By Charles Enman
The Telegraph-Journal
April 16, 2011
http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/front/article/1398657
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| Elizabeth McGahan, a history professor at the University of New Brunswick Saint John who has studied women and religion and the history of women religious, is skeptical of suggestions that women have never been ordained in the Catholic church. |
Next Tuesday, a small group of New Brunswick wearing purple stoles will stand outside the entrance of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Saint John as part of an annual protest called the Purple Stole Vigil.
The women will mostly be members of the Catholic Network for Women's Equality (CNWE, which is pronounced Can-Wee). For years, CNWE has been lobbying the church to reverse its ban on women entering the priesthood.
Inside the church on that evening, priests from around the Diocese of Saint John will be celebrating the Mass of the Chrism, which honours the church's sacraments and their own ordination.
The women outside have no right to join the celebrants indoors - for, as women, their ordination is, from the church's perspective, unthinkable.
"We can't accept this exclusion," says Cathy Holtmann, a founder of CNWE's New Brunswick chapter. "We believe as Catholic women that we too are called to ministry within the church - and this vigil is to call attention to the structural inequality we face."
Custom and a series of pronouncements may seem to have set the exclusion of women in stone, but Holtmann, like other members of CNWE, sees the exclusion as unjust in principle.
"If we are all baptized equally in Christ, there should be no distinctions in terms of how we are able to serve within the community."
Purple is the liturgical colour of the season of Lent, reminding people of the need for reflection and reconciliation. It is also a royal colour, symbolic for many of the sovereignty of Christ.
"Priests wear stoles - and the purple reminds us that we are made in the image of God and share through our baptism in the life of Christ. That's a high calling, of course," Holtmann says.
In its beginnings, three decades ago, CNWE was called Canadian Catholics for Women's Ordination. In 1988, as the group broadened its focus to include equality in all aspects of church and society, the new name was chosen as more reflective of the wider perspective.
A number of New Brunswick women were members of the national group. In 2002, a group of them, including Holtmann, met to form a provincial chapter, which received formal recognition in 2003, the year they held the first Purple Stole Vigil at the cathedral in Saint John. There have been annual vigils since. The provincial chapter has 15 formal members and has 30 people on its email list, some of whom are employees of the diocese who must guard their anonymity.
On the national level, CNWE joined the Purple Stole movement in 2000, following the example of some women in the United Kingdom who, in the 1990s, had begun wearing purple stoles to mass to symbolize their wish to be ordained.
The church's opposition to women's ordination has been reaffirmed in the last two decades. In the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II declared "that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church faithful."
John Paul saw no implication here that women were of lesser dignity. Even the Virgin Mary herself, the Mother of the Church, had not "received ... the ministerial priesthood," he pointed out.
The current pope, Benedict XVI, has held to the historic view. In 2008, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a decree stipulating that any women ordained as priests and any bishops ordaining them were to be immediately and automatically excommunicated. The rules banning women from the priesthood were immutable because Christ chose only men as his apostles and a priest must represent the body of Christ, who was a man.
Elizabeth McGahan, a history professor at the University of New Brunswick Saint John, who has studied women and religion and the history of women religious, will be at the Purple Stole Vigil on Tuesday. McGahan is skeptical of suggestions that women have never been ordained in the Catholic church. She notes that a number of Catholic scholars argue that women seem to have been ordained during the first 1,200 years after Christ. She makes particular reference to the 2007 book The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West by the American theologian Gary Macy.
"Macy has done meticulous work and no one denies his scholarship. And what he shows very clearly is that women were ordained to particular ministries up until the 12th century. What changed things was the papacy's need to reassert control as we saw the rise of the modern city and of secular powers that could compete with power of the church hierarchy. Having an all-male and celibate priesthood was a way of reinforcing the Vatican's authority."
Afterward, McGahan says, canon lawyers and theologians made the case that women had never been ordained to anything and should not be ordained going forward: "But this was probably false, and a real part of church history was buried."
The fact is, McGahan notes, that many views held by the official church have been subject to change throughout its history.
As every Catholic knows, it was declared after Vatican II in the 1960s that other faiths might contain truth, that the mass could be said in the vernacular language, that lay people (including women) could hand out consecrated communion wafers, that women no longer had to cover their heads in church.
Practices have always evolved, McGahan points out, adding that new adjustments are required by the changing place of women in society.
"In my childhood, my dentist, my physician, my parents' lawyer - they were all men. And today half of all physicians are women, my dentist and my accountant are women and the ball game is completely different.
"But the Catholic Church remains way out of step."
Like Holtmann, McGahan's objection to the exclusion of women from the priesthood is based more on logic than on history or sociology.
"My issue is very simple: If you say half the population cannot be a priest, then it calls into question your view of these creatures called women and of their potential for holiness. It's like women have a second-class baptized status."
The refusal to ordain women is a reflection of the church's difficulties in accommodating modernity, McGahan says. And those difficulties are of long date, seen clearly in the declining number of men becoming priests or women entering the religious communities. The decline began in the 1950s and became precipitous in the 1960s. Today, most priests and sisters are in their late 60s and early 70s, and there are almost no younger men and women preparing to take over their duties.
"In this diocese, we have 38 active priests serving 91 parishes. They run from church to church to offer partial services, and in 10 years, most will be gone. In 20 years, the Catholicism that I knew as a young woman will not be here. There will only be a few churches round and about, and many people still attending services will be making long commutes."
McGahan believes that this "slow nibbling away" began after the First World War, as more and more Catholic laity began receiving higher education. This allowed many of them to emerge as potential spokespersons for the faith.
"Even 30 years ago, you would never have seen a little coterie of people in their 50s and 60s educated enough to speak on the issues now confronting the church. Some people say this is the secularization of the church - but I call it the church's laicization."
This process has been occurring throughout North America and Europe, McGahan says. She refers to such lay groups as Call To Action, the American Catholic Council, and Voice of the Faithful (a Boston-based group formed in response to the sexual abuse scandals that have riven the church).
McGahan did not go to the first Purple Stole Vigil in Saint John but soon decided that it was important to be among the participants.
"The more I reflected on what needs changing in the church, I figured that silence would be seen as acquiescence. It was important to participate."
If the Catholic Church broadens its view of who can be ordained, women will not be the first beneficiaries, McGahan says. "No, they will ordain some of the married deacons first - and perhaps 10 years later, things might open up for women."
CNWE member Mary Bardsley of Fredericton, attending to an illness in the family, will have to miss this year's Purple Stole Vigil but says she will be there in spirit.
"Throughout my life, I have witnessed the strength and wisdom and experience of women and I'm sorry that those qualities are not echoed from the pulpits of the Catholic Church," she said.
Bardsley says she personally has no priestly vocation. "I am a mother - that is my vocation. But I know of women who have vocations, and it's a matter of justice and morality that they be allowed to pursue them."
Despite its long history of opposition to the ordination of women, Bardsley believes the church may well move to ordain women one day.
"When people say it's impossible, I think of Galileo. He was nearly excommunicated in his day but four centuries later, the church finally acknowledged his research. From this and other things, we know that the church is fundamentally just and will recognize a just cause - sometimes after a long wait."
McGahan concurs.
"We are on the church's side, though some people see our vigil and think we are shooting our own.
"But I would hate to think that anything I was saying would ultimately be detrimental to my church-because it is my church, and I care about it. We all do."
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