29 of Pastoral Constitution from Vatican II way since 1965 “No more sexual or racial discrimination within The Church, as not the Will of God”. I have personally given other evidence to the last 3 popes since the 1985 after God gave me the one word of “Equality” at a spiritual rebirth, but they are only want to listen to women who will go follow them instead of God’s Holy Spirit!. Please No more money for sexism!
Certainly, “countless women and men…working every day to push the Church just a little further” will make a difference to the People of God. But will it move Church hierarchy?
Could it be our theology which is the problem? Yes, God loves women, but HE clearly favors HIS Sons in both Scripture and Church tradition. And God is clearly a Divine Hierarch in the mind of majority Reform of the Reform Catholic Church.
Unfortunately, a theology structured in pyramidal hierarchy…with doctrine suffused to the core with the belief that pyramidal hierarchy is God’s Design and Divine Will…this theology HAS NOT/IS NOT going to change UNLESS we begin to see an alternative interpretation of hierarchy.
Nested Hierarchies perhaps? Inter-interdependent relationships where God is the ultimate inclusive hierarchy?
Then, surely, no one would be scared of the other.