Women and America, the Jesuit Review

The October issue of America is finally out: “Women in the Life of the Church.” Many of the articles are online already, but the overall impact surprises me because of one very strong article. 

Jesuit editor Matt Malone’s writings about women always leave me lukewarm. His note in this issue says boldly: “we should always heed the words of the Lord and ‘be not afraid’ to talk about challenging questions and how they affect our faith lives. So we have decided in the present issue to begin a conversation about the topic of ordination and gender.” BEGIN! Not even in America. After all, included in this issue is a summary of a 1996 article by prominent female Catholic philosopher, Mary-Angela Harper, arguing against women’s ordination and a few favorable letters in response to it. 

Then this week I read that Malone has announced that he is leaving in a year. Even NCR’s Michael Sean Winters wonders “This is a surprise for most of us, and it will be interesting to see what the journal does now. Will the next editor be a Jesuit or will they reach into the ranks of the laity?” 

The chair of the America Media board is a woman, Susan S. Braddock, so I guess all things are possible with God. In his note Malone quotes “Kerry Weber, our talented executive editor,” who, in introducing a 2013 issue on women, wrote “in trying to focus attention on or divert attention from this ‘closed’ topic, Catholics have frequently sidelined many other issues of importance.” Issues like “the many ways women do or could contribute to the church now without being ordained,” Malone summarizes. Oh, that WAS new then.

 One side of the current conversation is delegated to the late Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, whose 1996 analysis Malone judges to be “the best presentation of the magisterium’s teaching that has ever been produced in English.” If you haven’t read it, please do. It’s very disputatious. “Two distinguished theologians” were invited to offer their responses, a set up if there ever was one. Malone concludes, “At the end of the day, even the most settled teachings of the church must still be received and appropriated by the faithful if those teachings are to be a true leaven for communion and evangelization. One primary way that happens is through conversation.” Lukewarm.

Lucetta Scaraffia is the first of those theologians and also a journalist in Rome. Her article suggests the limits of the set up. At the end, she explains the legitimacy of appointing women to the College of Cardinals, but at the beginning, she deduces from Scripture “that Jesus wants to point women and men to missions of different kinds, but equal value.” In the middle, Scaraffia reviews how the church has devalued women, especially women in religious orders, but also parish women and women journalists. It’s worth reading for her reevaluation of the way this effect is the consequence of women’s exclusion from the priesthood, and her argument for women cardinals. 

Julia Brumbaugh is the other theologian and a professor at Regis University in Denver. Her article is even more worth reading because it is beautiful and inspiring, though more difficult. Brumbaugh acknowledges Dulles without accepting his premises as she argues that “sexism has been entangled in the practice of ordination in ways that may have distorted it.” Again and again, she draws different conclusions: “While at the surface the question about women’s ordination has been asked and answered, rarely has it been asked in this new context where women’s full human dignity is unreservedly affirmed and defended.” 

The most disputatious Brumbaugh gets is to go back to a presentation Dulles made in 1976, in which he said:

It has become evident that those in positions of ecclesiastical power are naturally predisposed to accept ideas favorable to their own class interests. Popes and bishops, therefore, are inclined to speak in a way that enhances the authority of their office. The alert reader will take this into account when he [sic: Bannan] interprets and evaluates official documents. 

Brumbaugh explains the differing roles of theologians and bishops, beginning with Dulles but going beyond:

To engage this dialogue between the magisterium of the church’s pastors and that of the church’s theologians is the work of the whole church, living in the power of the Holy Spirit. That Spirit is not received exclusively through the formal and institutional structures of the hierarchy but is given to the whole church and to each of the baptized. To affirm this reality requires an imagination that includes the Spirit working boldly within communities, arising in and transforming the hearts of ordinary people of faith and blowing throughout the whole world. This Spirit opens our hearts to ever greater and wider love, reveals our failures (past and present), makes possible true repentance and opens the way to a future yet to be realized. The Spirit and the Word co-create the church. 

See what I mean about her writing? Brumbaugh is not sloganeering, but leading us to the deeper truth of our own experience. 

Brumbaugh also does the best examination I have ever read of the METAPHOR of the bride and bridegroom because she examines the many scriptural and monastic sources that also use that metaphor: “It does not mean that God is a man and human beings are all women, and it does not mean that women and men have separate natures (whereas God and human beings do).” YES. 

While Brumbaugh’s conclusion calls for more theological work and not ordination per se, I think that’s because of the editorial set up. It still brings tears to my eyes:

Christ, through the Holy Spirit, is in this moment healing our broken hearts and accompanying us as we struggle to undo the legacies of sexism (among the many other evils we must resist). For theology and practice of ordination and ministry to be credible, then the work Dulles endeavored to do—to understand more deeply the mystery of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist—must continue. But that work must illustrate at every turn the full humanity of every person. Arguments that fail to interrogate the ways the Christian tradition has been distorted by sin or that rely on images that reinforce women’s subordination are inadequate to the evangelical work to which we are all called.