A “Grave Moral Error”

If you have not read Alice McDermott’s latest book, The Ninth Hour, I urge you to run, not walk, to the nearest bookstore, library, or e-book download! Beautifully written, unsentimentally poignant, compelling and affecting, it actually makes you proud to be Catholic just based on what so many nuns in the past have been doing and in the present continue to do. It is also an honest exploration of the nature of sacrifice and sacrament that makes you question, appreciate, and reflect on what that means in our lives today.

Alice McDermott is both a novelist and essayist – and a practicing Catholic, fortunately for us, in a most progressive, as well as reverential way. In the February 23, 2019 New York Times, in light of the Vatican gathering about sex abuse, she wrote an opinion piece titled, “Why the Priesthood Needs Women”. Her premise is the exclusion of women, based on gender alone, from the priesthood belies the Catholic faith’s oft proclaimed high valuation of all human life as worthy and equal. McDermott goes even further, contending that: “Far more than celibacy or sexual repression, barring one gender from the Roman Catholic Church’s highest ranks provides the implicit rationale for clerical abuse.”

She makes her position clear:

“The moral consequences of this failing become abundantly clear each time another instance of clergy abuse, and cover-up, is revealed. It is the inevitable logic of discrimination: If one life, one person, is of more value than another, then “the other,” the lesser, is dispensable. For the male leaders of the Catholic Church, the lives of women and children become secondary to the concerns of the more worthy, the more powerful, the more essential person — the male person, themselves.”

She calls for the Church “to correct this moral error.”

And I add…NOW.

She takes some comfort in the hierarchy’s inclusion, in its public vocabulary anyway, of words like “transparency” and “victim” and even “prosecute” but little in the defrocking of Theodore McCarrick, which, she points out, “is no recompense for the blindness, the arrogance, the cruelty of a system that allowed that pathetic man to become the shepherd of one of the most visible dioceses in the world. We fear that boys’ club secrecy and prancing misogyny, the profound moral error of discrimination, will prevail.”

She also describes a lament I keenly feel: the loss we would experience if we just walked away from the Church. How much we can take, she acknowledges, we are always measuring against what we would lose: the Church that many of us believe has guided us, provided solace, refuge, and reflection on the most important areas of life and spirit, that gathers our community, and is “the source of our own moral strength, of our faith in the substance of things hoped for.” But she ends the lament with: “And yet small commiserations can no longer placate our outrage. A sea change is required.”  Amen.

It is ironic, she notes, that the Church should actually be on our side in this quest given a document released in 1965 by the Second Vatican Council called “Gaudium et Spes,” or “Joy and Hope” (of which I had never heard – alas). From it, she quotes the following: “With respect to the fundamental rights of the person, every type of discrimination, whether social or cultural, whether based on sex, race, color, social condition, language or religion, is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God’s intent.” With that in mind, prohibiting women or any gender from the priesthood has to be “contrary to God’s intent” and, thus, “a grave moral error.”

She contends, as most of us do, that, ultimately, sexual abuse is about power. Further: “It is about the cruel dehumanization of the other, the perceived lesser being (italics mine), in order to gain, and retain, power. The institutionalized misogyny of the Catholic Church reinforces the notion of women, and their children, as the lesser. Catholic women, and their children, can have no assurance that the church can reform itself until that essential error is addressed and corrected. And that error cannot be corrected as long as women cannot be priests.” 

Double amen – and thank you.