I write as someone who felt called to ordained service for many years, but realized early on that I could never serve in the Roman Catholic Church that I had entered as an adult following a strong religious conversion experience. The fact that I was married with children was not the real issue. An Eastern Rite priest once offered to help me do seminary studies in the Middle East, from which (he said) I could appeal to be incardinated into a Latin Rite diocese in the United States. It sounded a bit too much like carpet-bagging to me, but more than that, I realized that I could never put my hands into those of a Roman Catholic Bishop and swear obedience to a set of teachings (e.g., the prohibition on so-called "artificial" birth control, the denial of Eucharist to divorced and remarried people, the limitation of presbyteral ordination to publically-celibate males, papal infallibility--even tightly interpreted) that I just couldn't accept in good conscience. And I saw what happened to many men who, stretched on the cross between their awareness of the needs of their people and the demands of the hierarchy, often left in despair, or went the way of self-medication, or led dual lives, or succumbed to a kind of institutional cynicism that poisoned or made impossible a loving relationship to the non-ordained members of the Church.
And perhaps even more than that, I tired of the intramural squabbling that took--and takes--up so much ink in the Roman Catholic press. There's just too much need in the world to spend time in fruitless disputation. As a friend who is an evangelical Pastor said to me one dark winter afternoon, "There's a lot of pain out there, Lar. You can feel it when you walk down the street." I felt that God was leading me, through my involvement in jail ministry and hospice work, to be present to that pain in a sacramentally-healing way, and I didn't want to waste any more energy on arguing theological points that for me were settled. So, with deep sadness, I left and sought out a community that honored the historically-Catholic sacramental and spiritual life, but didn't require me to say "yes" to that to which I could only honestly say "no." I found that home and for the past ten years have served as an ordained Chaplain in hospice ministry. I tell people that our little group didn't leave the neighborhood, we just moved next door. In a sense, I left the Holy Father's house as I left my own father's house: with love and respect, but with a resolve to live as an adult Christian taking personal responsibility for my spiritual life.
I write the above as a gentle admonition to Ms. McGowan not to absent herself from the Eucharist, but to find a place where she can receive it without all the inner conflicts that I'm sure afflict her as they used to afflict me. Of course, as a non-cradle Catholic (Lutheran, actually), I don't have the cultural and family ties that so many others do. But for me, Jesus is more than culture and more than "mere human tradition" (cf. Mt. 15:9). Has it been lonely? At times, yes (my former Spiritual Director pretty much disowned me); but fortunately, I have wonderful lay and ordained Roman Catholic friends who remain such but have resolved to live out their lives in an expansive relationship with the Church and to serve as prophets in its midst. Alas, the Spirit seems to have had other ideas for me.
My prayer for Ms. McGowan and others like her is that, whatever they do, they find "the peace that passes all understanding," wherever it may lead them.
An obvious place to begin is to ordain women to the diaconate. I have worked with a great many women deacons and clergy from other faiths and find that they are the most dedicated and sincere workers one could imagine. Women as deacons would preach, baptize, marry, conduct funeral rites and proclaim the gospel in a voice that would penetrate our deafness to women's gifts. The scriptures seem to indicate that St. Paul, the most strict about women in the church, himself left women in charge as deacons in the early Greek church. One would suppose the practice was farily widespread in the first centuries in Greek and Roman communities. Why not bring back this sacred and holy practice and empower our women to lead us, officially.
I could not agree more with JoMcGowan. The obstinacy with which the hierarchy persists in refusing the ordination of women is a scandal and the reasons given for it are, at the very least, as the great theologian Karl Rahner concluded, "unconvincing." As far back as 1929, Teilhard de Chardin wrote: "It as sometimes seemed to me there are three weak stones sitting dangerously in the foundations of the modern Church: first a government that excludes democracy; second, a priesthood that excludes and minimizes women; third, a revelation that excludes for the future, prophecy." Now, after eighty years and Vatican Council II, how little has changed in the governing Church.
Even more troubling for me is the ability of the hierarchy to keep potential scandal in silence, as if ignoring it or keeping it quiet will make it go away. I am not only speaking of sexual abuse of children. Each diocese has its own form of scandal bubbling just under the surface but being ignored until it erupts and has to be dealt with. In fact, it reminds me of the situation in the Gulf of Mexico.
Jo,
The solution on the political level in the church is the democratic practice of widespread, persistent, organized civil disobedience. That is entirely unacceptable to the male hierarchy and to the lower clergy and probably to most catholic laity. Women Church is probably the closest thing to it and that didn't work. On the religious level conversion is the answer and you can never count on that! It would be nice to be able to take the long view and say that the conversion will take a century or two, but there is also the chance that in a century or two the boys will be there and in charge, and that their view that this discrimination is in fact the will of the Savior will have proved itself true by prevailing, sad to say. But I who support your position and sympathize with your outrage haven't been able to bring myself to stop going to mass. It's hard these days to know why that is so! I do hope to see you at church soon.
Bill Shea
It is tough, isn't it, Jo? We as church are run from the top, by men who were born and raised a great many years ago. Expectations of women, well, were different! Barely beyond property? Sex objects?
Change is difficult. People often must wait until the pain of staying the same is so much greater than the pain of choosing change that life is unbearable.
The context of the early church was stretching minds to cope with inclusion of Gentiles. Perhaps today's context may be stretching minds to cope with inclusion of a wider segment of humanity as potential servants of the church.
Perhaps a first step may become for a Pope to place specific restrictions against women becoming pastors or bishops or cardinals? Women deacons only if their husband is also a deacon; women priests only if their husband is also a priest?
Two thousand years from now we may be the early church. Will "they" point to us, laughing in astonishment that we had a Year for Paul and a Year for Priests without ever looking at all the words Paul left for us, or at who we allowed to serve us, the church?
Hmm, and in heaven, when all is made known, will the Popes who are first in the church on earth be last because they are busy on the side, in tears, as they realize what they could have done to take care of us, their church -- and thereby spread the Word more gently, effectively and widely to the unchurched?
If I may, tongue in cheek - What qualities of ministry attach to the male over the female sex organs, or more graphically, to the penis over the vagina?
As to "ethereal images of the Eucharist as a nuptial banquet with a male priest the only possible stand-in for the groom" here is Eugene Kennedy commenting on Fulton Sheen in a TV interview when Paul VI celebrated mass in NYC:
"Sheen spoke with hushed grandiosity of the Eucharist as celebrated on an altar as a functional sacramental marriage bed. He was almost breathless as he evoked the moment of reception as that sublime instant of union between the lover and the beloved. In the stunned hush that followed, a Protestant bishop intervened in a gentle but mildly ironic tone ‘I had always thought of the Eucharist as a meal and the altar as the table…"
Me too.
I write as someone who felt called to ordained service for many years, but realized early on that I could never serve in the Roman Catholic Church that I had entered as an adult following a strong religious conversion experience. The fact that I was married with children was not the real issue. An Eastern Rite priest once offered to help me do seminary studies in the Middle East, from which (he said) I could appeal to be incardinated into a Latin Rite diocese in the United States. It sounded a bit too much like carpet-bagging to me, but more than that, I realized that I could never put my hands into those of a Roman Catholic Bishop and swear obedience to a set of teachings (e.g., the prohibition on so-called "artificial" birth control, the denial of Eucharist to divorced and remarried people, the limitation of presbyteral ordination to publically-celibate males, papal infallibility--even tightly interpreted) that I just couldn't accept in good conscience. And I saw what happened to many men who, stretched on the cross between their awareness of the needs of their people and the demands of the hierarchy, often left in despair, or went the way of self-medication, or led dual lives, or succumbed to a kind of institutional cynicism that poisoned or made impossible a loving relationship to the non-ordained members of the Church.
And perhaps even more than that, I tired of the intramural squabbling that took--and takes--up so much ink in the Roman Catholic press. There's just too much need in the world to spend time in fruitless disputation. As a friend who is an evangelical Pastor said to me one dark winter afternoon, "There's a lot of pain out there, Lar. You can feel it when you walk down the street." I felt that God was leading me, through my involvement in jail ministry and hospice work, to be present to that pain in a sacramentally-healing way, and I didn't want to waste any more energy on arguing theological points that for me were settled. So, with deep sadness, I left and sought out a community that honored the historically-Catholic sacramental and spiritual life, but didn't require me to say "yes" to that to which I could only honestly say "no." I found that home and for the past ten years have served as an ordained Chaplain in hospice ministry. I tell people that our little group didn't leave the neighborhood, we just moved next door. In a sense, I left the Holy Father's house as I left my own father's house: with love and respect, but with a resolve to live as an adult Christian taking personal responsibility for my spiritual life.
I write the above as a gentle admonition to Ms. McGowan not to absent herself from the Eucharist, but to find a place where she can receive it without all the inner conflicts that I'm sure afflict her as they used to afflict me. Of course, as a non-cradle Catholic (Lutheran, actually), I don't have the cultural and family ties that so many others do. But for me, Jesus is more than culture and more than "mere human tradition" (cf. Mt. 15:9). Has it been lonely? At times, yes (my former Spiritual Director pretty much disowned me); but fortunately, I have wonderful lay and ordained Roman Catholic friends who remain such but have resolved to live out their lives in an expansive relationship with the Church and to serve as prophets in its midst. Alas, the Spirit seems to have had other ideas for me.
My prayer for Ms. McGowan and others like her is that, whatever they do, they find "the peace that passes all understanding," wherever it may lead them.
Notwithstanding the considerable merits of her argument regarding the place of women within the church, I do not understand the logic of her action in not going to mass. In fact, it is bizarre. In substance she is saying "I don't agree with you, I object to what you are doing, therefor I will do harm to myself." Curious.