Back to Gender

Will the powers that be pay attention to Daniel Horan’s column this week in NCR?  The sentences that make me most want to cheer are these: “it is demonstrably clear that those who invoke ‘gender ideology’ generally don’t know what they are talking about. Such folks would do well to listen to leading scholars on the subjects of sex and gender, like Judith Butler of University of California, Berkeley.”

Having struggled with Butler myself, I appreciate this link. In it Butler gives brief chronologies of the use of the term “gender ideology” in Vatican circles and the development of the concept of “gender” as distinct from “sex” from Simone de Beauvoir on. But mostly she argues for a complex understanding of all these concepts to free people from the “medical, familial, and legal authorities” that assign sex now. Rather, she presents strong arguments for the freedom to choose bodily expression in many areas – which sets her on a collision course with Pope Francis.

Both Horan and Butler bring together Catholic teaching and the “world of gender diversity and sexual complexity,” as Butler phrases it, and find Francis’s teaching lacking “in inflammatory and consequential ways,” again from Butler. She focuses on what the new understandings about gender do for living authentically.

Horan is more focused what the church doesn’t do. “The real problematic ideology at work today is the uncritical promotion of 13th century pseudo-science and ancient philosophical theories that, while interesting and influential, are no longer sufficient to account for important developments in human knowledge and experience since the Middle Ages.” He is especially critical of church leaders who express pastoral concern for LGBTQ people and yet condemn a whole community.

As you might expect, LGBTQ issues run through both articles, but I want to suggest that the offhand and uninformed condemnation of new understandings of gender harm women in the church as well. Is that so obvious that it does not bear repeating? Think complementarity.

Rather, I want to move to my formerly favorite member of the new commission on deacons, Anne-Marie Pelletier. Celine Hoyeau, who writes from France for Le Croix International, has an exclusive interview with her this week.

About Anne Soupa, the theologian who has volunteered herself to be bishop of Lyon, Pelletier first says that’s not done that way, but then says that because of deadlock, “It is as though provocation is the only way forward.” Well, provocation is what we do: the ministry of irritation.

About governance, Pelletier supports more authority for lay bodies, and women in the College of Cardinals. I find this especially strong: “The truth that needs to be heard is that ministerial priesthood cannot be the sole authority to decide on the life and governance of the Church.” She is in a position to spread that understanding.

Yet about deacons, the area in which she has an appointed but advisory role, Pelletier takes both sides. She asks, [1]“Is it a static reality, as such a normative one, that we can only repeat? [2]Or are we not being asked for a work of creativity, of aggiornamento (updating), as Father Congar taught? [1] In the same way, we will certainly have to uphold the present Church, [2]while starting afresh from the needs of the Christian communities, and taking into account the lived realities.” It’s hard to do a live interview; maybe she is still figuring it out.

Pelletier does seem to see herself as representing women. She reports hearing from those who want expanded roles. She recognizes the need for ministry, especially in the Amazon. She’s willing for women to administer the sacraments of baptism and marriage, and to bring grace by confession without absolution. I am assuming she means in underserved areas.

Finally, Pelletier is is able to acknowledge that “anthropology” is related to “the relationship between men and women [which is] being questioned everywhere, and in a way that we should welcome. It must obviously also concern the Church.” But she pivots immediately to “This is an opportunity for the Church to engage in a real work of evangelical conversion,” and then back to something new: “It is an opportunity to find a true inner balance by having the courage to imagine the Church in a different way.”

Does she mean that the church has to change the world’s experience? Or that the church will change itself? See Horan and Butler, please. Complexity does not mean having it both ways.