This is part of a talk entitled ‘Being human means being sexual’ which I gave way back in 1977! It was the first of eight lectures on the theme of ‘Love and Marriage’. My original intention was to emphasise the truth that our sexuality is a key dimension of our being human. However, while I was preparing this talk, I was also reading a recently published book, The Ministry of Women in the Early Church, by R. Gryson (Liturgical Press, USA, 1976). It blew my mind. His research seemed to demonstrate very clearly that the basic reason why women were regarded as ineligible for ordination in the early Church was tantamount to denying women the fullness of humanity given by God to men. Men were made in the image of God. Women were not. They were made only in the image of men! That is why they were by nature subservient to men. Authority in the Church was restricted to men since women were considered incapable of exercising authority. The same was true of the ministry of teaching. It would seem that this understanding of women provided the fertile ground in which the Church’s tradition of denying ordination to women took root.
It struck me at the time that, if Gryson’s research is accurate (and I have not seen it refuted anywhere), then not only could the Church’s position on the non-ordination of women be described as ‘inhuman’, but the Church’s approach to sexuality was fundamentally flawed, since women’s humanity was considered as inferior to that of their male counterparts!
It is possible that further patristic research has raised questions about the validity of Gryson’s position. I must confess that I have not had the opportunity to follow up that line of enquiry. However, I would be surprised if this were the case. Certainly two major reports give no grounds for thinking that there is conclusive New Testament or patristic evidence which would rule out any possibility of discussing women’s ordination in the Church today. The Report of the Biblical Commission ‘Can Women be Priests’ chaired by the CDF Prefect, Cardinal Seper, was inconclusive, as is clear from its final three paragraphs:
It does not seem that the New Testament by itself alone will permit us to settle in a clear way and once for all the problem of the possible accession of women to the presbyterate.
However, some think that in the scriptures there are sufficient indications to exclude this possibility, considering that the sacraments of eucharist and reconciliation have a special link with the person of Christ and therefore with the male hierarchy, as borne out by the New Testament.
Others, on the contrary, wonder if the Church hierarchy, entrusted with the sacramental economy, would be able to entrust the ministries of eucharist and reconciliation to women in the light of circumstances, without going against Christ’s original intentions.
The other major work is a 1997 paper commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA), ‘Tradition and the ordination of women’. Much of it is devoted to examining the 1995 CDF’s ‘Responsum’ that John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter, Ordinatio Sacedotalis (which states that the Church has no authority to ordain women), belongs to the deposit of faith and is therefore infallible teaching. The CTSA paper examines this claim very carefully and its very clear conclusion was put to the secret vote of the whole assembly :
There are serious doubts regarding the nature of the authority of this teaching namely, the teaching that the Church’s lack of authority to ordain women to the priesthood is a truth that has been infallibly taught and requires the definitive assent of the faithful and its grounds in tradition. There is serious, widespread disagreement on this question not only among theologians but also within the larger community of the Church … It seems clear that further study, discussion and prayer regarding this question by all the members of the Church in accord with their particular gifts and vocations are necessary if the Church is to be guided by the Spirit in remaining faithful to the authentic Tradition of the Gospel in our day.
Of 248 members present, 216 voted ‘Yes’, 22 ‘No’ and 10 abstained. The fact that a tradition is constant does not automatically mean that it is part of the core Gospel message. When Benedict XVI was professor at Tubingen, he wrote the following with reference to the Vatican II debate on the Constitution on Divine Revelation:
Not everything that exists in the Church must for that reason be also a legitimate tradition; in other words, not every tradition that arises in the Church is a true celebration and keeping present of the mystery of Christ. There is a distorting as well as a legitimate tradition. Consequently, tradition must not be considered only affirmatively, but also critically. We have scripture as a criterion for this indispensable criticism of tradition, and tradition must therefore always be related back to it and measured by it … There is, in fact, no explicit mention (in the Constitution) of the possibility of distorting tradition … which means that a most important side of the problem of tradition, as shown by the history of the Church, as been overlooked (Joseph Ratzinger, The Transmission of Divine Revelation, in Herbert Vorgrimler, edit. Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, New York, Herder & Herder, 1969, vol. 3, pp. 184-185, 193).
Karl Rahner applies this point of theology explicitly to women’s ordination in the chapter, ‘Women and the Priesthood’, in vol. 20 of his Theological Investigation. Rahner makes specific reference to the argument from tradition given in the 1976 Vatican Declaration:
If the Declaration appeals to an uninterrupted tradition, this appeal is not necessarily and justifiably an appeal to an absolutely and definitively binding tradition, an appeal to a tradition which simply presents and transmits a ‘divine’ revelation in the strict sense, since there is obviously a purely human tradition in the Church which offers no guarantee of truth even if it has long been undisputed and taken for granted. With this Declaration, which has an authentic but not defining character, the fundamental question is whether this appeal is to a ‘divine’ or a merely human tradition (pp. 37-38).
It does not seem to be proved that the actual behaviour of Jesus and the apostles implies a norm of divine revelation in the strict sense of the term. This practice (of ordaining only men to the priesthood) even if it existed for a long time and without being questioned, can certainly be understood as a ‘human’ tradition like other traditions in the Church which were once unquestioned, had existed for a long time and nevertheless became obsolete as a result of sociological and cultural change (p. 45).
Another key Vatican II theologian, Bernard Häring, has stated very forthrightly that the Pope’s alleged ‘infallible’ decision on this issue does not satisfy the criteria needed for an infallible statement. Firstly, there was no ‘determining through ecumenical councils or investigating the conviction of the Church dispersed all over the earth’, as required by the constitution, Pastor Aeternus of Vatican I. Nor has it found a ‘reception’ in the entire Church. This leads Häring to conclude: ‘Both lines of thought complete and confirm one another on the ordination of women. They back the conviction that despite the Pope’s undeniable intention of proclaiming an infallible doctrine, no such thing took place’ (Bernard Häring, My Hope for the Church, p. 116). Readers will remember what I wrote earlier in this volume in my specific piece on Häring:
In the last book Häring wrote, chapter sixteen is entitled, The Future of the Church and the Issues of Women. He is in no doubt that, before long, women will be ordained in the Roman Catholic Church and he goes so far as to say: ‘I suspect that the rejection of ordaining women to celebrate the Eucharist is a relic of magical thinking’ (MWC, 114). He even dares to express the hope that “it would be splendid if the pope were to realize and humbly acknowledge his error before he leaves us … It would be a special sign of God’s grace to ecumenism’ (MWC, p. 118). Häring says these things out of his commitment to the full and equal dignity of women, certainly. In fact, he even writes: ‘I consider Rome’s “infallible” decision not only inopportune, but also out of touch with the times.’
As I have repeatedly said throughout this volume, I do not consider myself to be an original theologian. I believe deeply in the Church, sinful and dysfunctional though it may be. I am fearful lest my position on the ordination of women might be construed as a denial of the infallible teaching of the Church. I have laboured the above points to make it clear that my position is solidly within the Church, even though not held by all in the Church. The reception process for a truth takes time. It cannot be steamrollered, but neither should it be outlawed. My 1977 talk follows:
Being Human means being a Man or being a Woman
We all recognise the fundamental equality of men and women, as human persons. This is a key element in the Church’s teaching. Gaudium et Spes is very strong in its condemnation of sex discrimination. It states that all discrimination must be “overcome and wiped out as contrary to God’s will” and then it continues:
It must still be regretted that fundamental personal rights are not yet being universally honoured. Such is the case of a woman who is denied the right and freedom to choose a husband, to embrace a state of life, or to acquire an education or cultural benefits equal to those recognized for men (No. 29).
That is a very clear statement and it is one which we would all endorse. As Christians we are all opposed to sex discrimination. But are we?
Discrimination is usually based on prejudice and prejudice is often unconscious. It influences the way we act and feel and react and relate – but we are not aware that we are being influenced by it. That is why discrimination not only denies the rights of those being discriminated against – it also means that those oppressing them are similarly captive. They are slaves to their own prejudices. They are blind to what they are doing and why they are doing it.
During the international women’s year, 1975, Pope Paul VI referred to the emerging consciousness of women about their full dignity as human persons and spoke of this as one of the ‘signs of the times’. This emerging consciousness involves becoming aware of the subtle ways in which the full dignity of women as human persons is not given due recognition (either by themselves or by others).
If we accept that this emerging consciousness of women about their full dignity as human persons is one of the signs of the times, then we need to try to tune into this emerging consciousness. And when I say ‘we’ I mean all of us. I am not just referring to men. All of us, both men and women, need to tune into this emerging consciousness. The very phrase ‘emerging consciousness’ implies that we are coming out of a state of human sub-consciousness in which it was not fully accepted either in theory or in practice that being a woman is as full a way of being a human person as being a man. In fact, it seems to me that one of the consequences of this unconsciousness has been the impoverishment of the full human reality of being a man. After all, if our human sexuality highlights the truth that as human persons we are relational beings – i.e. we grow and enrich ourselves and others through interpersonal communication and relationships – it would seem obvious that man also is under-developed as long as he relates to woman as superior to inferior, rather than as equal human persons, each with special riches to share with the other.
The Second Vatican Council called us to an examination of consciousness not just as individuals but also as a Church. At the end of the first post-Vatican II meeting of the Bishops’ Synod in Rome in 1971, it issued a powerful document on ‘Justice in the World’. Its Introduction is as inspirational today as it was in 1971. The way its final sentence has been received and quoted so repeatedly in all kinds of official Church documents gives it an authenticity and authority all of its own:
Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel, or, in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation.
To be credible in carrying out this mission we, the Church, have to make sure that freedom and equality are being fully respected within our own community. More specifically, we need to look at whether in the Church women are truly free to be themselves as human persons – or whether there is sex discrimination within the Church with the result that all of us, men and women, are less than the human persons God is calling us to be. To make this examination very concrete, I would like to focus on a controversial issue which is very much to the fore these days.
Can women be ordained Priests?
There are a variety of reactions to that question. Some people say: ‘The day that happens, I am leaving the Church’. Others have no objection and cannot see the force of the arguments against the ordination of women. Some women actually feel a call to be a priest. Others say they would never go near a woman priest.
Why should I be discussing the question of women priests in a course entitled ‘love and marriage’? It is because I believe that the attitude which gets unearthed when we discuss the ordination of women is part and parcel of a wider attitude underlying all those other areas of life in which only now is a new and deeper consciousness of personal worth beginning to emerge among women. In what follows I am doing no more than offering my own considered opinion, an opinion formed from reading, study, reflection and listening to women in whom this new consciousness is emerging. What I want to suggest is that the issue of the ordination of women priests can be looked on as a symbol of the status of women in the Church. As long as we cannot accept the ordination of women, we as a Church are communicating through symbol that women are not fully human persons, sharing equal dignity with men. I would even dare to suggest that this attitude is a cancerous growth within the basically healthy body of Christian tradition.
Delving into the memory of the Church.
In order to face this issue squarely, we need to go back into history. This is not unlike the process in psychoanalysis in which a person thinks back to early childhood in order to discover the origin of certain attitudes which may be preventing or impeding full personal development. History is the memory of the Church, a memory which affects us much more deeply than we realise. With respect to the full and complete acceptance of women in the Church there is urgent need for a profound healing of memories, and many women are in need of this healing as much as men.
What could there be about women which would exclude them from being ordained priests? One recent writer, after a very extensive survey of the major writings in the first six centuries of the Church, concludes that the writings of the early Church considered women to be ‘weak, fickle, light-headed, of mediocre intelligence’ (R. Gryson, The Ministry of Women in the Early Church, Liturgical Press, USA 1976, p. 113). Naturally all the writers were men – Bishops, Priests, Canonists and Theologians. I would dare to say that even today not a few Bishops, Priests, Canonists and Theologians still have this attitude, although they would not admit it publicly and might not even be aware of it themselves.
However, that is not the deepest scar in the memory of the Church. After all, even some ardent feminists today might be prepared to admit that there could have been an element of factual truth in some of those descriptions at that time; but that would have had nothing to do with the reality of being a woman. It would have been due to the dehumanising effects of a cultural, social and educational system which denied women the possibility of full personal development.
There is a much deeper scar in the Church’s memory. Evidence of this is found in Ambrosiaster’s commentary on First Corinthians. This was a very influential fourth-century document:
‘Women should keep silence in the Church’. In an earlier passage Paul has ordered that women should be veiled in Church. Now he explains that unless they are quiet and reserved, there is no purpose in their being veiled. For if the image of God is man, and not woman, and if she is subject to man on account of natural law, how much more in Church should she be submissive … What does the law say? ‘Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you’. This law is for the whole species. Therefore, Sarah called her husband, Abraham, her ‘Lord’ … Although woman is one flesh with man, there are two reasons why she is, nevertheless, ordered to be submissive: first, because she originated from man; and secondly, because through her sin entered the world (Gryson, pp. 92-93).
In his commentary on 1 Tim 2:11-14, Ambrosiaster further expands these two reasons and spells out their implications:
Women must not only dress modestly; but Paul also prescribes that she be refused authority and that she be subject to man, so that as well by her dress as by obedience she be under the power of man from whom she draws her origin … Since man was created first, Paul places him before woman; it was not man that the devil deceived, but the woman, and man was duped by her intervening; therefore, no concessions should be made to her audacity, but instead, since through her death entered the world, she ought to remain in submission (Gryson, p. 9).
What is happening here? The writer is not just attributing to women certain weaknesses which could easily be accounted for by lack of educational opportunities due to cultural and social factors. No, he is going much further than that. He is making a number of statements of much greater seriousness.
First of all, he is saying that only man is made in the image of God. Woman is not made in the image of God. She is only made in the image of man. That is clear in the first passage quoted – ‘the image of God is man, not woman’. This is not just a temporary lapse since we find Ambrosiaster making the same point even more forcefully in other parts of his writings. In one of them he examines the question head on and comes up with a very firm negative answer that woman is not made in the image of God.
Man is the image of God; for it is written ‘God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him’. For this reason Paul says: ‘A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God’. On the other hand, he says: ‘Let a woman wear a veil’. Why? Because she is not the image of God. For this reason, Paul repeats: ‘I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men’ (Gryson, p. 94).
In fact, later in the same work Ambrosiaster argues against a false basis for saying that man is the image of God. That false basis would be man’s mandate from God to have dominion over all the animals. That cannot be the basic reason why man is in the image of God since it is also true of women. Yet, as Ambrosiaster comments: ‘It is obvious that woman is not the image of God’. Making the same point a few lines later he even goes so far as to say:
If it is true that man possesses the image of God in his domineering power, then woman would have to be recognised as the image of God, which is absurd. When it is clear that she is subject to the power of man and she has no authority whatever, how can we say then that woman is the image of God? (Gryson, p. 95).
A second point that Ambrosiaster makes is that the order of nature, or natural law, demands that woman should be submissive to man since she is naturally inferior to man. This means that woman should not exercise authority over man. It also means that woman should not exercise a teaching role in the Church when this involves exercising teaching authority over men. A further point he makes is that this natural inferiority of woman comes out clearly in the story of the Fall. It is woman who brings sin into the world through her weakness and her fickleness.
Am I making too much of this one writer? I leave specialists in Patristics to judge that. However, the reading I have done, though limited, suggests that Ambrosiaster is fairly representative of the thinking in the first six centuries of the Church in both East and West. He comes from the West but it is worth quoting a similar work from the East, the fourth century Apostolic Constitutions. This has been described as the largest canonical and liturgical collection of antiquity. In one section the writer is dealing with the possibility of women administering the Sacrament of Baptism:
Now as to women’s baptising, we let you know that there is no small peril to those that undertake it … it is dangerous, or rather wicked and impious. For if the ‘man be the head of the woman’, and he be originally ordained for the priesthood, it is not just to abrogate the order of creation … For the woman is the body of the man, taken from his side, and subject to him (Gryson, pp. 56-67).
The writer then goes on to stress that for a woman to baptise would be ‘contrary to nature’. He also says that if this had not been so, Jesus would have been baptised by his Mother, rather than by John the Baptist. But Jesus did not let this happen since ‘he knew the order of nature … being the Creator of nature’.
Another Greek writer, Didymus the Blind, writes: ‘Paul does not permit a woman to write books impudently, on her own authority, nor to teach in the assemblies, because, by doing so, she offends her head, man; for ‘the head of woman is man, and the head of man is Christ’ (Cor, 11:3). The reason for this silence imposed on women is obvious to Didymus, since it was women’s teaching in the beginning that caused such havoc to the human race. As Didymus puts it: ‘For the Apostle writes: ‘It is not the man who was deceived, but the woman’ (Gryson, p. 77).
Having written to the Galatians that ‘there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus’, St Paul himself would never have believed that women are not made in the image of God. Nevertheless, there are some passages in Paul which might have led later commentators to their deeply prejudiced conclusions: e.g. 1 Cor 14:34-35, 1 Tim 2:11-15 and 1 Cor 11:2-16.
The attitude in the early Church, therefore, seems to have been that, though women were accepted as human persons, they were not regarded as being fully human in the way men were. In fact, this view even affected the way they understood the process of generation. Under the influence of Aristotle, such a major figure in Christian tradition as Thomas Aquinas actually looked on woman as a defective man. He admitted that woman was created by God but this was precisely because she was needed for human procreation. So the reason for her specific existence was purely functional!
Despite his deep reverence for his mother and his faithful relationship with the mother of his son over many year, Augustine seems to have shared the same functional view of women many years earlier:
If woman has not been made for helping man by bearing children, what other kind of help can she give? Not manual labour, since another man is much better help than a woman. Not for the sake of company if a man is feeling lonely because another man is much better company and you can have a much more worthwhile conversation with a man than with a woman.
Not even for the sake of having people in society who are by nature submissive to men and who will obey orders – men have shown that they can do that just as well as woman if order in society demands it. So honestly, I do not know what the point is of God making woman if it is not for the sake of bearing children (Cf. St Augustine on his Comm. on Gen (De Gen. ad litt, IX no. 5 CSEL, XXXV111 [1]).
I have concentrated mainly on the early centuries of the Church but there would be no difficulty in tracing the effects of this trend through the long centuries of the Church’s life right up to the present day.
Until very recently, it was customary for women to be excluded from any form of liturgical ministry. Altar girls were unheard of and even women readers began their existence outside the sanctuary. In the ordering of new ministries in the Church, women are expressly excluded, even from the ministries of reader and acolyte. Officially, their exercise of these ministries is only tolerated on an ‘extraordinary’ basis.
It is not surprising that similar anti-feminine attitudes have coloured Church law down through the centuries and were still in the 1917 Code of Canon Law (replaced only in 1983). In 1976 a statement issued by an official symposium of the Canon Law Society of America acknowledged this and pinpointed numerous areas of Church life in which Canon Law subordinates women to men (either on protective or on paternalistic grounds), and also in which it actually discriminates against women. For instance, women are excluded from jurisdiction and also from administrative and judicial posts.
The same discriminatory approach is found in the 1976 Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood which continues to maintain that women are ineligible for the priesthood. It bases this position on the fact that Christ did not make women priests even though he defied his own culture by having women among his close followers and that this has been the constant tradition in the Church, one which the Church has no power to alter.
Part of its argumentation is that the priest acts ‘in the person of Christ’. Therefore, it is essential that the priest be a man, since the sign value would not work if a woman were a priest (There is a misleading reference to Aquinas as supporting this argument). This raises a fundamental Christological question. Is the difference between man and woman of such deep significance that a woman cannot act in the person of Christ? To answer ‘yes’ would seem to lay such an emphasis on the maleness of Christ as to have serious repercussions for the basic good news of the Gospel. The Good News is not that the Word became male, but that the Word became Flesh. This ‘sign’ argument would seem to locate the Incarnation in the maleness of Christ, rather than in his Humanity.
It is true that St Thomas stresses the sign-value of the sacrament and concludes from this that a woman cannot be a priest – but the sign value he is referring to is based on man’s superiority over woman. Since by nature woman is in a state of subjection to man, she cannot be the symbol of pre-eminence which is involved in the priesthood. The authors of the Vatican Declaration would hardly accept that argument since they are prepared to admit that ‘modern thought would have difficulty in admitting or would even rightly reject’ some of the earlier arguments.
We all know from our own personal experience that the reasons we give for our beliefs are not always the real reasons which influence us. Unknowingly at times we try to maintain a position by using arguments which are not the real reason for our stand. The earlier male superiority argument against the ordination of women might be so deeply embedded in the Church’s memory, we would be naïve if we were to presume it has lost all its influence. For instance, I can still remember the reason given in Noldin’s manual of moral theology against the ordination of women, other than the Pauline texts:
The reason why a woman cannot receive Holy Orders is because the clerical state demands a certain superiority since it involves ruling the faithful; whereas, a woman by her very nature is inferior to man and subject to him (III, no. 465).
Noldin was honest enough to admit that an individual woman might in fact be more talented than a man. Noldin’s manual was the text book from which I first studied moral theology and was in use in many, if not most, seminaries throughout the world until the mid-1960s.
There is one thing we can say for certain: Christ did not consider women to be inferior to men and less human than men. If we accept that, we are accepting as true that there is nothing about women which makes them incapable of exercising both priestly ministry and jurisdictional authority in the Church.
The Church’s ‘tradition’ on the ordination of women down the centuries has been too closely linked with an underlying attitude towards women which, as part of today’s ‘emerging consciousness’, is increasingly being recognised as inhuman and therefore un-Christian.
This brings us back to the sign issue. Signs matter. That is precisely why this question of the ordination of women as something important in the Church. We have seen that one of the ‘signs of the times’ is the emerging consciousness among women of their full dignity as human persons. And we are living in a time of growing acceptance of this among men. I would suggest that the continuation of the Church’s stand that women are excluded from being priests is going to be more and more a counter sign. In today’s world with its modern critical thought it cannot but be seen as one of the remaining vestiges of sex-discrimination. The more women become educated and conscious of their full personal dignity, the more they will be forced into an intolerable position. Either they will repress that dignity in the sphere of religion – yet how can this be done since Christianity is about personal dignity – or they will increasingly regard the Church as irrelevant to the realities of human life in the modern world.
That would be my answer to those who might object – why the hurry? Why not let the role of women in the Church develop gradually? The subordination of women to men in the Church is so deeply embedded in the Church’s memory that it needs radical surgery to heal it. In the present form of Church life, as long as women are barred from ordination to priesthood, they are also excluded from any real share in authority and effective decisionmaking in the Church. That is keeping the Church itself at a serious level of human under-development.
Being human means being sexual. As long as we do not exorcise the demon of sex discrimination from the Christian consciousness by some radical step like accepting the ordination of women, it seems to me that the Church will not be fully human since she will not be fully sexual. And such a Church will never be able to understand and share the full implications and riches of its teaching on love and marriage. As long as authority and ordained ministry remain a totally male preserve in the Church, there is a danger that the Church herself will not be fully alive. A fully alive Church must be a fully human Church, sharing the complementary riches of men and women at all levels of Christian life and mission.