There was a lot of disappointment, even irritation, over last year’s decision by a Vatican commission to shelve further discussion by the Synod on Synodality of the possibility of ordaining women to the diaconate. I do not doubt the sincerity of those who advocate for what they argue is a restoration of an office that existed in the early Church and that, tellingly, continues to exist in some Eastern Churches. Nor am I a scholar who can parse the exact meaning of the Greek terms used to describe those early Church ordinations. Still, the Eastern Churches do not ordain women to the priesthood, and the function of women deacons in the East is circumscribed by an understanding of traditional gender roles. I think it is possible to acknowledge the need for women to have real decision-making authority in the Church while doubting that ordination is consistent with the Church’s sacramental theology and practice and its historical self-understanding.
Like many American Catholics, I was initially certain that the refusal to ordain women was an archaic bit of chauvinism, something that should give way to a liberal emphasis on the equality of the sexes. But I am no longer certain that is the real issue, a doubt that puts me at odds with many people whose opinions I respect. When we think about the role of the priest presiding at the Eucharist, we need to understand how rituals and symbols work, which is not according to the strict and simple logic of antidiscrimination law. Rituals have their own logic. “There ought to be something in [the Church’s ritual practice] opaque to our reason though not contrary to it—as the facts of sex and sense on the natural level are opaque,” C. S. Lewis wrote, describing the figurative character of the priesthood. “The more they speak [and speak truly] about the competence of women…the more we feel that the central thing is being forgotten. To us a priest is primarily a representative, a double representative, who represents us to God and God to us.”
In that light, it seems to me that advocates for opening Holy Orders to women and the Church authorities hesitant to move in that direction are talking past one another. For many advocates of reform, ordaining women to the diaconate is the first step toward priestly ordination, which they consider a simple matter of justice. A number of women sincerely feel called to the diaconate and the priesthood, and the Church should recognize such vocations, it is argued, rather than waste or sideline persons of obvious talent and devotion. Lord knows the Church needs all the talent it can get. It is also claimed that ordaining women will strike a blow against “clericalism,” supposedly the root cause of clergy sexual abuse and also of disaffiliation, especially among women and the young. I’m not sure how much evidence there is to support those claims. It is not obvious that expanding the ranks of the clergy in this way will lead to less clericalism. And are women generally less susceptible than men to the social pressures that fuel the abuse of institutional power and the covering up of crimes? That claim seems to indulge in the sort of gender essentialism that many feminists reject. As for disaffiliation, ordaining women has not stopped the decline of the Mainline Churches, which are losing members much faster than the Catholic Church.
Defenders of the Church’s current teaching on Holy Orders rest their argument on claims of authority, rarely a persuasive move in contemporary society and a difficult ask in the aftermath of the abuse crisis. Pope John Paul II is said to have emphatically ended the debate when he declared that “in order that all doubt may be removed,” he had ruled the Church has “no authority whatsoever” to alter its “constant and universal” practice regarding ordination. He issued that edict more than thirty years ago, yet the debate continues. Many Catholic women continue to object to being treated as second-class citizens when it comes to how the Church makes decisions about both secular and theological issues.
The Vatican also argues that the fundamental question is not about the exercise of authority but about how male priests image or represent Christ, whose gender is indisputable, a basic fact of Revelation. This gendered imagery has its biblical warrant in the Hebrew Scriptures, where Israel is understood to be an often-wayward bride and God her faithful spouse. The “nuptial mystery” continues in the New Covenant, which casts Christ as bridegroom and the Church as his bride. It is the Vatican’s contention that this gendered imagery is indispensable to the Church’s identity.
When the priest consecrates the Eucharist, he is acting in Christ’s stead—in persona Christi—in a re-presentation of Christ’s actions at the Last Supper. He repeats Christ’s words and actions as though they were his own, representing “us to God and God to us,” in Lewis’s words. In effect, like the bread (which must be bread) and wine (which must be wine), the priest is a sign in a ritual whose efficacy depends on a host of interrelated, and readily understood, symbolic actions. Change any of those central images—change bread and wine to crackers and juice—and you change what the ritual communicates—namely, Christ’s Real Presence in the perplexing form of ordinary earthly substances. “Any social anthropologist will tell you that in fact the reality can’t be the same: meaning is not some immutable substance floating above and beyond the forms in which it is expressed,” wrote the historian Eamon Duffy about the implementation Vatican II’s liturgical reforms. “Change the rituals, and you do change the beliefs, or at any rate, radically refocus them.” In some sense, the Mass is analogous to a game like baseball. You can make small changes at the margins—so that, for example, games take less time—but if you change the number of players, or where they must be positioned on the diamond, or expand the strike zone significantly, you are no longer playing the same game.
The anthropologist Mary Douglas emphasizes this point in discussing how the Anglican understanding of the Eucharist moved from a Catholic belief in the Real Presence to a rite of commemoration, from an efficacious sacrament to a more rationalistic act of remembrance. At the same time, she observed, Anglicanism evolved from a traditional Catholic concern with “formal acts of wrong-doing” to the valorizing of “internal states of mind.” “The devotion to the sacraments, then, depends on a frame of mind which values external forms [my italics] and is ready to credit them with special efficacy,” Douglas writes.
It is such a general attitude which commits the ritualist to sacramental forms of worship. And vice versa, a lack of interest in external symbols would not be compatible with a cult of instituted sacraments.… Ritualism is taken to be a concern that efficacious symbols be correctly manipulated and that the right words be pronounced in the right order…. People at different historic periods are more or less sensitive to signs as such. Some people are deaf or blind to non-verbal signals.
I don’t exclude myself from that sort of cultural myopia, since I too struggle with some of the more cultic aspects of Catholicism. The Blessing of the Throats on the Feast Day of St. Blaise always leaves me sheepish and perplexed. But even when something doesn’t make immediate sense, we should first “think with the Church” before coming to any conclusions.
Douglas worried about the trajectory on which an indifference to such symbolic actions puts a sacramental religion such as Catholicism: “First, there is the contempt of external ritual forms; second, there is the private internalizing of religious experience; third, there is the move to humanist philanthropy. When the third stage is under way, the symbolic life of the spirit is finished.” I would suggest that a sympathetic reading of the Vatican’s ruling can be understood as an effort to avert movement toward that third stage. It is a drift already evident in the declining belief of many Catholics in the Real Presence as well as in a weakening conviction that the sacraments are unique and necessary instruments of grace.
Advocates for the ordination of women complain that insisting on such a literal approach to gender symbolism is an instance of “naïve physicalism,” unwarranted by any sophisticated reading of Scripture and the tradition and nothing more than patriarchal bias. But as Douglas argues, Catholic belief about the Eucharist is “as uncompromising as any West African fetishist’s that the deity is located in a specific object, place and time and under control of a specific formula.” There is no escaping the seemingly magical notion that in the sacraments, as in the Incarnation, the Resurrection of the body, or the Virgin Birth, spirit and matter are united in a particular way that scandalizes those who think body and soul cannot share the same eternal destiny. You can call that naïve physicalism if you like, but that metaphysical conviction remains at the heart of the Catholic belief that God has taken on human flesh and makes himself forever available to us in the Eucharist. “The crux of the doctrine is that a real, invisible transformation has taken place at the priest’s saying of the sacred words and that the eating of the consecrated host has saving efficacy for those who take it and for others,” Douglas writes.
“If God is male, then the male is God,” the feminist theologian Mary Daly famously insisted. Most Catholic feminists championing the ordination of women reject that extreme position. But, they argue, there is still much in the language for God in Scripture and in the tradition than needs to change if Catholicism’s patriarchal tendencies are to be corrected. God, the argument goes, must not be anthropomorphized using the language of sex, and the gender binary should not determine who can be ordained. Of course, it is a mistake to assign sex or gender to God, who transcends all such categories. Scripture uses gendered language in describing God as our Father and Jesus as his Son, but we also recognize the nonsexual character of the God of the Bible. That is a paradox, Scripture scholars remind us, that distinguishes Judaism and Christianity from many competing ancient religions, where the gods were routinely given human sexual identities.
Scripture scholar and theologian Elizabeth Achtemeier explains that feminine imagery for God in the Bible, which deploys similes, differs significantly from the male imagery, which instead uses metaphor. “A simile compares one aspect of something to another…. In metaphors, on the other hand, identity between the subject and the thing compared to it is assumed. God is Father, or Jesus is the Good Sheperd, or God is King.… Language is stretched to its limit, beyond ordinary usage, to provide new understanding,” she writes. In other words, if you change the metaphors, you change our understanding of what has been revealed. “The God of Israel…is one particular God who has done particular things in particular times and places,” Achtemeier writes. He is not merely a local manifestation of some universal spiritual reality present in various degrees in the host of other religions. That aspect of biblical religion has been characterized as “the scandal of particularity,” and restricting priesthood to men, I would argue, can be seen as a similar scandal. Like metaphors, ritual symbolism stretches our understanding to its limits.
But if the demand for more inclusive practices and language is to be resisted, how should the Church recognize the equality of women? As it happens, Mary Douglas provided a provocative answer in an article she wrote for Commonweal (“A Modest Proposal,” June 14, 1996). She readily conceded that the unequal role of women in the Church was unfair and needed to be corrected. But she resisted the idea that gender symbolism should be abandoned in the name of a more egalitarian ecclesiology. She cautioned that demanding such change in a profoundly hierarchical organization would prove futile. “Telling its members to forget their common past and make new myths of the present reality is the same as telling them to get lost, die off, and disappear.”
Instead, she proposed that “we would do better to take the nuptial mystery and run with it, not against it.” Why not create a place in the hierarchy specifically and exclusively for women, one that would deepen the Church’s gendered understanding of its identity, not neuter it? Metaphors of gender, Douglas wrote, have been used in countless cultures to create complementary and counterbalancing structures of authority and decision making, where checks and balances work within hierarchical systems to ensure fairness and a strong sense of community. The egalitarian assumptions of those calling for the ordination of women will not bring about more equitable outcomes, Douglas warned. In modern egalitarian systems, she believed that “the loudest voice has the main say, and woe to the weakest,” who are usually women. (Think of the current state of our culture and politics, where an avowed egalitarian ethos has only served the powerful.) Certain kinds of hierarchies can be more flexible, providing protection for the vulnerable, which is something the Church has often done well, according to Douglas.
Given the self-evident justice of the cause of empowering women, Douglas thought the Church needed to establish a Woman’s Commission on Doctrine, comprising both lay and religious women. The Commission would have veto power over certain questions, presumably those dealing with life issues and sexuality, thus counterbalancing the authority of the male hierarchy. Such a reform would not
undermine the notion of gender as a natural sign, but suggest how it could be more potently celebrated…. It would not deny but allow a stronger focus on the theme of the Church as the Bride of Christ. Our theological reflection, which has traditionally found a mysterious mirror of God’s identity in human sexuality, would be deepened, not diverted.
The obvious objection to such a proposal is that juridical authority in the Church has always been exercised by the ordained. But the question of fairness, and the crisis surrounding current understandings of the Eucharist, suggest that a bold innovation may be necessary. We are told that the Church is constituted not by its laws or organizational structure but by and through the Eucharist. Preserving and strengthening that sacramental reality is surely worth broadening our understanding of what a shared ecclesial authority might entail.
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