STATEMENT
OF THE HOLY SEE DELEGATION
TO
THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL
ON
GENDER EQUALITY AND EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN
STATEMENT
BY H.E. MSGR. CELESTINO MIGLIORE
APOSTOLIC
NUNCIO
New York
Thursday, 1 July 2010
This year’s substantive session is
particularly pertinent leading up to
the long expected World Summit on
the Millennium Development Goals. All women and girls who are affected by the
MDGs look forward towards an increased recognition of
their value and equality as well as
their dignified role in development.
Any deliberation on the matter will
be incomplete without ensuring the
advancement of women, who are
dynamic agents of development in the family,
society and the world.
Ever since world leaders committed
their governments to the ambitious
objective of attaining the MDGs,
some remarkable progress has been
achieved in mainstreaming women’s
perspectives in development both in
multilateral and national policies.
Even those countries lagging behind in
many aspects of development are
giving more prominence to the role of
women in public life, especially in
the political arena.
The empowerment of women
presupposes universal human dignity and, thus,
the dignity of each and every
individual.
The Spiritual
Empowerment of All Presupposes a Christ Led Life: The Refutation of Aristotelian
Anthropology
When I first began my art training in
the early 1960’s, one of the first slides -- PowerPoint did not exist back then -- we were
shown in the required art history class was the famous ‘fertility’ figure, Venus
of Willendorf from 25,000 BCE.[i] The professor told us that art history began
with this figure, yes, that art history began with a small statue of a woman
not a man. If all of art history began with the tiny effigy of a woman, who was
she? Even with recent archeological
information, this eternal muse remains a mystery. We do not know if she was a queen,
a fertility figure as was once believed or simply a funerary object. All we know is that she is female. I never
reflected on it from a gendered or theological perspective back then, but love
of this small four and a half inch form has stayed with me. I somehow knew she was significant, but as an
eighteen year old, I was too young then to fully grasp her meaning. The tradition of art history in its reverence
for the past in the present, aligns beautifully with the traditions of all
religions – looking at the past in order to draw lessons for the present and
future and create a foundation and continuity of human ‘being’. Surprisingly,
she has recently resurfaced in many of the theological books written today
exploring our religious history as an important example of our supposed goddess
tradition that pre-dates all other known religious traditions. The unknown mystery of her actual history is
much like the subject of women’s ordination in the Catholic Church; there is
much discussion on both sides, many unknowns and many ways to interpret the
data that argues for or against it.
In searching for answers to the
questions of whether women can or are called to priestly leadership roles in
the Church, we can continue the dialogue and pull a sense of the human voyage
to God through them that can only enrich our Catholic tradition, and establish
a better sense of what it means to be Catholic today as a woman, but also as a
man. Theological studies today that are
responsible will be able to look back behind our tradition to retrieve a
pre-historic spiritual tradition that has been missing from the picture. Doing this can reconnect us through a new
continuity that is a part of human history.
It can answer questions as to where we have been and how we have arrived
at where we are now in the debate about women’s roles in the Church going
forward. From the earliest times in our
Church, the anthropology of women has been defined by men, from Aristotle to
Augustine to Chrysostom to Aquinas and more, as being deficient and below that
of the male sex. These constructs have
pervaded our thinking up to modern times.
What we retrieve from ancient pre-history can inform and reflect a truth
that has been ignored because it was not thought to be relevant. What I want to explore here through a
retrieval of the Goddess, as a correction as to how women have been burdened by
a distorted world view about being ‘less-than’, or subordinate to the male half
of humanity because of a selected agenda to do so whether intentional or not.
I
want to present a short evolution about how humanity went from a matricentric,
or egalitarian culture as explained by the modern Lithuanian archeologist,
Marija Gimbutas, who taught at Harvard and UCLA, to the rise of patriarchy that
has been fueled by the Church from the earliest days through to a retrieval,
refutation, and correction by feminist theologians, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elizabeth
Johnson, and male theologians, John Foley SJ and Bishop Kenneth Untener, among
others, to a new paradigm of equal anthropology to the understanding of who we
are as Church now in a contemporary context.
The texts that are relevant to this argument are: Genesis 2:21-22,
Augustine’s On the Good of Marriage
and Commentary on Genesis from
Elizabeth Clark’s book, Women in the
Early Church, Gary Macy’s book, The
Hidden History of Women’s Ordination and that of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, Jean
Markale, Courtly Love, John Foley’s Creativity and the Roots of Liturgy and
Bishop Untener’s essay in The Practical
Prophet. I will trace various anthropological
ideas about women that are still unclear as we uncover a history that has
primarily been written by males from an androcentric worldview. We are still writing and exposing the
historical archeological and anthropological record. What I write addresses
where we are today in our reflection and research. I want to present an examination of the question,
not of whether women are capable of being priests, but a reply to the question
as to what that role of ordained women or a married priesthood might look like
if the Church found a way and a means to bring these into reality. What would
that look like based on the ancient evidence with hope that change can and must
happen if our Church is to survive. Eva Figes so aptly comments, ‘The church
may be dying on its feet, but it will cling to the last to the male
exclusiveness which was [is] its raison
d’être in the first place.’[ii]
When more people understand the dynamics
of male domination, then change can happen. Continually writing and reading about what is
going on in our church can perhaps instrument change in small ways from both
the outside and the inside. Those fearful
of any change will fight to maintain the status
quo, but the more a status of equals is modeled, then the old ways will
drop away replaced out of practical necessity of how men and women understand
each other.
Our
Goddess Tradition
As I stated at the beginning of this
paper, there was an apparent reverence for the female as evidenced by the
number of artifacts that remain of female figures from pre-history. We have an archeological record about many of
these cultures in Central Europe through the meticulous and ground-breaking
work of Marija Gimbutas, who made this her life’s work to study and collect the
artifacts, many of which are female.
Many of her suppositions about a peace-loving egalitarian society that
existed for thousands of years before Christianity and was eventually overrun
by a violent male society of invaders from the Russian steppes are suspect, but
what she has given us is the existence of a culture that revered the female in
some way and had female leaders.
In Ruether’s book, she “seeks to sort
out that piece of history that connects ancient Near Eastern societies, as they
arose from their Neolithic roots, with the contemporary Western feminists’
efforts to reevaluate how they are linked to those roots today.”[iii] Examining the current existing record of
women’s ancient past can create a firm foundation on which to empower women
about their own part in history and its importance. Ruether asks us to be careful in making any
biased feminist assumptions about the ancient historical record and cites the
many problematic conclusions in the work of Marija Gimbutas. She states, “Several archeologists who have
worked in some of the same areas as Gimbutas question her interpretation …Ruth
Tringham, for example believes that Gimbutas has ignored evidence of
fortification, inequality [between male and female roles], and human sacrifice
in earlier sites in order to fit her thesis. Gimbutas’ thesis that peaceful
goddess-worshipping, matriarchal societies experienced waves of invasion from
one area by patriarchal militarists with a completely different culture is not
history.”[iv] Ruether points out here that there was not
just a monolithic invasion from one people spreading over a wide area of
Central Europe, but more of intermittent periods of peace and growth and, then
invasions by those who would wish to take over the wealthier, more prosperous
communities by force or eventual forced assimilation. If indeed these more prosperous and peaceful
communities were led by women, then for a nomad-like tribe or group who were
not settled might find them alluring to conquer for many reasons -- food, housing, and rape or concubinage of
women. These invading forces might see
these prosperous communities as a means to a wealthier or more stable life that
might have been easy for them to conquer and then assimilate into. These prosperous communities if led by women
are an attestation to their ability to organize and develop a community that
enriched itself under female tutelage and grew.
However, I would argue that if Gimbutas
had not strongly presented her assumptions in a plethora of books on the
subject and brought these often one-sided assumptions to the surface, as many
men have done, then, perhaps the work would have been marginalized and never
looked at in a more serious way. Ruether
in her critiques obviously feels strongly about these assumptions right or
wrong and by refuting them pushes the envelope further for continued archeological
research by women that is necessary to find a more plausible answer to the
existing record of artifacts, both female and male. She does admit in her conclusion, however,
“There once was a culture, possibly worldwide, for most of human history, until
the last few thousand years—in which a matricentric, not matriarchal, society
flourished. Humans were in harmony with
one another and nature, thus a female-personified deity [Venus of Willendorf?]
expressed the immanent life energy that cycled through the earth as one
community.”[v] She does not deny that a Goddess cult
existed; however, it was perhaps structured differently, and not as
monolithically as Gimbutas states. It
appears that the existence of a matricentric community that Gimbutas insists
existed were female led where females and males worked in blissful harmony, but
the invasions were more in intermittent, successive waves rather than all at
one time from the Russian steppes and other northern climes.[vi]
Adele Getty explains in Goddess, Mother of Living Nature, that
the de-throning of the goddess was somewhat more complicated and these
invasions took place over thousands of years by Indo-Europeans, Aryans and
Kurgans, some of whom came from Russia, the Caucasus region and from northern
Denmark. They brought a father god of
light who flamed on a mountaintop and probably evolved out of volcanic
eruptions that destroyed all in his path.
He began to depose the goddess who then became transformed ‘from the
bountiful source of life into the enemy of the new God carrying with it a
perfidious implication: if the Goddess and her domain of moist darkness [seen
as the womb] were evil, then all womankind was also evil and guilty of
transgression by birth. The logical
conclusion of such thinking is most clearly revealed in the word of Yahweh’s
patriarchs. The role of the mother is
devalued and in its place the male’s reproductive power viewed as fertile
‘seed’, is blessed by God as if it were self-generating. The purity of the male
seed must be guaranteed through the virginity of the bride, so marriage as an
institution becomes the will of God, absolute submission to God’s will, and the
consequent acceptance of woman’s position as subservient to that of her husband
are obligations that come with the Lord’s covenant.’[vii] From this transgression of the female, we
move to further diminution of them in the Bible.
Genesis
and Augustine
“So the Lord God cast a deep sleep on
the man, and while he was asleep, he took out one of his ribs and closed up its
place with flesh. The Lord God then built up into a woman the rib that he had
taken from the man. When he brought her to the man, the man said, ‘This one, at last, is bone of my bones, and
flesh of my flesh, This one shall be called ‘woman’ for out of ‘her man‘this
one has been taken.”Gen. 2:21-23
The belief that the entire human race came out of man has been
perpetuated here in the Bible. The idea
that woman was ‘born’ from man is the great reversal of the truth that the
Goddess culture by the invaders from the steppes and the north knew that life
was nurtured in the body of women and came out of women, not men.
Augustine in On the Good of Marriage believed this to be a good thing because he
saw us as relational, but the underlying meaning was that the reason men and
women walk alongside each other is because women came out of the side of man. He saw ‘genuine relationship’ between a man
and woman as ‘one of them ruling and the other subject – even without sexual
intercourse.’[viii] He elaborates even more in Literal Commentary on Genesis, “If it is
necessary for one of two people living together to rule and the other to obey
so that an opposition of wills does not disturb their peaceful cohabitation,
then nothing is missing from the order we see in Genesis directed to this
restraint, for one person was created before, and the other afterwards, and
most significantly, the latter was created from the former, the woman from the
man.”[ix] Adele Getty claims this reversal of natural
birth to be womb-envy of the male.[x] Although I am in no way saying that this idea
is the same for all men, I wonder, if some males envied the life-producing
force in women in some way over the millennia of our existence and know full
well that although they have their part, they will never be able to give birth
in a true sense and this counter transference of their envy triggered the
reversal we see in the creation narrative of Genesis?
Medieval
Aristotelian Anthropology
We fast forward several centuries now
and take a look at the medieval church and how it dealt with women because
there was a monumental shift of power at this time from commonality in ministry
as a way of life to differentiation of a core group of privileged males to own
the ordos. In a general sense, the point of Gary Macy’s
writing is to explain in great detail and careful analysis the huge shift the
Church went through in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that stripped the
laity and women, as collateral damage, of all power of ecclesial ministry.[xi] Exclusion became the modus operandi at this time in history. Perhaps this happened as a necessary shift of
structure so more growth of the Church could be maintained and managed, but it
is this shift of power and organization that has made the Church what it is
today – more legalistic, hierarchical and exclusionary on a global scale. It is
at this point in history that the ‘maleness’ of Christ took hold, as Elizabeth
Johnson says, and became the focal point of the Church tossing aside
justice. She says, “If the equal human dignity
of women is ever recognized in ecclesial theory and praxis, this discussion
about the maleness of Christ [and God, I add] will fade away. In a more just church it would never have
become such an issue.”[xii]
Since the Middle Ages, the Church has
used Aristotle’s anthropology, especially as used by Thomas Aquinas to subjugate
especially women and laity in the name of Christ. Aquinas saw women as having a
deficit of reasoning ability needed to preside at Mass. This deficiency was the reason why women were
‘subject’ and ‘not in command’. Then
Aristotle goes on to say, “that corruption of government exists when government
falls to women.”[xiii] Women were not understood as complete human
beings by these men. These ideas about
women which began with Genesis 2, continued in the medieval ages and seems
amplified in its vitriol and analysis of women as human beings less than
human. It would seem that these writings
were ways for the men to distance themselves from women and denigrate them to
convince themselves that women were bad so they could escape and deny their own
primal urges so that they would not be tempted to break their vow of celibacy. Oftentimes what is most desired is that which
we criticize and debase in order to assuage the feelings that accompany the
desire.
Macy expounds on this in his conclusion,
“Women were considered as children or servants in canon law, subject to the
protection and correction of males. The
reception of Aristotle’s concept of women by medieval scholars was a conscious
effort of selection… The separation of men and women into separate spheres as a
well as the relegation of women to the laity, resulted in women being shunted
to the margins of the intellectual life of Western Europe. Women were in effect
considered to be monsters. Unnatural in
birth, incomplete in mind, and disgusting in their bodily functions, they were
clearly inferior to men.”[xiv] Because of their inherent authority that they
deemed came from God, it is apparent that they felt compelled to carry on the
continued description of women as the person who came out of Adam, made from
his rib – only a small part of his body and because of this thinking felt
justified in furthering the stance of ultimate authority that they felt
entitled to have and that was their birthright as males.
Notwithstanding the good that has come
out of the Church for so many that has been superbly healing. The idea of this
exposé; is an attempt to foster change in order to improve on the good already
extant. Retrieving some of the lost
values in the pre-twelfth and pre-thirteenth centuries is best explained by a
quote in Macy’s book taken from Edward Shillebeeckx’s book, Ministry: Leadership in the Community of
Jesus Christ:
“In
comparison with the ancient church, circumstances here have taken a
fundamentally different direction: a priest is ordained in order to be able to
celebrate the eucharist; in the ancient church it is said that he is ‘appointed’
as minister in order to be able to appear as leader to build up the community,
and for this reason he was also the obvious person to preside at the
Eucharist. This shift is of the utmost
importance: at all events, it is a narrower legalistic version of what the
early church believed.”[xv]
In addition, “Shillebeeckx work
confirmed the conclusion of earlier scholars that there was a fundamental and
significant change in the understanding of what constituted Christian ministry
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
He suggested that the cause…was the introduction of Roman law and hence
a more legalistic approach to ministry that caused …a change [that] occurred at
the conclusion of and partly as a result of the eleventh century reform
movement [Gregorian Reform].”[xvi] The Gregorian Reform solidified the position
of male power within the clergy ordo
and completely excluded women. This
reform started with an idea to clarify the roles of ministers in the church as
it grew, but over time has become a gross distortion that has caused a male
privileged sense of enormous psychological and spiritual abuse of women and
laity that was never intended at the outset.
The Church’s separation from the laity and retreat into a male-only
world that has not kept up with the times is evident from the changes
implemented to reverse many of the edicts passed in Vatican I by Vatican II. Today the Church is desperately trying to
catch up, but with the return to the medieval Roman Missal this year, how can
we not say that it now is once again retrenching itself in an historical,
nostalgic past that really does not exist? Does the Church have a right to be
anachronistic in this way?
Retrieving
the past can be good
As Macy’s book says, there are two overlapping
stories emerging here; the historical and the theological.[xvii]
Although the historical record is clear that
women were in leadership roles in some fashion in the Church before the shift
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we need to look at this information
much more closely and determine if a redefinition of ordination is possible. I reason here that if a redefinition of the
roles of ordained ministry could be changed and redefined during the Middle
Ages away from the simpler and more fluid roles before the Gregorian Reform;
then can they be changed again to re-include women and married clergy in a new
age and understanding of our Church and its roles of called ministry. We all know that systems evolve and adapt as
new information is presented and our Church is no exception. The growth in the Church could not have
happened it if was not flexible enough to adapt to societal and technological
changes that are also part of God’s plan for humanity. The bottom line here is that women were
leaders in the Church in communities in some way, shape and form, albeit not in
the complex detail as ratified during the reform that instituted a separation
of male, female and lay roles in the Church, but as those individuals who most
fit in line with the call from Jesus to inspire their communities in faith. It also has been demonstrated in this paper
that women were leaders once in the ancient, per-historical Goddess
cultures. Women had power then and they will
continue to demonstrate leadership qualities now. We can reshape the ideas of what has been
going in the last two thousand years that needs both a new historical and
theological lens in which to redefine and correct the errors of the past both
in society and in faith. When we
retrieve our equality we can contribute a better quality to everything we do
because mutual respect will be the refound grace that will carry us into the
future.
With the implementation of the Gregorian
Reform in the High Middle Ages, women who had heretofore had leadership roles
in the Church were now sidelined as the reform sought to clarify and separate
lay from the clergy.[xviii] The idea of celibacy and continence existed
during this time among even the married clergy and could have been an impetus
to once and for all create a clean break away from the lay world. Jean Markale, however, suggests that the
implementation of the Gregorian Reform was not as absolute as one might think.
He says, in Courtly Love, “Finally in
1073, Gregory VII, solemnly declared that any sexual activity was incompatible
with the religious life. This scarcely
prevented the clergy from practicing concubinage over a long period of time,
including the bishops and the princes of the Church as well as the more modest
religious servants of the parishes. It
even reached a point where parishioners preferred their priest to have a
concubine than to be living alone: the thinking was that the priest would thus
not seek to seduce the women of others.
This is a good indication of a certain kind of mentality, as well as a
great deal of license in social custom.” [xix] The role played by social custom is frequently
glossed over in many theological books that express that once the edicts were
written and passed everyone stopped what they had previously been doing and started
to immediately obey the new ruling. We
must keep this in mind when we read as changes dictated in 1073 were not
communicated swiftly, nor implemented uniformly, if not entirely ignored. There was great local diversity in how the
decrees were implemented. Some,
obviously, took more licenses with bending the rules or interpreted them in a
different ways than others. Life is
messy and because a papal decree has been enacted it would stand to reason that
its implementation would not always be a smooth transition from previous
actions to new ones. Forty-five years
later, we are still experiencing the implementation of what was set out in
Vatican II which ended in 1965. Perhaps
the idea of celibacy is better lived out by some, but then the abuse scandals
have nullified much of one’s belief in a celibate clergy. From this viewpoint, it just does not seem to
be working. Repressed sexuality, whether
hetero- or homosexual, will find expression, indeed, needs to find expression
somewhere and somehow. Therefore, I
propose that this needs to be examined more closely with councils which include
both female and lay input. If sexual
expression is suppressed then emotions are suppressed and sometimes a darker
side will manifest. The medieval misogyny
based on the Biblical anthropology of the time can be an outward expression of
the frustration of dealing with no outlet for sexual connection and affection.
Reappropriation
Feminist theologians can make a stand by
pulling out from the histories of our traditions the constant appropriation of
feminine and female images to be utilized to express the various aspects of
maleness. In fact, I would begin to examine
how we might explore and research where the idea of maleness might emerge
within the female story as a counterbalance to this utilization and maleization
of the female in our religious history. We
must begin to pinpoint where the male appropriation of the female has taken
place and deconstruct the male construct, reappropriating it for the female or
at least in a more balanced egalitarian respect for both genders. How do we interpret this for ourselves? How would we, for instance, see our Church as
the early medieval female mystics, such as Hildegard von Bingen and Judith of
Norwich, saw themselves in a Christocentric light? Their stories barely make
mention of Mary. Indeed, Elizabeth Johnson in her article, The Maleness of Christ, reclaims Imago Christi in the sense that it was meant precisely for our
baptismal [we-are-a-priestly-people] heritage and tradition from Paul as we are
all ‘clothed in Christ’(Gal. 3:27-28).[xx]
If we are the embodiment of Christ at our baptism without regard to gender and are
called to be priests by the very nature of it, then how can the contradiction
exist that women are said to be something other than the same image as men? She goes on to conclude that we need to do
away with a ‘dualistic anthropology’ for one that is inclusive,[xxi]
indeed Christo-inclusive. I ask which
seems to me a fairly obvious question, when the Vatican talks in its encyclicals,
they often make reference to ‘the people’ of God; i.e. -- “Marriage based on
exclusive and definitive love becomes the icon of the relationship between God
and his people and vice versa.”[xxii]
– who is included in this collective noun ‘people’? Are not all women and men included equally in
God’s love without differentiation? When the Vatican refers to humankind or human
being are they not referring equally to men and women with no gender bias?
John Foley states, in Creativity and the Roots of Liturgy that
“even though the journey and implantation of a sperm is dramatic and
interesting, it is not the most significant fact about conception. The union is.
Everything about [conception] leads to the union. When chromosomes combine, they are not doer
and receiver—the popular stereotype of man and woman – but complete equals.
Each has a full half of what is needed.
In combination, they now become a whole…when sperm and egg unite two different and differentiated beings
unite as one to become three.[xxiii]
Could this not be more Trinitarian in concept? Could this be said any more
beautifully? I think not. All of us are, biologically, a product of an
equal amount of maleness and femaleness; twenty-six male and twenty-six female
chromosomes. It’s all there in the DNA. It exists in nature and, therefore, how could
it be otherwise theologically as God made us this way. Christ himself was humanly and divinely half
and half, if we must give God a male gender.
So for women to be ‘less’ than what they are, is a lie and for men to
think that they are ‘more’ than what they are, is the second lie. So, in essence, we all need to begin to
believe and admit the truth about equality, but more than that we need to start
acting and living that truth for anything to change. Who is a man to say that my sense and
feeling, of acting Christlike is different than his own sense? How can he know my sense; for that matter,
how can I know his? Mutual respect is
allowing the other to have their image of Christ, to be their own imago Christi. If we are all imago Dei; how can we all not be imago Christi? We all
deserve and are fully both.
In personae aequum-broader horizons
The argument of imago Christi leads to another argument about the meaning of in persona Christi. A little-known
article explains the idea of in persona
Christi. It was written in 1991 by
Bishop Kenneth E. Untener and appears in The
Practical Prophet: Pastoral Writings. It
demonstrates how an idea can be manipulated even in a theological sense. Take the word persona: the Latin Oxford dictionary defines it as personage, mask,
character, or part. It does not say the
meaning is ‘person’, but facsimiles of a person; which I understand to mean ‘as
in the image of’ not ‘in the person of’; therefore, the priest, according to
this definition in not in the ‘person’ of Christ, but a sort of facsimile, an
imitative copy. Theologically speaking,
if the meaning is said to be in the ‘person’ of Christ, then that meaning is
stretched from the dictionary one. Bishop
Untener goes on further to explain, however, that the meaning itself from the
Greek, en pro opo Chris tou—in the
presence of Christ -- is a mistake made by St. Jerome in translating 2
Corinthians 2:10. If this is true, then
is this a valid construct to use today as an excuse for a reason not to ordain
women? If this is a non-infallible
definition, which it appears to be; then it cannot be used as an argument
against women’s own ability to also be in
persona Christi. I would hope that
what counts in this deep idea of Christ and God is not the surface, outside
appearance or resemblance based on gender; but a holy, contemplative inner
spirituality of who is serving at the table of the Eucharist and the entire
Mass. Bishop Untener calls this
instrumental causality. The meaning is stretched by the Magisterium to say that
their authority on this is the only one that counts. So they can twist and manipulate the meaning
to their own ends, but no one else can. Within
the article discussing this topic by Bishop Untener, who was part of the large
congregation of Saginaw, Michigan, was his discussion of how ideas, even in the
Church can and have reversed themselves, such as, the idea expressed at the
Council of Florence in 1441 that anyone who was not Catholic would not be saved
to the reversal of that idea at the Vatican II Council in 1965 that reversed
that idea to include that any human person may be saved. He attributes this to all of us expanding our
horizons and our sense of the awesome expansiveness of God and how our narrow
human horizons must stretch to broaden and widen in a way that can align us
even more with our Creator who is the most expansive of all.[xxiv]
In
persona Christi is a human male construct. I would suggest a more expansive construction
to include and unify the genders and our Church closer to Christ by using in persona Christi ed Ecclesiae, especially
if we consider Christ as the Bridegroom and the Bride as Church. In
exploring this idea, I believe there is something deeper going on, a deeper
calling. When one has been shut out of
something one focuses on the object that is verboten,
instead of the deeper level of why does one want this thing to begin with. We must ask, why do women want to be
priests? Are women called to this
vocation as men are, or are they called differently? If we expand our thinking, we can ask, what
would women bring to the Eucharistic table if they were allowed to
concelebrate? For one, they would bring the other half of humanity to the table
in a real, representational sense. In
consecrating the Eucharist, they would actively be bringing the other half of
the gene pool to Christ in transubstantiation.
There is experience in the doing, not in sitting and watching. Women want to actively partake in the
Mass. They need, for their own
fulfillment of their deepest desires to partake in the celebration of the
Mass. Women have been deprived for too
long from the table of plenty. If we
believe that Mary was Christ’s humanity, then women presiders would consecrate Christ’s
humanity to the Eucharist, in homage to the Theotokas. For the first time it would be whole. If we think of the male priest as the divine
representation of Christ during the Eucharist; then all these centuries only
half of the entire picture has been brought to the people of God. We all have been cheated. What, indeed, would a married couple bring
also to the table if allowed to do the same? Their unity can result in a third
person, so then their action of union completes the consecration of the Trinity. Human love is brought directly to the table,
and therefore, the divine and the human meet in a representationally symbolic
form that has no equal. Our humanity
meets the divine in a more direct sense before the eyes of the community. For
now, we do not know the answer of how to make this complete, but the question
is there to be discerned at some time in the future. Instead of trying to fit the new paradigm
into an old box, I propose that we really begin to think in new ways and break
a bit with this box of traditions – both Goddess and male-centric religions. We
need to question what is most relevant and authentic to our humanity in view of
God now and for the future, not a past that has already been. Is it not to glorify God in ways that expand
our own meanings of what, who and how God acts in our midst?
Conclusion
We can continue the discussion by
putting in conversation the secular and the spiritual, the flesh and the soul,
the human and the divine. One where we
can retrieve long ago hidden aspects of our earlier Church that made it
attractive for many to convert; reinterpret them to reincorporate them into a
renewed church that better includes all and allows those hidden truths to
enrich us all in new ways in a revitalized and more ecumenical
institution. All these aspects create a
complex background that has sent mixed messages throughout the ages of freedom
for some who knew how to respond and not allow the contradictions to stop them
from realizing their true mission and authentic calling, but how many countless
others who were harmed, wounded or even killed by them of which we do not know
the story.
Our future holds another sort of
reconciliation, a joining of polar opposites on a collaborative basis and
eradicates one gender’s supremacy over the other. The struggle here is not about control or
power over, but one of mutual understanding and communication on common
desires, needs and wants in the face of a God that is so beyond our human idea
of gender that limits our own individual connection to the divine and our
ground of being. The sacred cannot be
reserved for men only as half of our humanity is women and that needs to be
addressed on an equal basis. Our own
deepest desires as Ignatius would say, need to be heeded on our own ground of
being that is expressed from a woman’s point of view that is as valuable as
that of the male. Contradictions arise
when words are invented to tell us how to interpret our experience by something
outside the sphere of that experience. Listening with patience and
understanding is the key to healing the wounds that unbalanced power structures
make on the human person without a sense of dignity.
This is not an argument of either/or,
but of both/and. It is about reconciling
pre-history to patristic and medieval Church history; correcting the
misconceptions latent in Church tradition and moving forward in a clearer and
brighter future as only God would want from humanity. “Circles of women and some men gathered
around the worship of the ‘Goddess’, presumed to be the original deity of human
history.”[xxv] We come full circle in asking, could she have
been the four and a half inch image of the Venus of Willendorf?
[i] Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western
Religious History, University of California Press, Berkeley/LA/London,
2005, p. 4, illus.
[ii] Figes, Eva, Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society, Persea Books, 1987
[iii] Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History, University of
California Press, Berkeley/LA/London, 2005, p. 7
[vi] Ibid., p. 21-28, 314
[vii] Getty, Adele, Goddess, Mother of Living Nature, Thames
& Hudson, London, UK 1990, p. 19-20
[viii] Clark, Elizabeth A. Women in the Early Church, Liturgical
Press, Collegeville, MN 1983, p. 28
[x] Getty, Adele, Goddess, Mother of Living Nature, Thames
& Hudson, London, UK 1990, p.23
[xi] Macy, Gary, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination, Oxford University Press,
2008, p. 112-125
[xii] Johnson, Elizabeth A., The Maleness of Christ in The Power of Naming, Schϋssler-Fiorenza,
Elisabeth, Orbis Books, NY, p. 314
[xiii] Macy, Gary, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination, Oxford University Press,
2008, p. 120
[xv] Shillebeeckx, Edward, Ministry: Leadership in the Community of
Jesus Christ, Crossroads, New York, 1981, pp. 56-58
[xvi] Macy, Gary, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination, Oxford University Press,
2008, p. 32
[xix] Markale, Jean, Courtly Love, The path of Sexual Initiation,
Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2000 (from Editions Imago, 1987) p.62
[xx] Johnson, Elizabeth A., The Maleness of Christ in The Power of Naming, Schϋssler-Fiorenza,
Elisabeth, Orbis Books, NY, p. 312
[xxii] Benedict XVI, Pope, Deus Caritas Est, Libreria Editrice Vaticana,Va 2005
para. 11
[xxiii] Foley SJ, John, Creativity and the Roots of Liturgy, Pastoral
Press, Portland, OR, 1994, p. 21
[xxiv] Untener, Kenneth E., The Practical Prophet: Pastoral Writings, Paulist
Press, Mahwah, NJ, 2007
[xxv] Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History, University of
California Press, Berkeley/LA/London, 2005, p. 274
Bibliography:
Benedict XVI, Pope, Deus Caritas Est, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Va 2005
Clark, Elizabeth A. Women in the Early Church, Liturgical
Press, Collegeville, MN 1983
Figes, Eva, Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society,
Persea Books, 1987
Foley SJ, John, Creativity and the Roots of Liturgy, Pastoral
Press, Portland, OR, 1994
Getty, Adele, Goddess, Mother of Living Nature, Thames
& Hudson, London, UK 1990
Macy, Gary, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination, Oxford
University Press, 2008
Markale, Jean, Courtly Love, The path of Sexual Initiation,
Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2000 (from Editions Imago, 1987)
Ruether, Rosemary
Radford, Goddesses and the Divine
Feminine: A Western Religious History,
University of California Press, Berkeley/LA/London, 2005
Shillebeeckx, Edward, Ministry: Leadership in the Community of
Jesus Christ, Crossroads, New York, 1981
Bibliography:
Benedict XVI, Pope, Deus Caritas Est, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Va 2005
Clark, Elizabeth A. Women in the Early Church, Liturgical
Press, Collegeville, MN 1983
Figes, Eva, Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society,
Persea Books, 1987
Foley SJ, John, Creativity and the Roots of Liturgy, Pastoral
Press, Portland, OR, 1994
Getty, Adele, Goddess, Mother of Living Nature, Thames
& Hudson, London, UK 1990
Macy, Gary, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination, Oxford
University Press, 2008
Markale, Jean, Courtly Love, The path of Sexual Initiation,
Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2000 (from Editions Imago, 1987)
Ruether, Rosemary
Radford, Goddesses and the Divine
Feminine: A Western Religious History,
University of California Press, Berkeley/LA/London, 2005
Shillebeeckx, Edward,
Ministry: Leadership in the Community of
Jesus Christ, Crossroads, New York, 1981
