Women in ministry

This week my attention is drawn to the different ways ordained women understand their ministry. My first inspiration is a response in The Atlantic to the James Carroll piece that I wrote about last week. Susan Bigelow Reynolds writes of her experience in graduate school when she lived in a Catholic rectory (which the priests no longer inhabited, it should be noted). “‘Everybody Wants a Revolution, but Nobody Wants to Do the Dishes’” is a headline guaranteed to attract any woman’s attention. She describes a wonderful parish: diverse and lay-led, in which she exercised various ministries from cleaning the church to religious education: everything, in short. She takes issue with Carroll:

I winced when I read Carroll’s suggestion that clericalism will finally meet its end when laypeople simply decide to be “Catholics on our own terms.” Who, I wondered, in a Church of 1 billion people, is “our”? What can come of such an approach, ultimately, is merely another sort of Benedict option. In the original sense of the term, traditionalists bind together to keep the faith. In Carroll’s version, it’s the reformers who circle their wagons. But the result is the same: a smaller, purer Church of Good People.

At St. Mary’s, by contrast, a culture of inclusive collaboration gradually took root as laypeople and priests joined together to leverage the Church’s institutional power on behalf of the most marginalized members of the local community. Over time, they developed structures and practices to ensure that, no matter who the pastor happened to be, the laity would retain a guiding voice in the parish’s mission.

Reynolds concludes with a strong argument for laypeople to have a “formal role in the authority structure of the Church” to build “an ecclesial culture of justice, transparency, and humility.” Other critiques of Carroll’s article which are less ministry-based suggest that the human condition is always going to result in flawed institutions. But I think of the quote attributed to Churchill that “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Certainly better than clericalism and hierarchy.

Another example of parish-based excellence is a letter that I encourage you to print, revise, and send to your local paper the next time priests are ordained in your diocese. The generosity of the All Saints Parish Women’s Taskforce and Upstate NY Call To Action to the newly-ordained man as it calls for women’s ordination is inspiring – and probably why it was printed.

 “Why now?” is the question I have for a JSTOR posting by Peter Feuerherd,  whose work I know in NCR. Feuerherd highlights two articles, one from 2000 by Paul Sullins, a Catholic University sociologist, who finds that in congregational positions “women clergy are over-represented in subordinate positions and those having lower status.” This is not true in administrative roles, which reminds me of Pope Francis’s appointment of four women to top jobs in the Synod of Bishops (The Tablet, 5/24/19). Sullins studied Episcopalians and Presbyterians, denominations with long enough histories of ordaining women to have expected women’s status to be more equal to men’s. He determines that the culture of congregations is like that of families, and resistant to changing gender roles, despite the official policy of the denomination. I have not researched any more studies to follow this up, and I wonder if this is still true.

The other article Feuerherd highlights is a 1993 study by three sociologists from American University: Rita J. Simon, Pamela S. Nadell, and Angela J. Scanlan. The most interesting aspect of their study to me is what they found out about the motivations of each group.

When asked about why they decided to enter their present careers, the ministers frequently spoke of being “called” to the ministry, a term absent in the rabbis’ responses. … A few said that they believe they first received the call as children; others felt called as adults, but said they could look back and interpret earlier events as calls. Most often, these women said that the call came gradually and subtly.

We place so much emphasis on calls! The rabbis emphasize “the status and power the role conferred.” Often, they moved from other roles, realizing that they would be more effective leaders in the Jewish community, a kind of credentialing. When asked “to look 10 years into the future,” the ministers felt that some of the stereotypical gendered behavior they had observed would be lessened; the rabbis believed “women will be more likely to forge their own role definition of how a rabbi should relate to and interact with her congregants, one male rabbis will not emulate.” RCWP and all you other ordained women out there: are you more like the rabbis?

Feuerherd was researching the date of the first rabbi’s ordination, by the way, and these articles came up.

I have less tolerance for America’s publishing Avery Dulles’s essay, “Gender and the Priesthood: Examining the Teaching”, to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, the papal document forbidding discussion of the ordination of women. The introduction to his 1996 talk in Origins summarizes:  

[Dulles] recommended that “the pastoral leadership of the church, recognizing the complexity of the theological issues and the inevitability of dissenting views, should be patient with Catholics who feel unable to accept the approved position. While assuring the integrity of Catholic doctrine, the bishops should show understanding for dissenters who exhibit good will and avoid disruptive behavior.” Dulles said that on this teaching “the pope and the cardinal have not called for an act of divine or theological faith but simply for a firm assent. But inasmuch as this assent is to be given to a teaching contained in the deposit of faith, it seems hardly distinguishable from an act of faith. The ‘de fide’ status of the doctrine, however, has not been so clearly taught that one may accuse those who fail to accept it of heresy.”

Despite how patronizing this is, Dulles, a Jesuit, is trying to move the discussion away from the question asked at the time: Is this teaching infallible? So we in WOC are not heretics! Just you wait, Henry Higgins, for the disruptive ordinations! The essay is an examination of the objections to John Paul II’s letter, with explanations of the church teaching in response.

Maybe America thought it a good idea to resurrect this because it does note that the deacon question is not quite as clear. It can be a good review of the official position if you have the blood pressure for it.