Behold, the Woman
What Will the Catholic Church Teach About Women?
by Nancy M. Cross
With Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter, “On The Dignity and Vocation of Women” (1988), offset by four failures by the American Catholic bishops to deliver their own pastoral letter on women, the last two decades of the twentieth century will go down in Roman Catholic history as a time of the birth pangs of a momentous new doctrine.
The Roman Church of late has been torn on the issue of “women” by an internal controversy of historic proportions. Though affecting the European and North American Church most intensely, the meaning and role of the sexes in the economy of Christendom is being argued worldwide. Mission magazines like those of the Columban Fathers who serve in the Far East, and Maryknoll, whose priests, nuns, and laity are active in Central and South America, tell stories of native women under the guidance of American missionaries actively working to wrest authority from the male leadership of home, church, and society. Feminist consciousness-raising sessions are being reported even in India, the land of suttee.
The Church in Africa shows less interest in the issue—partly because of the general acuity of their development, pressures of racism, tensions with Islam, and the need to sensitively handle polygamy—but also in part because of an intrinsic sense that the West is wrong on this issue. The suspicion that it is American missionaries who are imperialistically planting feminist ideology and stimulating the change of customs in many countries gained credence at the Synod on the Laity (Rome 1987) when the African bishops perceived that the American bishops were forcing their pro-feminist agenda on the world church. Journalist E. Michael Jones reported in Fidelity (December 1987) that Nigeria’s Francis Cardinal Arinze, President of the Secretariat for Non-Christians, bridled when an American, Albina Aspell, closed a paper with a promise that she would pray for women in the Third World who hadn’t reached equality with men and who were oppressed by sexist customs. Retorted Arinze, “If you mean by oppression, customs which sanction abortion and divorce, then pray for the women in your own country.”
Feminism is just one of the “liberation” ideologies—and the most revolutionary—to find an opening in the Church since Vatican II. These have brought an improbable word into the Catholic vocabulary, dissent, more lately called, loyal dissent, which means determination to stay within the Church but to work for radical change. Rosemary Radford Ruether, the confabular professor and feminist theologian at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, one of the originators of the infamous New York Times pro-abortion ads, calls on those at variance with the Roman Catholic Church to “stay in the church and use whatever parts you can get your hands on” for any cause opposed to the traditional stance (America, 3/1/86). Perhaps with Ruether and company in mind, Fr. Charles Curran, whose relative stance on moral theology cost him his teaching post at the Catholic University of America, spoke an obvious truth a few years ago declaring, “Women are the greatest internal problem for Roman Catholics during the next decade.”
Women have been considered something of a problem throughout the Church’s 2,000-year history, and certainly the solution will not be found in a decade. St. Paul in his letter to the juvenile church at Corinth was angry over the usurpation of authority by women. St. Paul considered the women’s takeover part of the overall problem of insubordination and antinomianism in Corinth, perhaps even the cause of it. In the end, he firmly supported male headship (1 Corinthians 11): “If any one is disposed to be contentious, we recognize no other practice, nor do the churches of God.” And in a final burst he wrote, “It is shameful for a woman to speak in church. What! Did the word of God originate with you, or are you the only ones it has reached? . . . I am writing you this as a command of the Lord.” Was he merely expressing his prejudices? Catholic feminists have put him at the head of their discard list. Yet, that last phrase, a startling apostolic interdict, has demanded that the Church treat the passage seriously.
Men of the first eight centuries—Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, among others whose meditations on the Scriptures and profound theological work have earned them the title “Fathers of the Church”—sometimes found women enigmatic. Tertullian was not alone in preaching to female audiences, “You are the Devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that tree; you are the first forsaker of the divine law, you are the one who persuaded him whom the Devil was not brave enough to approach; you so lightly crushed the image of God, the man Adam; because of your punishment, that is, death, even the Son of God had to die.” Among the Doctors of the Church, the scholastic philosopher and theologian, Thomas Aquinas, expressed an ambivalence toward women that is documented from statements about their being “misbegotten males” to “the voice of a woman is an invitation to lust and therefore must not be heard in the Church.”
On the positive side, the Fathers promoted the doctrine of Mary—a doctrine which, according to the late Hans Urs von Balthasar, gave “Mary a place even higher than Peter. The Church is a feminine reality and has a place ahead of the male successors of the apostles. The Mary principle—thus the female principle—is more important than that of the very hierarchy which has been entrusted to men.”
The honor the Church has given to the place of the Virgin Mother and uncounted female saints, to say nothing of the understanding of her as the Bride of Christ, has not overcome the overall effect on women of negative words in the Fathers’ writings, or the natural difficulties that men have with women; neither has the protection of the woman by an inviolable marriage vow based on the love between Christ and the Church, nor the guardianship and respect given to her fertility. The Virgin Mary has been the object of deep admiration in the Church both as virgin and mother, but many women tend to view this sourly as a kind of inverse condescension, or even a deliberate plot. Popular consciousness-raising processes like that promoted by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, turn to activist women—bold Catherine of Siena and intrepid Teresa of Avila (even Susan B. Anthony and Winnie Mandela appear in a prayer-litany)—as models rather than to Mary’s self-negation. Rosemary Ruether has boasted that for years she has honored pagan goddesses rather than the Virgin Mary.
All the untidy components that eventually must find arrangement in a developed doctrine of sexuality—the dogmatic meaning of man and woman in creation and in the salvific plan of God—lie within this conundrum extending over two millennia, with deeper roots sunk in another 2,000 years of Jewish history. In describing the historical development of the Church’s consciousness of faith, John Henry Newman concerned himself both with how the content of faith grew and how faithfulness to the gospel was guaranteed in that growth. His criteria in brief: the outward form of the original idea must be preserved; there must be continuity of guiding principles; earlier stages of development must be assimilated in later stages; later stages must be discernible in “the embryo” of the earlier stage; there must be logical interconnection; and the idea must be lasting without losing its vitality. These together proved the guidance of the Spirit, and were, in Newman’s opinion, decisive. It is these criteria that must ultimately be the judge of feminism’s tenets.
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