Women, the Priesthood and Catholicism

by Urban T. Holmes

from Towards a New Theology of Ordination: Essays on the Ordination of Women, pp.52-60.

Ed. by Marianne H. Micks and Charles P.Price, Virginia Theological Seminary,
Greeno, Hadden &Company Ltd. Somerville, Mass., 1976

Urban T. Holmes is Dean of the School of Theology at the University of the South, and has written and lectured extensively on the ordination of women, and is joint editor with Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, of the Presiding Bishop’s study on priesthood and sexuality.

The mainstream of the Christian tradition over the last two thousand years lies within one cultural pattern, the Graeco-Roman world, with two basic variations upon the fundamental theme, the Eastern and the Western. Certainly there have been and are exceptions to this. There is, for example, the ancient Mar Thoma Church of India, the indigenous remnants of sixteenth century Jesuit missionary activity in the Far East, and some nativistic Christian groups in Africa. These elements have not been, however, in any sense a part of the cultural context which has been the shaping influence upon the understanding of the religious experience which we call Christian theology.

In fact, the intellectual world in which the Christian tradition has evolved is so monochrome that undoubtedly many are incapable of identifying the process by which the transcendent experience of God necessarily takes on the texture, color, and form of a given culture. Perhaps we are aware of the anomaly of building eleventh century English Romanesque churches in Kenya, Fiji or western Kansas on the grounds that this is “what a church is supposed to look like,” but are we equally aware that a patriarchal society, characteristic of the heirs of Greek and Roman thought, produces a masculine notion of God, which when imposed upon a matriarchal society might be just as much an anomaly? We speak of the “faith once delivered to the saints” and the “mind of the Church,” often without realizing that we are identifying the divine intentionality with cultural patterns of a relatively short span of human history within a limited social context.

It would be gratuitous in the extreme to suggest that we despise our Graeco-Roman culture, Western or Eastern. Whether or not it has come to the end of its productivity, as some say, is debatable; but we are our culture, and we can no more deny it than we can deny our natural parents. We do need to understand, however, that language, norms of human inter-action, symbols and myths, aesthetic values, etc. are elements of culture. While our culture provides us with the only available tools of theological thought, and we ought to be thankful for them, they inevitably produce a distorted representation of any experience they describe. This is true no matter how reasoned a use we make of these tools, since our community necessarily influences our use of reason itself.(1) Therefore, while we are grateful for the richness of a cultural heritage such as the mainstream of Christianity has possessed in the profundity of the Greek and Roman mind, nonetheless we must use its gift with humility. We need to be careful not to claim an absolute quality for what only the ineffable mind of God can possess.

This issue comes into sharp focus on the matter of the ordination of women to the priesthood. There have been those who have said that there are no theological reasons why women should not be ordained priest. There have even been those who have claimed that it is a matter of theological indifference. Both of these observations represent a negative theological approach to the question. Actually the debate over the ordination of women to the priesthood raises at least one very important theological issue and makes a positive contribution at no less than two levels to the whole theological process. The one very important issue is that of the elusive problem of speaking of God in a given cultural context. The two levels at which it contributes to the task of theology are, first, as a challenge to the masculine theology of the patriarchal Graeco-Roman culture of which we are a part; and, second, as a possible stimulus for a more catholic expression of the experience of God.

The reason why the question of the ordination of women to the priesthood lies in the area of a positive theology is related to the function of the priest. Quite aside from the doctrine of the priesthood, the person of the priest is a very powerful force in representing completely the experience of God. Speaking practically, the priest has a focal role in those events—liturgy, teaching, preaching, counseling—in which we consciously seek the mediation of God to humanity. It does not matter whether we are speaking of the preacher in the Puritan meeting house or the celebrant at a Solemn High Mass. The person of the priest takes on a symbolic function, irrespective of our theology of the church, the sacraments, or the ministry. He is a pivotal figure.

In the First Letter to the Corinthians Paul complains of division in the church, “When one says, ‘I am Paul’s man,’ and another, ‘I am for Apollos.’” He adds, “Are you not all too human? After all, what is Apollos? What is Paul? We are simply God’s agents in bringing you to faith” (1 Cor 3:4- 5). Paul is being naive, perhaps intentionally. The agent which Apollos and Paul and every priest is becomes identified with that God for which he is the agent.

Every clergyman has the frequent experience of being called “God” by little children. The child differs from the adult only in that the process of equating the one represented with the one representing is transparent. This is why I speak of the priest as the “sacramental person.”(2) It is something of what Luther meant when he said that a person is larva Dei, “the mask of God.”(3) No one has seen God, but we have seen the one who stands in for God; and while this can be and is any person since we are all made in God’s image, this function is focused in that person authorized to preside at the Eucharist, preach, and bless and absolve in God’s name—that is, to do the godly actions.

This is a difficult point for some because, as I suspect, the priest was for centuries a civic official and has recently become a professional, and neither model adequately conveys the symbolic function of the priest.(4) Both fail to capture the fact that to be a priest means to live for that which transcends the commonwealth and is above human knowledge and skills, as well as to be a means of participation in the transcendent One. Surely this makes a large claim for a human agent! Henri Nouwen’s image of the priest as the “wounded healer,” however, who restores wholeness by making his own brokenness and search for healing available to others enables us to see that such an understanding of the clergyman is not one of presumption, but of surrender to the love of God.(5)

The person of the priest, his very being, becomes then part of the substance of our almost instinctive image of God, and the stuff from which theology is made. Perhaps this is not true of one priest or a half dozen, but it is true of the composite of priesthood as consistently reinforced in so many times and places. The priest is symbol and, as Paul Ricoeur has said, “symbol invites thought” (or invites to do theology).(6) The masculine priesthood evokes a masculine image of God, and the masculine image of God makes a male priesthood part of the will of God.

Much of the women’s liberation movement has broken into this circle by pointing out that the attributes of gender are a product of culture and that the person is not its sexuality. It must be carefully noted that this is going beyond the earlier suggestion that the exclusively masculine interpretation of God is a product of the patriarchal Graeco-Roman culture. There is nothing absolute, as I have already said, about this excessively masculine emphasis. It might appear then that I agree with their point of view that the denial of ordination to the priesthood to women is merely an ideological question and has nothing to do with theological truth.(7) This is not, however, the case.

Certainly there is a great deal of evidence that the bulk of behavior patterns and attitudes we attribute to gender is culturally induced, even if we do not underestimate the power of culture. For example, while it may be culturally accepted, it is not in accord with “human nature,” as far as we can tell, that women cry more than men, that women are more religious than men, that men make better artists than women, or that women like to keep house more than men.

There is a danger, however, that in affirming this truth we miss one that suggests there is more to the question of the ordination of women to the priesthood than the acknowledgement of the relativity of cultural images. If we say, as we have, that Christian theology has been shaped in one cultural pattern and that this has given the tradition a peculiar texture, color, and form, this is not to say that there is not a resource for theology that underlies the multiplicity of cultures and has a universal quality. At least some scholars would suggest there is such a universal context. Carl Jung spoke of the collective unconscious; ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz and Desmond Morris describe the genetic patterning of behaviour; Noam Chomsky, a linguist, refers to the deep grammar; and anthropologists look for what is common to all mankind, if it only amounts to the incest taboo.(8)

The universality of the dying and rising God, the prevalance of the sacred meal, and the sense that death is not the end of what is valuable in a life are examples of images embedded in the underlying resource, which are available to all cultures. Where some in the women’s liberation movement overstate their case is in their failure—as understandable as it may be—to grasp the very likely possibility that the masculine and feminine symbols, joined in a creative tension, are also located within that underlying resource. This is to say there is possibly more to gender than culture. To be a person is not to be asexual. There is no such creature! To be a person is to possess, not as part of its cultural heritage, but of its human heritage, that symbolic reality (the most powerful reality of all) of masculinity and femininity in interaction.

Without attempting to describe extensively the nature of the masculine and feminine symbols and their relation to one another, briefly they can be identified with the thought patterns traditionally associated with the right and left hands, respectively, as attributed in Robert Ornstein’s research in the functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain.(9) The masculine is associated with the dextrous, the explicit, the analytical, the causal, the active, the creative, etc. The feminine in turn is related to the sinister, the tacit, the ambiguous, the spontaneous, the receptive, the nonlineal, etc.

The masculine is not the possession of the male individual to the exclusion of the feminine nor is the feminine the possession of the female individual to the exclusion of the masculine. Sometimes women who have followed in general agreement to this point will resist the possibility of a male writing about the feminine, because “he knows nothing about it.” This is not true for the male who is seeking to understand himself in his entirety. In fact, for the man who has struggled with the feminine symbol within his own inner resources there may be greater understanding than in the woman who has taken it for granted.

Historically man has denied the feminine symbol within himself to his own peril. This has been true of man particularly when he is a member of a patriarchal society, such as our Graeco-Roman culture. It is evidenced in the male’s attempt to protect himself from the feminine symbol within himself as much as from without by forming exclusive male associations.(l0) The more we are threatened by the feminine the more frantically the males exclude the females from certain places, times, and activities. The feminine is often seen as “polluting.” Just to name some contemporary examples, there is the hunting camp, the club or the bar (depending on one’s social class), the secret society, and until recently the corporate structure. The Roman Curia is another example, which the priestly establishment might take to heart. Certainly the reaction of some priests in recent years to the ordination of women to the priesthood has taken on more the characteristics of finding that a woman has joined the fraternity than of commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

If the masculine and feminine symbols and their interrelation are the common resource of every person, which underlies and extends far beyond their particular cultural conditioning, it has to be also said that the male individual is more likely to bring into consciousness the masculine symbol and the female individual the feminine symbol. In other words, a significant meeting with a woman is going to evoke in a person the possibility of interpreting all that touches upon that experience in terms of the feminine. There is no doubt, for example, that the presence of a woman in a social gathering heightens the awareness and deepens the respect for the portentous implications of obscenity.(1l) In the same way when a male is the consistent adept at ritual functions we attribute to the God he invokes notions of law-giving, single-minded clarity, initiative, and mastery.

There is nothing wrong with such notions of God, as far as they go. The problem is that in an excessively masculine society, whose patriarchal culture has consistently sought to repress the feminine symbol in the underlying resources of humanity, such notions are held to the exclusion of a balancing imagery, resulting in heresy. The word “heresy” is the opposite of the word “catholic,” and means to choose one dimension of the available meaning of God as opposed to another.(12) The Catholic faith is one that expresses the whole possible meaning. The denial of the feminine in ourselves and in the understanding of the experience of God makes such wholeness impossible. It is time that those who appeal to the obsessively narrow-minded grasp of sexuality in Graeco-Roman culture as being “Catholic” realize the one-sidedness of that claim.

The history of Christianity is filled with examples of the underlying feminine symbol attempting to break through this cultural repression, which the church tragically confused with the revealed word of God. The brief identification of the Holy Spirit as “she,” the “underground mythology” surrounding Mary Magdelene (recently appearing in the most lovely of the songs in Jesus Christ, Superstar), the twelfth century “courts of love,” the cult of the Blessed Virgin, and the matriarchal monastic conventicles are examples. If they sometimes took on pathological dimensions, such as the spontaneous cruelty of medieval man, this is because repressed needs often do. Perhaps the worst “repressors” were the Puritans, whose rigorous and distant God was the most masculine of all, and for them the feminine emerged in its most demonic form: the witch.

It is a moot point whether the ordination of women to the priesthood would be the result, or the cause, or both, of the deterioration of the patriarchal Graeco-Roman culture. This is not a question the Church needs to resolve. What is needed is the realization that the feminine symbol in relation to the masculine symbol needs to find a place in the life and, consequently, the consciousness of the church’s understanding of the experience of God. It is time that we cease to suffer the ill effects of the denial that has for two thousand years drawn us into heresy. Perhaps that is strong language, but the proverbial “two-by-four” is needed both for those of us who equate a monochrome cultural experience with the possibilities of God’s revelation and for those who do not recognize the deeply embedded power of the symbol of human sexuality.

It would be wrong to ignore the frightening dimensions of the proposal that lies before the church. The masculine understanding of God can make us fearful as one is afraid of the familiar tyrannical father. This is not the kind of terror, however, which we face as we contemplate a God mediated to us by persons who bring into our consciousness the feminine symbol. The God of the Puritans was banal and dull. The God that women priests might conjure up before us will be quite different. Such a God is not familiar; she lives in the darkness of the earth, nurturing and creative. We still do not understand her moods and we cannot predict her ways. She is not the God of the computer, she is the God of the artist. Before her we feel the fright of the unknown that knows no control.

John S. Dunne wrote in A Search for God in Time and Memory that contemporary man will find God in the darkness, not the light of his life.(l3) He is speaking of that reduction which results from identifying the self with the light of our learning, not the light of God’s presence. His imagery recalls the little child, lying frightened in his dark bedroom, calling out for help. Dunne quotes Paul in saying that we cry out, “Abba,” meaning in Aramaic, “Daddy.” I know and admire Dunne, but I can only believe he has been seduced by the excessive masculinity of the Apostle. No child I know of, afraid of the dark, calls “Daddy.” It is rather “Mama.”

Notes

1. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (3rd ed.; New York: Philosophical Library, 1970), pp. 385 - 387, refers to the underlying problem in all metaphysics of the “polymorphist” nature of human understanding, requiring the dialectical and genetic cognitive process, in which objectivity lies before us and not in our grasp.

2. Urban T. Holmes, The Future Shape of Ministry (New York: Seabury Press, 1971), pp. 8 - 32.

3. Cit. Charles R. Meyer, Man of God: A Study of the Priesthood (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1974), p. 138.

4. A further discussion of what I mean by this statement will be found in Robert E. Terwilliger and Urban T. Holmes, eds., To Be a Priest (N.Y.: Seabury Press, 1975).

5. Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1974), pp. 85 - 98.

6. Cit. Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God , (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 6.

7. It would seem to me that this is what Emily C. Hewitt and Suzanne R. Hiatt Women as Priests: Yes or No (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 44, are saying. The argument that follows suggests that, while the word “difference” conjures up some unfortunate images and should be avoided, the reality of the feminine and masculine symbols are not a matter of indifference.

8. Some will imagine in what I have identified as the “underlying resource” a definite commitment to Jung, since he is so popular now. I would hope that the reader would understand that the term I am using is intentionally vague and avoids Jung’s vocabulary because I do not believe the argument rests upon the acceptance or rejection of Jung’s theories.

9. Robert E. Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness (New York: Viking Press, 1972), pp. 50- 101.

10. Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (New York: Random House, 1969) traces the evolution of male bonding from the viewpoint of ethology. It has many implications for the kind of “defensive bonding” I have indicated here.

11. I use this illustration in order to suggest that there is much more to some of our heterosexual manners than mere convention. The obscene is not simply a matter of having a “dirty mind.” The obscene relates to the pollution of the incongruous and connotes the ominous that lies within the unknown powerful, dark, inner drives of man. The word itself means “portentous,” “sinister,” and is related to the feminine symbol in such a way that one is not “obscene” lightly with the feminine part of our consciousness.

12. The word “catholic” comes from the Greek, kath holon, meaning “according to the whole thing." The Catholic Church is the entire people of God, who take into account all possible truth. A good Catholic would also be a good Protestant, because when we seek to be true to the whole, we become very aware of how partial our sight is and “protest” any identification of historical embodiment of the experience of God with the absolute nature of God per se. The word “heretic” comes from the Greek, haireomai, meaning “to choose” or “to take for oneself.” The word “heretic” has been used in a very cruel way in the history of the Church, and it is understandable why some in the name of tolerance avoid it. However, if we deny the possibility of heresy we lapse into a solipsism, where nothing can be held to be truer than anything else and we are intellectually immobilized. This in its own way is far more tyrannical than the suggestion that heresy does exist.

13. John S. Dunne, A Search for God in the Time and Memory (New York: The Macmillan Coinpany, 1969), pp. 113, 176, 192 -194.

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