It's Going To Take Much More Than Just Adding Women To The Clerical Mix

Eugene Kennedy has written another provocative essay for the National Catholic Reporter. I post it here because I think it deserves discussion and that doens't happen on the NCR over any week end. Besides, I don't competely agree with his conclusion.

If the church ordained women, there would be no sex abuse crisis
by Eugene Cullen Kennedy - National Catholic Reporter - May 21, 2010

Some years ago I asked in a column, "If the church ordained women would there be fewer abortions?" I suggested that recognizing women as fully equal with men would have obviated centuries of the repression, injustice, and pain inflicted on women and cleared the air of the edgy suspicion and anxiety with which many men, including church leaders, have regarded women throughout the centuries.

In the last century, women sought equal rights for themselves as human beings from the men who had grown up believing that they constituted a second and lesser sex whose main role was, in ways too many to number and too scandalous to name, to take care of them. Had the church ordained women it would have automatically changed history, making them equal in all ways, and striking off the emotional chains that had bound them, voiceless, in time's dungeon. Men would have had to relate to them on the same footing and much of the longing for independence that is symbolized in the abortion struggle would have been lessened.

This is beginning to sound as improbable as "Avatar," but duck away from the cascade of unconvincing arguments dumped on women (e.g., "Women don't look like men so they can't represent Jesus,"} by the usual suspects of the curial all-star theology team. Imagine instead that the church had affirmed their human equality by welcoming women into the priesthood. What would the results be?

Such action would have killed Clerical Culture: Like a noxious species wiped out by a meteor before it could evolve into a monstrosity, Clerical Culture would never have come into being. Women would not have stood for it. To grow, it needed an all-male environment, an agar plate as smooth as a fairway on which women were forbidden to play.

Some women were granted visiting rights to Clerical Culture -- the mothers of priests who were also necessary for its flourishing. These women had enormous influence on little Johnny's going to and remaining in the seminary, and were happy to spoil him on his vacations and later on his days off. They were, we might say, enablers who were glad to have their priest sons hanging around the exclusive clerical club house. They could be boys forever.

Priests' mothers cannot be faulted for accepting the honored place, right next to the statue of the Blessed Mother, where Clerical Culture placed them. Their revered presence -- symbolized by their hands being bound at death with the same linen cloth that bound their sons' hands at ordination -- meant that other women were not welcome, at least not as close range, another prerequisite for a booming Clerical Culture.

In classic Clerical Culture, women were handmaids of the lords, allowed in by the servants' entrance and regularly reminded by men, from the pope on down, that they were inferior by nature and, much like slaves cruelly counted as half persons, they were expected to know their place and meet male demands without making any of their own.

Priests liked to make jokes that you could not have women priests because they couldn't keep the secret of the confessional and Pope John Paul II became so exercised over the issue that he instructed then Cardinal Ratzinger to fashion a prohibition in the form of an infallible declaration. Not surprisingly, led by sensible women, Catholics paid little attention to this.

Would sex abuse have occurred if there were adult women in the priesthood standing up to and confronting the troubled male priests who preyed on the children in their care? Indeed, would Clerical Culture, with its locker room ambience and it odors of cigar smoke, bay rum, and Bushmill's whisky, have survived the clear eyed gaze of women who made clerics put away their toys and grow up?

Clerical Culture was the essential breeding ground of the sex abuse crisis. This crisis was also hidden in the violet trimmed folds of this unique social milieu. It conferred respect, esteem, and the benefit of the doubt on those priests who could not earn it on their own and who carried out furtive erotic raids on the innocent in its maze-like structure. This culture allowed the unhealthy to pass for healthy and lead secret lives whose corrupt form they themselves did not understand.

Women priests would not have allowed this tragic feasting on children to go on for an hour without taking action to end it. Healthy women do not put up with unhealthy men and this crisis would have been averted had the priesthood had enough healthy women in it to make the unhealthy men either grow up or get out. (The problem with this whole argument is it assumes the presence of healthy women. Much more than the ordination of women would have been needed to insure a clerical culture that would attract healthy people. Adding women while leaving the historic theology would only have attracted equally unhealthy women.)

The church would have been wise to adapt the old advertising slogan, "Do you want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman." Did the church want to avoid the sex abuse crisis and guarantee the manliness of its priests? It should have tried letting women do the job.

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There is an awful lot in this essay I like, especially Kennedy's analysis of the influence of the mother's of priests. I suppose this is a sad statement, but some of the most healthy priests I've had the privilege to meet, only got that way after the death of their parents--especially their mothers. I often wonder if this dynamic isn't why Jesus warned His disciples that if they were to follow Him they had best be prepared for dissension in their families and to ultimately leave them behind. Sometimes the real personal battles aren't fought over deciding between God and Mammon, but deciding between God and family.

Early Church Fathers certainly recognized the pull and influence of families on the future adult believer. The analogies of Catholicism as the spiritual religious equivalent of one's biological family are all over the place, starting with the words of Jesus Himself. Unlike Jesus though, the Church has seldom warned that there is the very real issue of being overly influenced by one's family and by extension one's religious family. Mother, whether it be mom or Mother Church, is not always deserving of one's undying allegiance. Jesus recognized this universal truth. Sometimes in the interests of following His way, it was better to take a hike.

We have such powerful connections with the family that the mere thought of being ostracised by our families can literally be experienced as a fear worse than death itself. One only need look at the incidence of suicide amongst gay teens to see this truth. When teens come to the conclusion it's better to abort themselves than suffer potential rejection, it's a sad statement about the nature of maternal love. And that sad statement is as true for Mother Church as it is for some biological mothers. What's even sadder is it is Mother Church that is giving all the permission Catholic mothers need to set up that dynamic for their gay children---out of love no less.

Jesus said it was perfectly reasonable for children to reject their families for their own spiritual good. He had the exact opposite opinion about parents rejecting their children, as He so beautifully demonstrated in the parable of the prodigal son. What's often lost in that story is that the father accepted his son back on his son's terms, not on some arbitrary standard of re admittance.

It is for reasons such as these that I don't have the same assumptions about the influence of women on clerical culture that Eugene Kennedy does. He may be right, that if the Church had added healthy women from day one, things would now be vastly different. I just don't know where those healthy women were going to come from given the culture in which the Church was born. Yes, the Gospels are full of examples of this kind of healthy woman, but they seem to be the exception, the fruit of Jesus's direct teachings, not the products of their society. Once the men took over His mission, the teachings quickly changed and women were again relegated to, and enculturated in, accepting their less than manly status. It's just plain old human nature to repeat one's enculturation.

It's easier to go with flow than row against it. Jesus knew this and it's why He challenged Peter to walk above the flow. Peter almost did it too. Almost is the operative word. It's also the operative word for how the early Church got many of the things Jesus taught. The results, compounded after two millenia, is what we have now: a very flawed misogynistic church. To add women to this clerical mess without changing a great deal of the underlying theology will not result in much healing, The official church would eventually select it's pool of female candidates on it's own existing terms, and those terms have never been very healthy for women--or some of their children.