Women In The Clergy Doesn't Have To Be A Threat, But It Sure Is

Forty years ago this was such a violation of gender roles women hockey players were unthinkable.  Unfortunately  Catholicism has not seen fit to open the limits of it's female gender expectations for quite a bit longer than forty years and it's truly harming the Church.

Over at his blog Bilgrimage, Bill Lyndsey starts out a recent post with a really important statement.  I've been thinking a lot about this sentence for the past couple days, especially the last clause:

"One of the most fateful (and evil) decisions made by the Catholic hierarchy in the 20th and 21st century has been to treat the movement of women around the world to claim full personhood and a full range of human rights for women as illegitimate, and as a threat to the Catholic faith."

Bill's post goes on to ponder the recent Hobby Lobby decision and it's ties to the GOP attacks on women's reproductive rights, but my musing dealt specifically with why women's rights are treated by the Church as a real threat to the Church itself.  It's not just women's rights that seems to be the threat, it's gender redefinition that is more and more becoming a major talking point in conservative Catholic circles.  The attempt to circumscribe women's ability to access contraception and abortion are the most visible signs of the Church's discomfort with the advancement of women claiming full personhood, but my gut says this 'threat' is about way more than whether women have enough babies to satisfy the male God.  There seems to be something more going on.

Here's another example of the threat of gender redefinition in another area.  This comment concerns the problems the Anglican Church have with installing women bishops.  On the surface the comment first struck me as frivolous and then I really thought about the point Tridentinus was making and I think he is absolutely right about a certain mindset:

"Can you imagine the C of E with half of its bishops not recognising the other half as priests, let alone bishops? Can you imagine the problem for parishes in deciding whether their priest was validly ordained or not? Every priest will have to have a pedigree declaring that no woman was involved in his ordination nor in the ordination of the bishop who ordained him or the bishop who consecrated that bishop. Ok, for now but in twenty years?
The mind boggles.
It doesn't really matter anyway as none of them are in Holy Orders but transpose it to the Catholic Church and the result is chaos."

What boggled my mind is thinking a given priest or bishop would have to have proof of ordination that didn't include women anywhere along the priestly pedigree.  It's hard for me to think of a pedigree or lineage that excludes the female half, but that's what Roman Catholicism has bequeathed to the world...a spiritual ministry whose pedigree is free of the female.  Is this supposed to be the most pure thing male humanity can imagine God wants,  or is this just truly sick?  

After much thought, I have come to the conclusion it's truly sick and that Bill Lyndsey is truly right, only in a sick system can the movement towards the full personhood of women be a threat to Catholicism.  Pope Francis can talk all he wants about a deeper theology of women, but what Catholicism really needs is not a deeper theology of women, but to reflect on why so much of it's current theology, eccelsiology,  discipline, and doctrine excludes the thought and presence of women and why that developed into the albatross it's proving to be for the post modern world.  If this evaluation was done honestly and with integrity, I think we would find out it didn't start with Jesus.

I think one thing that needs to happen is exactly what happened with women's athletics back about forty years ago.  A lot of men back then thought women's team athletics was nothing more than a few 'wannabe men' or terminal 'tom boys' who were hell bent on forcing their way onto the masculine stage.  Sports for women was almost exclusively individual sports like tennis, golf, swimming, gymnastics, and some track events.  Those sports featured girls and women cavorting in skirts or short shorts or swim suits and for the most featured grace and elegance, but not too much power and muscle, and were to be given up immediately upon marriage and motherhood.  Team sports like basketball and volleyball and softball and such represented some sort of gender busting magical line.  Hockey was unthinkable..except by a few of us whose dads or brothers needed us to be puck fodder in a hockey goal and we were dumb enough to do it just to be included in the fun.  We found out it was a lot of fun.

Then came Title IX and everything changed for women.  For my male contemporaries, some who really were upset with this legislation,  I would laughingly tell them wait until you have a daughter and then suddenly realize you have another captive audience for your sport fantasies.  It's amazing to me how many of these daughters went onto have great careers in sports.  So I know change in gender roles and expectations can happen, be accepted, rejoiced in and bragged about--endlessly.  Every time I watch a women's college basketball game between U Conn and Tennessee I have to pinch myself because back in my day we were lucky to get our parents and family to come and watch our games.  

The problem for the Church is priests don't have daughters and that means our lay men are going to have to do some 'mansplainin' to their clerical brothers about the fact there are no magic gender lines.  There's only patriarchy and an unexamined expectation about gender roles--roles that women never had a lot of input in how they developed, but that input is precisely what today's woman expects to have....and that's probably the big 'threat' to Catholicism and the root to all the clerical angst about femi nazis and the evolution of gender roles. Women expect to be treated as intellectual and spiritual equals and will not accept a few token crumbs.  Game on.