Back to Ordination, Again

After a month of looking at issues of oppression that we can use our priesthood to address, I am delighted to find important articles on ordination. 

In La Croix International, George Wilson presents a deceptively simple analysis of the situation. He begins slowly: it’s a “policy” to exclude a “class” of people based on “gender.” But then he warns us “Trying to find past examples of women being ordained might actually mean unwittingly accepting this implicit premise: the proof that the Church has the power to ordain women is dependent on the demonstration that it has done so in the past…They may have conceded that a pastoral response suited to the church of the 3rd century must be determinative for its response in the radically different world of the 21st century.”

Of course, I agree, even though I am steeped in history. So is Phyllis Zagano. In the same publication, even this advocate of ordination to the diaconate moves away from historical determinism to describe how both Eastern and Western churches are now implementing roles for women that could be considered diaconal in her talk at the American Academy of Religion.  

Wilson does emphasize how long it takes for “upheavals in human understanding…to be lifted into consciousness, appreciated, and translated into operational policy” in the church. The upheavals we are living through now are “the push for racial equality on the one hand, and the women’s movement on the other.” In regard to the former, “it took more than 20 years after Emancipation for the Church in America to do the unthinkable and ordain an ex-slave, Fr. Augustus Tolton, in 1886.”

Then Wilson moves to women’s ordination and the Scriptural example we all use, “no longer male or female.” He places it in the “policy” framework that he developed before:

“It would seem that the policy that excludes women from even being considered for priestly ordination on the basis of gender alone represents a breakdown in the process of achieving the equality mentioned in Galatians. Women were surely not excluded from the New Testament understanding of a ‘priestly people.’”

He goes on to relocate the burden of proof: 

“Given the fact that…

(1) the deposit of faith says nothing about who is eligible for priestly ordination;

(2) cultural assumptions about women and their human capabilities have changed so dramatically and irrevocably over the past hundred years; and

(3) the lay faithful in so many countries are calling for such a change…

“It would seem that the burden of proof for maintaining or continuing the present discipline now lies, not with those who are calling for this new recognition of women’s equality, but with those who deny its possibility.”

Ines St. Martin in Crux reminds us of one such, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, who seems to want to be Pope. Recently he said at a press conference after the Latin American Synod “there are ‘no conclusions that open this door.’” Wilson might place this among the “historically comic errors” he documents, including the classic “bride of Christ” problem, about which he says, “The mystics were focused on symbols that touch a deeper level of the spirit than the structuring of organizational roles in the Church.” Again, of course. 

In looking at my files, I found a 2016 article by Natalia Imperatori-Lee that might be a graduate course to expand on Wilson’s Women’s Ordination 101. She’s quoting the man who actually is Pope – Francis – and Hans Urs von Balthasar, a theologian whose writing formed the basis of “the gendered language [Francis] uses to describe the church as a masculine/feminine complementary reality, where Mary and Jesus, or Mary and Peter, correspond to separate dimensions of the church.” I have written about this article before, and I urge you to link to it again, because Imperatori-Lee presents the consequences for the whole church, not just women, of this kind of thinking. It “means that the role of the laity is obedience and receptivity,” and she asks, “Does this fit with the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council, which says in ‘Lumen Gentium’ that the whole people of God are called to minister in the church?” She uses contemporary understandings of sexual biology, the complexity of human relationships, and gender stereotypes to argue that this way of thinking sends “a message about the people of God that truncates our imaginations and limits our possibilities for full human flourishing.”

I will now mention that Wilson’s article begins:

“The very credibility of the synodal process Pope Francis wants to make constituent of the Church’s life depends on how we face the issue of women in the Church.”

He calls this an “anodyne,” “1. serving to alleviate pain” or “2 : not likely to offend or arouse tensions,” according to Merriam-Webster. Does that sound like women’s ordination? Yet despite the emotions it arouses, he is making it central to the Synod’s credibility.  You can’t read an article about the synod that doesn’t discuss how open it will really be, such as Sarah McDonald’s in The Tablet. 

Yet you know I follow with great hope the under-secretary at the Synod of Bishops office in Rome, Nathalie Becquart. This week, she’s writing the preface to a new book in Italian that details the stories of eleven religious women abused by priests or their superiors, also noted in The Tablet. Becquart writes, “The Church as a whole is called upon to come to terms with the weight of a culture steeped in clericalism, which it inherited from its history, and of forms of exercising authority on which are grafted the different types of abuse – of power, economics, conscience, sexual.” The book doesn’t sugarcoat the consequences; many of the abused women have left their orders. Of course, Becquart sees the Synod as providing a new way of operating.

Joan Chittister in NCR calls us to a new-old way of operating as she reviews the Beatitude that could be the theme of this blog: “Happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” and in her Chittister way, concludes “for they shall boil over.” Just like many bubbles come together to make the pot boil, she calls on us to act together to make change. She finds hope in a German sister who, “on a live podcast,” calls out “for the church, the Vatican, and the pope to begin to recognize the equality of women as well as end the violence against women everywhere.” She finds hope in “a Catholic family in Baltimore who protested when their teenage daughter was made by the local priest to change her LGBT pride shirt — in public — at the Catholic school she attends,” as did “the girls’ teenage friends and large numbers of other parishioners.”

We owe it to our Galatian priesthood to boil over about women’s ordination, however we interact with the Synod process. “Happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”