Women's Ordination Conference at CTA

"If Roman Catholic Women were ordained tomorrow…"
The day before this year's Call To Action Conference in Milwaukee I attended the Women's Ordination Conference gathering. In the morning a panel of three speakers addressed the meeting. I found their comments, which I have summarised below, very challenging and provocative.

1. Sheila Briggs, feminist theologian at the University of Southern California.
Sheila raised two issues: First: whether ordination into the priesthood as we now know it now would even exist in the Church by the end of the 21st. century and secondly: whether women should even aspire to ordination in the contemporary church.
She pointed out that some feminist theologians such as Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza have stated that "ordination is subordination." Those who might be ordained into the present scheme of things would be ordained into an intrinsically patriarchal system. But the Catholic Church has nailed its colours to the mast against women's ordination. The whole system of authority in the Church is presently held by a single thread - that only an ordained priest may preside at Eucharist - and it may well fall apart over this issue.
Briggs pointed out that the Vatican's argument against women priests revolves around their notion that there is an ontological defect in women that would negate the conferring of the sacrament of ordination. The context of women in society at this point in history, however, does not support this view of women's intrinsic defectiveness.
Briggs then shifted to a reflection on whether or not the celebration Eucharist actually requires ordination. The basic sacramental connection of Eucharist is to baptism, not to ordination. Baptism empowers the whole community to celebrate Eucharist as the common meal of the baptised. Women and men are made equal by baptism. They may fulfill different roles in the church, but in earliest Christianity, these roles were not differentiated along gender lines.
Jesus in fact did not ordain anyone and there was no ordained hierarchical priestly caste in the church for approximately 150 years after Jesus' death because the early Christians expected that the apocalyptic 'end times' were imminent. But this does not mean that the first Christians did not celebrate Eucharist - there are multiple references to it in the NT and early Christian writings. We can conclude that the ordained priesthood is not historically a characteristic of Christian origins. The ordained priesthood arose in response to changing historical contexts and if it does not change today and open up to women, it may in fact become extinct in its present historical manifestation.

2. Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, Professor of Ethics at Monmouth University
Barbara opened with a cautionary note: we now live in 'in-between times" when the Reign of God is at hand but not manifested yet. We must remember that all historical eras of the Church have been found wanting, and even if our times sees the ordination of women, this in and of itself will not bring about the coming of the Reign of God. While the ordination of women will to some extent reduce gender injustice in the church, it may or may not have an impact on, for example, the scandalous racial and class divisions in Catholic parishes.Were women to be ordained tomorrow, racism would still exist in the Catholic Church. Few Catholic parishes have a vibrant mixture of blacks and whites. Only 4% of US Catholics are black. If women were ordained, they would be white women. There has been a huge increase in the proportion of Hispanic Catholics and soon it is predicted that over 50% of US Catholics will be Hispanic. Most Hispanic communities worship in parallel and less accessible parishes i.e. they have Masses outside the peak times for white Catholics, often in the basement of the church. Would this change if women became priests?
Would women priests promote economic justice? The Catholic Church is in denial on the increasing economic disparities in society. Only stockholders and wealthy elites are prospering in this economy: middle income earners are falling behind and lower income workers are struggling to survive. In previous times of economic expansion workers pay also increased, but since 1980 workers wages have lost ground. Also balancing the demands of work and personal life has become more difficult. People worked longer hours in 1999 than in 1989. Also, only white women have made small inroads into the managerial strata of corporations. The sharp economic inequalities amongst Catholics themselves mar the promotion of solidarity and justice. The clergy are cocooned from much of this because most of them are content to merely dispense the sacraments and not rock the boat. But the Eucharistic banquet is a foretaste of heaven where the place of honour is reserved for the poor. Would women priests be instrumental in unraveling the web of injustice which prevents the Church today from celebrating a more inclusive Eucharist?

3. Episcopalian priest-sociologist Paula Nesbitt from the University of Denver.
Paula began her statement by remarking that most of the groundbreaking work on feminist spirituality is coming from Catholic women because they have been radicalized by their exclusion from the priesthood. Protestant women clergy have been co-opted. She then analysed several aspects of the present situation of Protestant female clergy.

1. Women's ordination is not available in all dioceses, and in some it has been reversed, e.g. the recent decision of the Southern Baptist Conference. Some women have had to relocate to be ordained. The conscience clause reaffirmed by the Lambeth Conference of 1998 exempts bishops from ordaining women.

2. Women have been taken advantage of or silenced in order to fit in. Women clergy avoid any association with feminism. Women are pressured into the (unpaid) diaconate rather than the full priesthood and as a result the permanent diaconate has flourished. Women ministers often take part-time positions.

3. Women are not in the higher positions in the church hierarchy so they have not had an influence on the formation of doctrine. Women are slower to attain rectorships that men who are their contemporaries in the seminary. Women will often take over poorer churches in order to gain a foothold: they build up the congregation, which will then be in a more favourable position to attract a male priest. The congregation is pleased that it can now "afford" a man. The rate of parishes requesting a female priest has remained stagnant. Women priests have to prove themselves over and over again. Women who are not feminists get the better jobs. Those opposed to women's ordination play the more traditional women off against the feminists.

4. However women clergy by their very presence HAVE acted as catalysts for change. The anticipated hostility to women bishops (there are now 11) has not surfaced. Women clergy can still take on positions on the prophetic edge that are considered too risky for men.

The question for Catholic women, she said, is: If women are ordained in the Catholic Church, how will they guard against becoming the handmaidens of an oppressively hierarchical structure? Should women work to become priests, bishops, cardinals and even Popes in the church of the future, or rather to radically transform the structure itself?
Food for thought indeed!
Joanna Manning