The Argument from Rome

by Gerald O'Collins S.J.

from Women Priests? Yes - Now! pp. 37-50, ed. by Canon Harold Wilson, Denham House Press, 1975.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

Is it time for all Christian Churches to throw ordination to the ministry and priesthood open to women? Some communities like the Methodists and Presbyterians have already appointed women as full ministers. By 1971 80 ordained women had worked or were working for the United Presbyterian Church in the United States. The American Baptist Convention not only accepts women to full participation in the ministry but also refuses to reserve its leadership for men only. In 1971 it elected a woman president. The Anglican Church has begun to ordain women as deacons. Should the Roman Catholic Church abandon its traditional prohibition and allow women to be ordained and serve as priests and deacons? The question has already been raised at many levels of Catholic life. For instance in 1971 65 bishops of Canada met with 60 women to talk together about the place of women in the life of the Church. The Canadian bishops accepted in principle the proposal that suitable women should be ordained.

Should work as a priest or deacon become possible for Catholic women? Ought the Church to alter its roles in this matter? I hope that no one who is reading this article will react with an instant and angry “Of course not!” We all need to give this new question a chance and to entertain possible changes despite any inherited prejudices.

Certainly there were and are plenty of prejudices to be inherited about women's place in the life of the Church. Long ago St. Jerome declared: “Woman is the gate of the devil, the way of evil, the sting of the scorpion, in a word, a dangerous thing." Closer to our own time is Dr. Samuel Johnson. When Boswell told him that he had just been to a Quaker meeting and heard a woman preach, Johnson said: “Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog walking on his hindlegs. It is not done well: but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

At the end of last December I was in a small German town and heard a sermon on family life. The preacher proclaimed to us that the father of a family was “God's representative”, while the mother's job was to serve, sacrifice herself and remain in what he called “the workshop of life”. The preacher damned sociologists, psychologists and all other “ologists” who dared to question whether a woman's task was simply “Kirche, Kuche and Kinder”—going to church, bearing children and working in the kitchen.

None of these four men could give our question a fair hearing. St. Jerome's description of woman as “a dangerous thing” betrayed his irrational and un-Christian fear of the other sex. Dr. Johnson's ugly—if witty—comparison of a dog edging forward on its hindlegs gives us a glimpse into his own confused and anxious feelings about women. The German preacher clearly assumed that only a man could properly represent God. The traditional family structure of Prussian Germany and Victorian England set the authoritarian father at the head of the table, the male priest in front of the altar and the male preacher in the pulpit. God was presumed to want it that way.

If we do recognize within ourselves some such prejudices, let us put them aside for the moment and ask: What does the Bible say about the ordination of women? What can we learn from Christian history on this question? How do present-day changes in the life of the Church help us to think about it again?

First, some soundings from the Bible. The Christian devaluation of women has often justified itself on the basis of the Adam and Eve story. Let us begin with the creation narratives in the book of Genesis before moving on to Jesus and Paul. In a short space it is impossible to deal with the biblical evidence. I can only recall a few major points which support the conclusion that the Bible speaks for, not against the ordination of women.

The opening chapters of Genesis show the Israelite writers challenging and rejecting the often degraded position of women in surrounding cultures. God created woman to be neither a superior animal nor a half-human slave, but to be man's equal and partner. Chapter 1 of Genesis comes from a tradition formed by Jewish priests. No sexual discrimination appears in this priestly tradition. God created male and female in his own image (Genesis 1 :27).

It was to the book of Genesis that Jesus appealed when he rejected divorce (Mark 10:2-12). He condemned practices which not only allowed but even made it easy for husbands to divorce their wives. Both within Palestine and beyond, the status of women was decidedly that of inferiors. They were severely discriminated against in public and private life. Only in the rarest cases could women bear witness in Jewish courts of law. Most rabbis denied them the right to study the sacred scriptures. In the face of entrenched discrimination Jesus took a revolutionary stand in his attitude towards women. Let me point to some examples.

A woman who had suffered for twelve years from a flow of blood came close to Jesus seeking a cure. Contact with her made hirn ritually unclean. But he was concerned only to recognize her faith, cure her condition and send her away in peace (Mark 5:25-34). He violated the common code by speaking with a Samaritan woman. It was bad enough for a Jew to talk with a male Samaritan. Jesus not merely spoke with her but transformed her into a missionary. Many of her fellow Samaritans came to believe in him “because of the woman's testimony" (John 4 :7ff). Once Jesus was eating in the home of a Pharisee, when a notoriously sinful woman burst into the room and fell weeping at Jesus' feet. With her long hair she wiped her tears from his feet, covered his feet with kisses and anointed them with ointment. Simon the Pharisee was shocked. Like so many of his contemporaries and our contemporaries he saw such a woman only as an evil sexual object. She would defile good people by her touch. The Pharisee thought to himself: “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.” But Jesus saw in her a suffering human being, one wounded by her sins. Those sins were now forgiven, “for she loved much” (Luke 7:36-50). He found only human weakness to be cured, not a female vice to be despised by male arrogance.

Did Jesus consider that women were to be assessed simply by two major tests: their success in bearing children and making the kitchen the workshop of their lives? Two stories suggest that Jesus was free of such stereotypes. Someone in his audience reacted one day to his preaching by praising his mother: “Blessed is the womb that bore thee, and the breasts that you sucked.” Jesus, however, insisted that all women, including his own mother, were to be judged in exactly the same way as men: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” (Luke 11 :27-28). Ultimately God assesses women by their fideliy as human beings to his will rather than by their success in specifically female roles. On another occasion Jesus visited the house of Martha and Mary. Martha became upset because she had to work alone preparing the meal while her sister sat there listening to his teaching. Mary was being highly unconventional—studying with a rabbi and not busily working in the kitchen. Jesus, however, maintained that Mary was free to make her own decision. “Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her" (Luke 10:38-42). A woman's place was not necessarily in the kitchen.

Jesus showed a radically new stance towards women not only in his preaching but also in his miracles. As his most extraordinary deeds the gospels report that three times he raised dead persons to life. In each case women played a special role in the stories. He raised first a woman, the daughter of Jairus. On this occasion he disregarded religious taboos by touching the corpse and making himself thereby unclean. He took the dead girl's hand and declared: “Little girl, I say to you arise” (Mark 5:41). He raised the only son of the widow of Nain, because “he had compassion on her” (Luke 7:11-17). Finally, he brought Lazarus back to life, after the dead man's sisters had sent for Jesus (John 11:1-44). All these three most remarkable miracles thus gave women a special place.

They played a unique part in his own death and resurrection. Apart from the beloved disciple only women followed Jesus to Calvary and stood by to witness his death on the cross. Women attended his burial. The twelve male disciples were not there. On the first Easter Sunday it was the women who first visited his tomb, found it empty and were told to carry back to the male disciples the good news: “He has risen, he is not here” (Mark I6:6). At the birth of Christianity women preached to men Jesus' resurrection, the very heart of the Christian message. How odd it is when we find a Church now forbidding women to preach the good news to any congregation.

To sum up. We find Jesus breaking with religious convention and taboos in his contact with women. As far as he was concerned, they enjoyed before God equal freedom and responsibility with men. Jesus left no instructions that only men were to be admitted to any future ordained ministry. In view of his startling openness to human beings as human beings, it would have been astonishing if he had announced “Priesthood is to be a male privilege. My Church shall forever exclude women from ordination. Only men can represent me in my priesthood.” Jesus did not set up such limitations. He could not have done so without being outrageously inconsistent.

But what of the fact that after all Jesus selected only men for the ranks of the twelve? He admitted no woman to that inner group. Three observations ought to be made. First, as we have seen, Jesus strongly challenged his society on its attitude towards women. To have gone further and called six men and six women to make up the twelve would have outraged his contemporaries to the point of destroying his work right from the outset. Second, there were women like Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Susanna who followed and helped him as he preached the good news (Luke 8:1-3). It was quite extraordinary for a rabbi to have women accompany him on his travels. Third, we dare not in this way derive from Jesus' ministry rigid norms for the ministry of the later Church. If we do, some strange things would have to happen. Only circumcized Jews could be ordained. Their ministry should be restricted to Israel. They would have to refrain from administering baptism, the Eucharist and the other sacraments. In short, if we insist on making the sexual composition of the twelve a permanent norm for admission to ordination, we would logically have to return to that form of late Judaism which was Jesus' religion during his ministry.

We have been looking so far at Jesus' attitude towards women. Let us now turn to St. Paul. Most people think at once of his words to the Corinthians: “The women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate” (1 Corinthians 14:34). Many scholars believe that this text was later added by someone else. In the very same letter Paul notes that women prophesy in the community (11:5). For Paul the ministry of a prophet was surpassed only by that of an apostle. He lists apostles, prophets, teachers, administrators and other ministries, without suggesting that any of them ought to be confined to men (1 Corinthians 12:28). He allows us to conclude that the Eucharist was celebrated frequently in the Corinthian church, without indicating—let alone insisting—that only men could preside at the liturgy (1 Corinthians 11 :20ff.).

Of course, there is an obvious danger in pushing such arguments from silence—from what Paul did not say. However, what he did say supports the thrust of our argument. The apostle recognized that Christ's death and resurrection had done away with any distinction of status between man and woman, as well as with the social distinction between slave and free and the religious distinction between Jew and Gentile. His message was dear: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3 :28). For Paul all men and women can now enjoy an equal access to God through faith in Jesus Christ. This equality is heavily compromised when the male sex reserves ordination for itself and alone shares in Christ's ministerial priesthood. Regrettably and often tragically, the Catholic Church—both its leaders and members—has often behaved as if there were still either Jew or Greek, either slave or free, and either male or female.

A final word on St. Paul. At the end of his greatest work, the letter to the Romans, he sends his warm greetings to many Christians in Rome, both women and men. But first he commends to the Roman church “our sister Phoebe, a deaconess” of a Greek church, where she has been “a helper to many and myself as well” (Remans 16:1-2). From the time of St. Paul deaconesses worked in the Church for several centuries. The Didascalia, a 3rd century Syrian document, commands that women deacons were “to be honoured as the images of the Holy Spirit”. They prayed and sang in church services, brought communion to sick women and children, and administered alms for the community.

In 517 a synod in Burgundy abolished the ordination of deaconesses. What had happened? Pre-Christian and non-Christian cultural attitudes affected the Church, as was the case with slavery. The message of Jesus and the meaning of his life, death and resurrection should have led to equal treatment of women and to the abolition of slavery. But gradually the Church adjusted itself to society instead of challenging society. It was shaped by the current culture, instead of shaping the culture. Things went beyond the abolition of ordination for women. Non-Christian taboos about women being unclean reasserted themselves. In 578 the Synod of Auxerre forbade women to take the consecrated host in their hands. The Eucharist would be made unclean by their touch. Christians began to believe that the monthly period made women impure. In the Middle Ages women during menstruation were forbidden even to enter a church and receive holy communion. Down to our own time women were excluded from the sanctuary during Mass. They might be menstruating, unclean and hence unsuitable to touch holy things. Women were permitted to sweep the Church, dust the pews and prepare the flowers. But they could not enter the sanctuary to serve at the altar.

The authority of such important writers as St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Gregory the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas supported this devaluation of women, which deprived them even of such minor tasks as serving and reading during the liturgy. St. Gregory endorsed the Old Testament book of Sirach (42:14) in maintaining that male vice is superior to female virtue: “Being a man means being strong and clear in one's thinking. But a woman is a weak and confused spirit.” Aquinas taught that masculinity was the norm and a female baby results from a chance error. Later biologists discarded the physical basis of his theory, but many Christians continued to accept his conclusions on the moral inferiority of women.

All in all, it looks very much as if the Christian Church has been among the strongest forces in creating and preserving the inferior status of women in the western world. Even loving regard for the mother of Jesus has been used to support discrimination against women. Mary's humility and obedience have been stressed much more than her strong-minded faith and forthright courage. Jesus did not praise his mother for her submission to her husband Joseph, but for hearing the word of God and following it courageously.

In the recent history of the Catholic Church few things illustrate better the refusal on the part of men to treat women as equals before God than the 1918 Code of Canon Law and the composition of the Congregation of Religious. This code of law which is still valid today lumps together women, minors and the insane in determining their domicile (canon 93). The Congregation of Religious which is based in Rome and until recently has been an exclusively male body exercises wide authority over the lives of nuns. It was assumed that men enjoyed some God-given insight into the way convents of women should function. This male dominance looks even more unfair, when we recall that normally women religious have been twice as numerous as their male counterparts.

We have looked at the Bible. We have reflected a little on attitudes towards women in the history of the Church. Now let us glance at the way things are changing in the Church today. By not ordaining women as deacons and priests, the leaders of the Catholic Church seem to ignore principles and practices which they recently endorsed. The second Vatican Council (1962-65), Pope John XXIII and conferences of bishops have rejected discrimination against women and called for equal and fair treatment. In his encyclical Pacem in Terris, Pope John welcomed the liberation of women as one of “the signs of the times”, the signs of God's saving activity among us (nos. 40, 41, 42-44). The longest document from the Vatican Council, “The Church in the Modern World,” noted and welcomed women's efforts to secure equal treatment with men (nos. 9, 60). In February 1971 the American Bishops' Conference issued a statement on the place of women in the liturgy. That statement began: “It is certain that in the liturgical celebration, as in other facets of the Church's life, there should be no discrimination or apparent discrimination against women.” Is there no such discrimination or apparent discrimination, when American Catholics never see a woman preach, never see a woman celebrating the Eucharist and never see a woman performing a regular Sunday baptism?

In certain countries Catholic women already perform some or even all of the tasks of a deacon. By October 1972 German bishops had authorized 2,000 women to distribute holy communion at parish Masses. By then about the same number of women enjoyed official positions as pastoral assistants (Gemeindereferentinnen) in parishes and other communities. They have taken over much of the work of curates. The best sermon I ever heard in a German parish was preached by a Dominican nun. In the diocese of Trier a woman has the bishop's authorization to preach regularly. In South America matters have gone much further than in Germany. Catholic nuns perform baptisms, preach sermons, distribute holy communion and officiate at weddings. They act as full deacons without being ordained as deacons.

If we read what Jesus and Paul had to say, recall some facts of Christian history and reflect on recent developments, the conclusion comes through loud and clear. The ordained priesthood is not something which Catholic males can continue to exercise all by themselves. How can Catholic leaders support justice, freedom and equality in other spheres, while they continue to treat women as second-class members of the Church? How can Catholic preachers encourage their congregations to obey God's will, if these same men deny God the right to call women to be deacons and priests? That, it seems to me, is the heart of the matter.

Moreover, the Catholic Church has its duty towards society. Our world has begun to demand human dignity and freedom for all, even if brutal practice often denies that dignity and oppresses that freedom. Our society maintains that men should treat women as full human beings. The Church should respond to our changing world and support these reforms within society. Not only in public affairs but also in the life of the Church women ought to enjoy equal rights and carry equal responsibility. Or is the Catholic Church to wait for the entire world to change, before it allows full equality to women and abandons its traditional exclusion of women from the ordained ministry?

This article began by sampling a few prejudices against the ordination of women. Let us conclude by sampling the objections which some Roman Catholics raise against admitting women to be priests and deacons.

(I) One group of objections directly rejects women themselves. “Women are psychologically unsuited to be priests. Anyway I don't know any women who want to be ordained. I am sure the women who will offer themselves will be the wrong types. Look at some of those Protestant women ministers. They are domineering, secretly fearful of marriage, disturbed women who obviously had bad relations with their fathers.” This rejection of women on psychological grounds supposes that women by their very nature are unsuitable for work in the public sphere. God made them to play a hidden passive role in society. They are unable to lead others, because they cannot think objectively and make firm decisions. We have all heard this kind of objection before. Men have justified slavery, apartheid, the mistreatment of Australian aborigines and colonial rule on similar grounds. Society has often forced women to play passive roles and excluded them from serious decision-making. Aquinas thought women were biologically inferior. We ought to know better than to think of women as psychologically inferior. In 1972 I heard an American preacher declare: “I don't know any women who want to be ordained.” There were, in fact, a dozen or more women in his own parish who made no secret of their desire for ordination. We all have a great capacity for not knowing what we don't feel like knowing.

What of female ministers in Protestant Churches? Certainly a few look as if they may have deep personal problems. But so too have some male Catholic priests. Haven't we all met priests who are domineering, secretly fearful of marriage, disturbed men who obviously had unhealthy relations with their mothers? Must God call only the perfect to his ministry or can he make use of people who have suffered from common human troubles ?

(2) A second set of objections points to pastoral difficulties with the Catholic faithful in general and Catholic men in particular. The faithful do not want women ordained. If there were women priests there would be women parish priests. Men don't want women in charge of them. Two observations ought to be made about the wishes of the faithful and the fears of men. First there are many things the faithful have not wanted, like the abolition of slavery. Slaves were not set free because the Catholic faithful as a group solidly supported their liberation. Second, Indian men have refrained from tearing their country apart because they have a woman prime minister. Men work happily enough in university departments under female professors. The English police force has not yet collapsed because women officers are now in charge of men. Recently the head of a Cambridge University college argued that women fellows in a college of male students would be unacceptable as tutors. “What man,” he asked, “would want to take his problems to a woman?” A stunning question— even in view of the fact that Cambridge male tutors often tell undergraduates to take their problems to a woman on the University Medical Counselling Board! Women priests and deacons would encourage new ways of understanding and exercising Church leadership. The day of the bully parish priest, bishop or religious superior is over. Leaders are there to serve not to dominate. Women have proved themselves more suited than men to offer the Catholic faithful a gentler leadership of service.

(3) A third line of objection maintains that the ordination of Catholic women would upset the ecumenical relations—for instance, Anglican-Catholic relations. However, if our ecumenical relations would be upset by recognizing the full dignity, freedom and responsibility of women in Church life, they are the wrong kind of ecumenical relations. Almost all Christian Churches have been guilty of discrimination against women. If the American Baptist Convention elected a woman president in 1971, this was only the fifth time the Convention had done so in 64 years. Even today few Christian groups, apart from the Society of Friends, enjoy anything like absolute equality of persons regardless of their sex. Ecumenical relations which would be harmed by the ordination of women are not worth having.

(4) Finally, some people insist that the priestly ministry is unlike other vocations. No one has the right to ordination. Church leaders are empowered to admit to ordination those whom they will. If they totally exclude women, they have the power to do so. This argument, however, risks substituting Church authorities for God. As St. Paul often maintained (Galatians 1:15 1Corinthians 12:11 etc.), God alone calls men and women to their life's work. Church leaders are empowered to recognize but not to create or suppress a divine call. Have they the right to decide what God can or cannot do? Present law in the Catholic Church makes it impossible for God to call a woman to the ministry or priest or deacon.

The ordination of women is not going to turn the Catholic Church into a paradise. Such a change will not suddenly end the stern struggle involved in following Jesus. But it would bring two happy consequences. By allowing women the freedom to serve in the ordained ministry, Church leaders would make it easier for people to believe what they say when they talk about women's dignity and worth. By recognizing God's freedom to call whom he wills, they would cease to give the impression of substituting their authority for that of God.

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