I’m Buying a Sports Car!

What is going on at Commonweal? I am so shocked by Adam Fleming Petty’s introduction to a book review that I am inspired to violate the gender norms of “the nineties,” though of which century I am not sure. Was it really true that “A man undergoing a midlife crisis buys a sports car” in the twentieth? Or that “Perhaps this hypothetical woman doesn’t buy anything; perhaps, like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, she engages in an affair, the love of a younger man rekindling her own youthful spirit.” As Petty says, “very nineteenth century.”  How cute to be retro! But why re-inscribe such rigid notions of male and female distinctiveness at all?

I am even more shocked by Paul Baumann’s “The Standoff Over Women’s Ordination. Is equality compatible with hierarchy?” How interesting that a substantive article in a well-respected secular publication signifies a “standoff.”

Baumann is Commonweal’s former editor and now senior writer. In his first paragraph, after complementing New Yorker staff writer Margaret Talbot as “a scrupulous and fair-minded journalist,” he pontificates that “the most fervent of these women have found a home in ad-hoc denominations after being excommunicated because of their illicit ordinations.”

It’s downhill after that, if possible. Baumann grudgingly presents the same old arguments, recognizing their “somewhat crude understanding of how symbols work.” He’s invested in the more theological “nuptial mystery.” Because Christ is male, the Church, his spouse, must be female, and the priest, who acts in the place of Christ, must therefore be male. When I heard this many years ago from seminarians, I thought it a fantasy verging on porn. No mystery about it. No sexist elaboration necessary. People of all genders are made in the image and likeness of God.

There is nevertheless something extremely jarring in Baumann’s edited quotation: “there is nevertheless something jarring about their conviction that the Church exists to ‘meet [their] needs’ and will ‘fall into irrelevance’ if it does not.” It’s not about their individual needs. As Talbot says: “barring people from Holy Orders because they aren’t biological males enforces misogynist values that have harmed both women and the faith.”

Is there anything more individualistic than misogyny? Contrast that with the “glorious freedom of the children of God” in the openness of the early church communities with egalitarian leadership structures.

It’s a bit unfair for Baumann to rely so heavily on an article anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote for Commonweal in 1996. She can’t defend herself, and who knows if she might have modified her ideas. I’ve only read her How Institutions Think, so with that focus she might not have. Both her family of origin and her own family were enmeshed in the British colonial bureaucracy and research apparatus. I know from BritBox on TV that in that system, colonials, mostly of color, constantly agitate for institutional change and that it does not happen easily. Why should she, a devout Catholic, expect anything else in the church?

Except that she was a devout Catholic, and that in that article she recognized that “the role of women in the church is inadequate…It is a male-dominated institution, and was so even in the heyday of powerful Mother Abbesses.” She goes on to say that feminists could play down or play up the significance of gender, and that the latter is her own inclination, “But this is a long shot,” so better to not “generate hostility” and instead “run with the nuptial mystery.” This suggests to me that she might be much more inclined to favor women’s ordination if circumstances had changed. And they have – see Talbot on WOC and German theology as well as your own activism and beliefs.  

Everything Baumann quotes Douglas saying, she says, including many examples of complementarity in societies around the world. She’s an anthropologist, after all, not a theologian or an historian. I’ll quote what Baumann does not: “The scholars at the Vatican see an element of betrayal in going back on what has been decided by their deceased predecessors. Any community has a certain way of perceiving its own historic identity.” He picks her up at “Telling its members to forget their common past and make new myths of present reality is the same as telling them to get lost, die off, and disappear.” Does Baumann conclude with this because he fears irrelevance? Those frightening women! He finds standoff, and I find tremendous change. In 1996 could we have imagined the validation that this New Yorker article signifies?

When I have despaired before about Commonweal and women, I have remembered Mollie Wilson O’Reilly. She began there in 2008 when Baumann was editor, as editor-at-large and columnist, a big title for quarterly contributions. The earliest article I found by her was in 2009, on altar girls. Her most recent is early this year on the ministries of acolyte and lector being opened to women. She goes far beyond the predictable responses to examine the history of these ministries since Vatican II: “Establishing and protecting men’s authority and privileges has been the Vatican’s consistent framework for defining women’s roles in liturgy going at least as far back as Liturgicae instaurationes.” No women altar servers, and “If you can imagine thinking it would be better to keep the Scriptures outside the sanctuary than to let women in, congratulations, you are thinking like Rome circa 1970.”And thinking like Rome in 2021? Bishops “can allow women to serve. It stops short, even now, of telling them they should.” O’Reilly deplores how limited it is that “an acknowledgment that ‘doctrinal development’ now makes it possible to recognize women as people” is all we get.

Commonweal is proud of its history as a lay publication. How far is it from thinking like Rome? Affirming gender binaries in two articles at the same moment does not suggest very far at all. Anthropologists always study myths. Instead of Douglas, you might consult the videos that present eight myths about women’s ordination on the WOC website. Kind of like the seven deadly sins, but different. Baumann has not invoked all of them; you might start with #8, “Christ is the bridegroom of the Church, his bride, so priests must be men because the Church is a bride,” the nuptial mystery. Or you may prefer the text-based format of “The Resource for a Renewed Church,” which includes the succinct “Why Ordain Women?” I’m afraid I cannot rehearse again the arguments against the “foundations” of the church that Baumann clings to, or go into his elisions of facts that do not support his arguments. I’ll be too busy driving my sports car, having an affair, or reading, thinking and working for change in a misogynistic church.