Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Women priests: They're bringing that up again?!

I love social media. I love interacting with people from around the world, praying for their urgent needs, cooing at their baby pictures, keeping up with their updates, and staying somewhat abreast of world events, all at the same time. But every so often something happens that gets my Pauline heartrate up. And it happened again this week when a prominent Catholic posted a link on social media featuring an interview with another prominent Catholic, a German Benedictine nun, who couldn't see any reasons why the Church should not ordain women. The very prominence of the person who posted the link guaranteed the article a vast readership and made the sister's comments all but unquestionable. Yet the things Sister Ruth Schönenberger is quoted as saying were questionable indeed! (Here's hoping that some of the most eyebrow-raising remarks owe more to the translator than to the speaker.)

Thankfully, Sister Ruth, unlike some aggressively feminist thinkers, is still acting within the sacramental discipline of the Church. Her community depends, even if with a bit of distaste, upon the male priesthood, for the Mass. Despite her sincere inability to comprehend the Church's teachings, she has not run off to one of the many schismatic bishops who have attempted to ordain women. I only wish she had kept her own counsel. And so, useless though it may be, I am going to respond to what I read, if not on the vast scale of an Internet Influencer, at least within the modest horizons of my blog. There would be much more for me to write about, for example, the almost mechanistic understanding of priesthood (priesthood as a "function"); the absence of any reference to the insights of Pope John Paul II (you would think, well, I would, that any discussion about the roles of man and woman in the Church would want to take seriously the 400-pages Pope John Paul offered on the relationship of man and woman, given the nuptial nature of the relationship of Christ and his Body, the Church); the purely political character of "gender equality" as a category for "discussions on reform" in the Church... Alas, I must leave all those aside for now.

I first want to address the twofold statement that was highlighted in the online snippet and which spoke clearly enough to me:
"It is surely only natural for women to be priests and I cannot understand the reasons given as to why not."
That is quite an assumption: "It is surely only natural..."  The priesthood is not, in fact, something only natural, but something explicitly supernatural. That is why the ordination ceremony is loaded with symbols of the supernatural: a prolonged prostration, the Litany of Saints, the laying-on of hands not only by the ordaining bishop, but by all the priests who are present, a prayer of consecration (which the bishop offers with hands extended, as at the epiclesis at the Mass when the priest extends his hands over the bread and wine, asking for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts), and the anointing of the priest's hands with chrism. No, we are not speaking of something "only natural" when the topic is the sacramental priesthood.

And then there is Sister's confession of ignorance: "I cannot understand the reasons given." I know the Benedictine tradition of education. Sister Ruth's academic background is guaranteed to be ten times vaster and deeper than mine, and we won't even go into her depth of experience. But even without a series of advanced degrees, most of us recognize that ignorance is not a good reason for action. Especially when that ignorance concerns the reasons behind a reality that represents two thousand years of unbroken ecumenical practice in the Churches of East and West, and that has been affirmed explicitly by four Popes in just over forty years.

She threw in a straw man (er, person): "the presence of Christ has been reduced to the male sex" (Jesus Christ was and remains a man, perfect in his masculinity, but that is not a "reduction" of his "presence" to "the male sex" nor an amplification of "the male sex" to "the presence of Christ"); the whole expression she offers is a fabrication. The male priesthood is a sacramental representation, a picture, an icon. What water is to baptism--an image of the cleansing and life-giving properties of the sacrament--the male priest is in the ordained priesthood: an image of Jesus Christ, who became not just "man" but "a man." (This, by the way, presumes that the human body matters. That the body, as male or female, is not a shell, is not a container for the soul, but has a fundamental meaning in its masculinity or femininity--a very daring thing to assert these days!)

And then there is the non sequitur, "we, too, have excellently qualified women theologians. The only thing they lack is ordination." But erudition alone is not a qualification for ordination. Not even "pastoral formation" is enough. A vocation is essential. As a religious superior, Sister Ruth has surely had many experiences of helping certain women accept the reality that God's will for them was not Benedictine life, no matter how deep the feelings of connection on the side of the postulant or novice. Paul VI's 1976 Declaration (On the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood, n. 6), "Since the priesthood is a particular ministry of which the Church has received the charge and the control, authentication by the Church is indispensable here and is a constitutive part of the vocation."

Sister Ruth speaks of a "power imbalance" --not referring to the way men in the past or present themselves act in the positions their priesthood places them (clericalism is indeed alive and well, in both its "progressive" and its "conservative" manifestations, and I have my own frustrations with the way certain ordained men subject the faithful to their needs and idiosyncrasies), but Sister is referring to the sacramental order itself.

Most distressingly of all, she declares: "We intend to look for new forms (of celebrating the Eucharist) which suit us and develop new ones." This is not within the power of the priest or even of the Church. It constitutes an abuse of the priesthood and one of the worst kinds of clericalism. This alone tells me that even if the Church were to ordain us to the priesthood, Sister Ruth is declaring herself unfit for ordination, for she expects to exercise some kind of authority over the Eucharist itself. She seems to be wishing to craft a feminized Eucharist, not recognizing that the Mass we celebrate is already the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, and we ourselves are already the Bride, even if not yet wearing the "fine linen of the righteous deeds of the saints" (Rev 19:8).

Sister Sara Butler would be able to speak to Sister Ruth on her own level. A theologian of the highest order, Sister Sara once saw "no reason" the Church should not ordain women. She even worked for the ordination of women in the Anglican Church, believing that this would help the cause of women's ordination with Rome. But at a certain point along the way, the efforts with the Anglican Church having succeeded and Rome refusing to budge, Sister Sara began to see the priesthood in a different light. She ended up being appointed to the Pontifical Theological Commission--quite a turnaround for someone who wanted to turn the Church around!

Speaking in a Catholic-Reformed dialogue, Sister Sara said: “I am convinced that the Catholic Church’s tradition of reserving priestly ordination to men depends ... on a distinctive understanding of the priesthood. Divergence over the ordination of women, then, illustrates in a particularly sharp way the logic of differences that date from the 16th century Reformation.”

A Church that ordains women, especially a church that ordains women and allows them to "develop new forms of celebrating the Eucharist," will not be the Catholic Church at all, but one more new schismatic church. Indeed, there are already "catholic" churches (not in communion with Rome) which ordain women as deacons, priests, and bishops, so insistence is really pointless if one really believes that these orders are valid. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, the one built on Peter, will lumber on with all the inconvenient limitations that are part of her nature.

There's more, of course, but you can read the book she wrote about it (I wish Sister Ruth would, too): The Catholic Priesthood: A Guide to the Teaching of the Church. Meanwhile, here is Sister Sara herself on the subject:



Another book-length treatment on the subject is by Monica Migliorino Miller: The Authority of Women in the Catholic Church.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sister, I think you protest too much. Be grateful that you don't feel betrayed because you feel that God is calling you to the priesthood and the church forbids it.

Sister Anne said...

Thanks, Anon. No, I do not feel betrayed vocationally by the matter of a male priesthood, but I do feel betrayed by the long wait for "the Church" to pay attention to the Theology of the Body. There seems to be an incredibly strong force attempting to keep that "theological time bomb" from ever really going off, and so often the resistance is coming from members of the same generational cohort who, really, already had their (long) run of things. As someone of a younger cohort, always stuck having to deal with the fallout from what those older than I have imposed, I was really rattled by the interview.