What are we to make of St. Paul’s writings about women? Those who reject the inspiration of Scripture do not really care what he has to say. Others will try to distinguish changeable disciplines from doctrines, but not everyone draws the line in the same places. Many conservative voices might make light of hair coverings or even silencing women in churches, but still resist a more gender neutral partnership in marriage and more leadership roles for women in the Church. Are St. Paul’s teachings simply culturally conditioned or does his viewpoint reflect God’s timeless mind about matters.
St. Paul is the source for the major texts on the “subordination” of women. Nevertheless, critics of the status-quo of a male-only priesthood often quote his words about equality in grace found in Galatians. Paul is not schizophrenic. His words must not be forced to say things that he did not intend.
Regarding ministry and marriage, Paul is clear.
“What I want you to understand is that Christ is the head of every man, man is the head of woman, and God is the head of Christ . . . a man . . . is the image of God and reflects God’s glory; but woman is the reflection of man’s glory . . . and man was not created for the sake of woman, but woman was created for the sake of man. . . . However, though woman cannot do without man, neither can man do without woman, in the Lord; woman may come from man, but man is born of woman — both come from God” (1 Cor. 11:3, 7-8, 11-12).
Speaking of the organization of spiritual gifts, he demands:
“Women are to remain quiet at meetings since they have no permission to speak; they must keep in the background as the Law itself lays it down. . . . Anyone who claims to be a prophet or inspired ought to recognize that what I am writing to you is a command from the Lord” (1 Cor. 14:34, 37).
Illustrating his sincerity, he repeats himself to Timothy:
“During instruction a woman should be quiet and respectful. I am not giving permission for a woman to teach or to tell a man what to do. A woman ought not to speak, because Adam was formed first and Eve afterwards, and it was not Adam who was led astray but the woman who was led astray and fell into sin. . . .” (1 Tm. 2:1-14).
St. Paul is regarded as infamous in certain circles for his view of marriage:
“Wives should regard their husbands as they regard the Lord, since as Christ is head of the Church and saves the whole body, so is a husband the head of his wife; and as the Church submits to Christ, so should wives to their husbands, in everything. Husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her, to make her holy. . . . In the same way husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies; for a man to love his wife is for him to love himself. A man never hates his own body, but he feeds it and looks after it; and that is how Christ treats the Church, because it is his body — and we are its living parts. . . . This mystery has many implications; but I am saying it applies to Christ and the Church” (Ephesians 5:22-25, 28-32).
Leaving out commentary, I suspect some readers are already angry. These Scripture texts seem to fly in the face of what many know of the contemporary experience. I have known Christian feminists who gave blunt appraisals of St. Paul. They saw him as sexist and utterly patriarchal. I still remember one frustrated woman of WIT (a group at Catholic University called “Women in Theology”) who just admitted angrily, “I hate Paul!” If she could, she would have torn his writings out of her bible. But there is the catch. St. Paul is in the Bible and many of us believe that we must wrestle even with those texts that challenge us and are hard to accept. St. Paul is the great apostle to the Gentiles. The Pauline community and its beliefs will become pivotal to the Church’s understanding of sin and the measure of faith, ministry, the family and the Church.
The analogy of the spousal relationship is directly attached to Christ’s relationship to the Church. It is this analogy that is operative at Mass, wherein the priest signifies Christ, the head of the Church; the congregation is immediately reflective of the rest of the Mystical Body. The priest is one with the divine bridegroom; the assembly, representative of the bride of Christ, is identified with the Church. As I have mentioned before, unless one is going to overlook “sacramental lesbianism,” a woman cannot fulfill the function of priest in such a theological framework.
St. Paul wanted women to know their faith and to hand it on in the domestic setting; however, they were not allowed to offer the official teaching that is associated with the presbyter at liturgy. Paul makes it definitively clear that this prescription is tied up with the God-given order of creation (1 Cor. 11:7; Gn. 2:18-24). He further admits to a specified “command from the Lord” (1 Cor. 14:37). Although this command is not known to us, it should not be dismissed. Paul is not a liar. Christ is perceived as the ultimate author of a corpus of religious teaching that must be handed on in exact detail and preserved by the teachers of faith (1 Cor. 11:23, 15:1-2; 2 Tm. 1:13). Several times Paul encountered serious assaults upon his person and office (1 Cor. 1:12, 4:3; 2 Cor. 10-12); if he had invented this “command from the Lord” to shore up his arguments, he would quickly have been stripped of his authority and unveiled as a deceiver. Such did not happen.
Will we allow the truths of Christ via St. Paul to speak to us today? I pray it will be so. I only hope it is not too late. As an experiment I read these passages to several fine women in my parish and even the most docile took some offense. How deep is the secular infection in the hearts and minds of believers? How can we recover St. Paul so that traditional values about ministry and the home can be preserved while women might still be empowered and given the respect they deserve?
POPE JOHN PAUL II: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful” (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis).
Filed under: Bible, Catholic, Church, Priestesses, Priests, Sacraments, Sexuality, Women Priests |
Blogger Priest 
Fr. Joe,
If you want to take those verses in the bible literally, why stop there? I would think you wouldnt be driving a car, or wearing the clothes you have or using the money you are given or eating the tasty food out of the refrigerator you have?
Father Joe,
One last input and then silence from me. I am sad to learn the Archdiocese of Hartford is in apparent noncompliance. The parishes with which I am familiar here do not publish financial accounts at any time (I did not write anything about weekly). My parish has appointed trustees and no financial council, advisory or otherwise.
Respectfully,
Chad
Father Joe, Thank you for the thoughtful response. I also do not seek an argument. I am sorry if I gave the impression that I thought ordination was unnecessary or that sacramental roles should be shared with or assumed by the un-ordained. That is not what I meant, nor do I believe it (bound by the papal citation you included in you original post). The suggestion I was making pertains to the temporal management of the human facets of the institution. I was referring euro-centrically to a past time when the educated and the ordained were largely the same people.
The very extensive modern participation of women and the laity in general that you cite does not extend to any real management authority in the final resort. One example: The Philadelphia review board was systematically “kept in the dark” about matters clearly within their defined remit, with results that ill served the church. I was only attempting to raise the thought that sacramental and preaching functions are not necessarily organically linked to managing the church. In short, I said nothing about dispensing with ordained male priests. I honor the memory of my uncle, a priest of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. I was addressing a very narrow point about the temporal performance of the church and the exclusion of some members from meaningful roles in management, not Holy Orders.
Neither was I critical of bishops acting prudently to protect church assets. I was saddened rather by the public inconsistencies in doing so that bring ridicule to the church. This contributes to the loss of effective moral witness. It is utilitarianism. I do not make any criticism whatever of the lifestyles adopted by recent popes. What I apparently failed to do was illustrate that some views expressed in the Pauline tradition have fallen out of fashion, while others are held as still valid. My reference to a party line was a failed attempt to note that all human organizations, whether sacred or vulgar, use some kind of consensus as an operating framework, and human history is replete with discarded and radically amended manifestos. Before you chide me, I do not conflate the church founded by our Lord with, for example, the Republican party. I admit I was thinking of the recently “retired” Bishop Morris of Australia when I wrote that.
When I joined my parish in 1985 there was an elected parish council and a report of all income and expenditures was provided annually to the congregation. All of that is long gone. More recently in this and the neighboring diocese there have been major public incidents of misappropriation of parish funds by individual pastors. In both cases theoretical financial controls and appointed “trustees” were completely ineffectual. This is a management problem, not a theological one. It would be impertinent of me to inquire about the structures in your diocese.
I actually agree totally with (reportedly) some bishops that the charter is lacking in appropriate due process for accused clergy. It disappoints me that this was not addressed by the USCCB at their last meeting (at least no revision was made). Perhaps I should in charity allow that the lonely episcopal opposition may be as Galileo on this subject. What saddens me is the general outside perception becomes disunity on a critical issue, especially when the dissidents decline to be audited, which has nothing to do with the rights of the accused.
It appears that my comments became an occasion for you to address many current critical lines of thought about the church. That you wrote effectively on those issues is a good thing, I think, but please know that I do not hold or even sympathize with most of the positions you addressed. I seem to have unintentionally provided a “straw man”.
There seems to be a tendency in the blogosphere to apply the label Protestant as derogatory to those who raise questions regarding any precepts of the church. This may at times be valid, but I have seen all too many self-identified “Catholic” websites and blogposts filled with vitriol, condemnation and calumny. Why are these people so afraid? If the Catholic church was not vitally important to me, I would not care about any of these things.
You are certainly correct about the perils of the “interpretive agency” applied to Scripture. I worry about that all the time. For example, the completely contradictory policies of two US archbishops (both of the Capuchin order) regarding the acceptance of children of same-sex parents into Catholic schools confound me.
I am sorry to be so critical. I am the product of an engineering education and a profession that requires testing of everything. It is, in fact, very encouraging to me that many millions of Catholic people, including especially hundreds of thousands of clergy and religious, are doing their best to be faithful to the Gospel and are performing wonders of service all over the world in the name of the Lord. The issues that concern me are of little consequence compared to that. I should learn from St. Paul to discard that which is not useful.
May I say that I have found your blog and those of Cardinal O’Malley and Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI to be among the best Catholic sources I read. The common denominator seems to be an impression of manifest humility.
I suggest that all newly installed bishops be told immediately the old joke about the prospective foreman, who exclaimed “I can hardly wait until I’m the boss and everybody will do what I tell them.”
Respectfully,
Chad
Father, thank you so much for this posting.. and, I most likely am in majority as I am a woman but, I agree with Paul… There shouldn’t ever be women priests because it’s not how it is supposed to be as you have so eloquently laid out for those who have eyes to see… As for the questioning of some “why even have priests?” without priests there is no reconciliation. Without priests there is no Eucharist and without the Eucharist there is no life and light , there is only darkness and death..
Father Jenkins, Thank you for your summary of the tradition (known in another context as the party line). Pope Benedict recently reiterated that you cannot interpret and apply individual passages in the Bible without taking account of the whole. That is why we are not fundamentalists. I can, for example, quote St. Paul that there is no longer male and female, but this would not serve. St. Paul boasted that he did not depend on charity, but worked at his trade to support himself. Yet our 21st century pontiff lives in totally dependent splendor. Some things change, others not, yes? I believe the real problem here is not the assignment of the sacramental role solely to males, but rather the arrogation of all authority and administrative “governance” in the church (speaking of the human institution) to the ordained. (I realize you were addressing only ordination). It more or less functioned in the era of mass ignorance (uneducated laity), but is looking pretty silly lately, as ignorance is now of a different degree and kind. You look for a way to get women to accept subordinate status while still getting deserved respect. Well, you do not have to be an ordained priest to recognize the spectacular failures of some contemporary ordained church leaders for what they are: the same myopic, incoherent, self-referential blunders we see all the time from corporate and political authorities. I am not condemning, just pointing out the ubiquity of sinfulness. Women and the laity in general could hardly do worse, and might do better. You know that the Twelve reportedly found it inappropriate that they should spend time in administration, so they delegated the job.
You wrote recently of your sadness that the Corapi affair was giving the appearance of the church fighting itself. I am also saddened, as as I am by two individual US bishops who somehow know better than several hundred of their peers how to deal with child protection issues (one of whom recently was honored by the Holy See). How about the spectacle of one US diocese maintaining in court that parish assets were not diocesan (to minimize abuse settlements), while simultaneously another maintained the exact opposite (to facilitate asset stripping of closed parishes)?
I will continue to pray for faith and understanding. Thank you for your service to the People of God. I think I can imagine a little of how difficult it is to be a priest today and I hope you will receive the thanks you are owed and the grace and strength to persevere.
Chad