On the “Crime” of Ordaining Women (continued)

By Christine Schenk csj, Executive Director, FutureChurch

[Extending the statute of limitations for Vatican handling of clergy sex abuse is a positive as is] allowing lay canon lawyers and judges and subjecting episcopal leaders to the jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The latter makes it abundantly clear that bishops and cardinals are accountable under canon law.

But the changes did not go far enough. Sadly missing were a clear statement about the need to sanction bishops who knowingly transferred pedophile priests and a mandate to report allegations of clergy sex abuse to civil authorities.

The announcement was the occasion of confusion and scandal for many faithful Catholics. Why equate women who desire to minister as priests to clerics who are pedophiles? It could be poor public relations; it could also reveal the patriarchal roots and (largely unconscious) misogyny running deep in clerical-bureaucratic culture.

Bishops, who are supposed to be our principal teachers, owe the people of God and the public in general a clear and well-founded explanation of their opposition to women's ordination.

Pope John Paul II’s 1994 encyclical on the non-ordination of women (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis) and the subsequent letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith  (Responsum ad Dubium) claiming infallibility for the teaching, prompted both deep soul searching and extended debate by theologians, canon lawyers, laity and clergy. The teaching led to intense examination of what is meant by the “infallibility of the ordinary and universal magisterium” (teaching office of the Church) and to what extent it is possible for a Pope on his own authority to invoke it without consulting the world’s bishops. The theological debate is ongoing and not likely to end any time soon. This is because documents from the Second Vatican Council (Lumen Gentium 25 d-e) make clear that five conditions must be fulfilled before the “universal ordinary magisterium” can be considered to have exercised infallible teaching:

• The bishops of the world must be involved in a collegial exercise of teaching authority.

• The bishops must be free to express their own considered opinion.

• The bishops must listen to the Word of God and the sensus fidelium.

• The teaching must concern matters relating to the object of faith.

• The bishops must want to impose the doctrine as definitely to be held.

None of these five conditions were fulfilled in the attempt to designate the non-ordination of women as being infallibly taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium. In fact just one year earlier, in 1993, 110 U.S. bishops successfully voted down the third draft of a planned pastoral letter on women in which the Vatican had inserted a command that they teach about the ban on women’s ordination. The bishops’ first draft had included a request to open discussion of the teaching. This suggestion was the result of hundreds of listening sessions bishops held with women all over the US over an eight-year period. The ill-fated pastoral, a product of ten years work, was abandoned after the third draft failed. This fact alone indicates that over 100 US bishops had serious doubts that the teaching on the non-ordination of women was a closed subject.

In the case of imposing excommunication on women who pursue their call to priesthood and on priests seeking to support them, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has never made clear the nature of these offenses nor the value(s) being protected. It is incumbent on the bishops as chief shepherds and teachers to inform the faithful of the nature of the offense, the reason for the extreme punishment, and the value being guarded.

Nothing has been found in the disciplines of sacred scripture, psychology, physiology, anthropology, theology, and sociology that precludes consideration of priestly or diaconal ordination for women. Faithful Catholics are still waiting for a plausible rationale for refusing to discuss women’s ordination or for imposing excommunication as a penalty. The current state of affairs is all the more puzzling in light of the 1976 statement from the Pontifical Biblical Commission that found nothing in Scripture to prohibit women’s ordination.

It is time to set aside the archaic arguments used to support the exclusion of women from Holy Orders and replace them with genuine theology worthy of the Gospel. If such theology does not exist, then the exclusion of women from Holy Orders must end.

At the very least, Church leaders should enter into dialogue with women who experience a priestly call, as well as with Catholic priests and laity who believe that call is from God.

An important and doable next step would be to open the permanent diaconate to women.

For info on FutureChurch’s So All Can Be at the Table Campaign asking for optional celibacy and women deacons in the Catholic Church, click here http://www.futurechurch.org/fpm/optcel/

For info on FutureChurch’s June 10 preconference Hanging Tough: Keeping Your Integrity and Changing the (Institutional) Church before the American Catholic Council celebrating Vatican II in Detroit MI, click here http://www.futurechurch.org/acc/

For more info and resources to continue the discussion of church teaching on the non-ordination of women, click here http://www.futurechurch.org/amillionvoices/
consciencedissentandnonordination.htm