Posts Tagged “faith”

Women Priests and Equality

Kenneth Hynek • 29th Jan 2010 • Religion, Atheism, Religion, Catholicism, Society, Men and Women, Religion, Theology • , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I don’t usually do requests, but every so often I’ll entertain one.

The issue of women’s ordination briefly came up in a conversation I got into on , with an atheistic tweep (hey, don’t look at me…that’s apparently the technical term) firing off a couple of tweets at me commenting on the intransigence of the on this issue. I’m not sure what it is about this issue that some atheists find attractive or useful — are they declaring that they would convert and become religious in a heartbeat, if only they could have a female pastor? — but it came up all the same.

And I’ve actually addressed this issue before, though not in an article exactly. I did, however, address it in a comment once, when talking with The Barefoot Bum. Which makes this a bit of ancient history.

Let’s start with the statement from Barefoot that actually precipitated the discussion, what say?

The ians did actually have laws limiting male –- penalties for , and , child support rights for wives, inheritance rights for daughters (and even concubines). These laws were not perfect — nor were they put into perfect effect — but they were quite enlightened for the time with respect to women’s rights. I guess I could deride your ignorance at this point but Monty Python didn’t make many jokes about Babylonians.

Unfortunately, they did not — Barefoot is right. Shall I count that, though, as an admission that his own “knowledge” of Catholic teaching comes from said comic troupe?

Anyhow, on the the point: the Babylonians did have some legal recognition for the status of women…but at the same time, other aspects of their legal reality were very much against women (the wife could, through the marriage contract, become an indentured servant to other, older women in the man’s life, for example; wives could taken as payment of pre-marital debts of the husband; a bad wife could be stripped of her dowry and, if she was unable to prove that her ‘badness’ — what constitutes ‘bad’ is nebulously defined — was the result of neglect or cruelty on the part of her husband, she might be drowned for it).

Babylonian law also allowed marital infidelity in limited contexts, although any children that resulted from that union were to be left with the father; they were taken away from the mother.

And let’s not even get in to the comparison and contrast between the Babylonian, property-based view of children and the Church’s teaching, which states the opposite: children may never be considered to be the property of a parent.

So in a sense, Barefoot is right — the Babylonians were a bit more progressive, in their laws, than some of their Ancient Near Eastern counterpart cultures…but that still isn’t saying much. Truly unique teaching on and sexuality emerged from an otherwise insignificant Hebrew nation to the west of Babylon.

Barefoot continued:

So says the male orthodox Catholic. It appears women in both your and Peter’s life disagree – have you considered that they just might be onto something?

This got back, actually, to a notion I discussed previously in that same comment thread, about the difference between equality and equivalence. I discuss it below, for the reader’s benefit. And while I’ve no doubt that Barefoot probably dismissed it as arrogance when I said, as I will now, that yes, the women (and men) who have articulated their opinion that the Church is being sexist are ignorant and know not of what they speak, that is in fact the case. Ultimately, it’s an issue of truth — I can come to no other conclusion than that they are wrong and that they misunderstand the issue.

And indeed they do. It’s not an issue of “rights” at all, which is the first mistake they make.

Now, since I can’t count on the possibility that Barefoot read the article I linked him to regarding this issue, let me cite a part of it here that is relevant:

One need not seek far to find rhetoric like this:

“The prohibition against priests is based on the ancient idea of the inferiority of women. But we are all created in ’s image and have the same rights; and the fact that was male does nothing to negate this. That, along with the fact that all the Apostles were male, is the only thing upon which bases its male-only priesthood. But in the days when Jesus was on earth, it would have been unthinkable for him to select women for his ministry. Not because women weren’t capable, but because they would not have been accepted.”

The first difficulty here is that , like all sacraments, is not a “right”, but a gift. Nobody has the “right” to or , much less . Trying to apply “rights talk” to sacraments is like threatening to sue for the free gift of . If God gave us humans what we deserved according to strict justice, we would all be damned. Christ came to save us from, not give us, what we deserve.

And yet, aren’t we are all “equal” in the sense that “God is no respecter of persons.” Yes. And Paul knew better then anybody in antiquity that male and female were “equal” in Christ in the sense of having identical dignity before God. It was he, after all, who said, “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” (Gal. 3:28). Paul saw nothing inferior about woman’s dignity. But he, like the other apostles, did see something which kept him from ordaining women.

“Right,” says the modern critic. “He saw blinkers. Like Jesus, he was prohibited by his culture from doing something that no ancient would accept. But now times have changed. Now we know women are competent to pastor and preach, so they should be made priests.”

This common objection is founded on a number of misconceptions about what the sacrament of ordination is and what Jesus and the apostles did. First, it is simply unhistorical to say that Jesus was worried about “what everybody would think.” Jesus did and said lots of shocking things. He horrified his hearers by saying, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). He prompted his fellow Jews to form a lynch mob by declaring “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). He touched lepers, ate with whores, and excoriated the ruling class in Jerusalem. He challenged conventional wisdom in a thousand ways. His message (and that of the apostles) was indeed, so conciliatory to his contemporaries that they welcomed him with crucifixion and hailed his disciples with stonings, beatings, and assassination attempts. Bottom line: If Jesus had wanted woman priests he would have ordained them, public opinion or no. The “Jesus was hamstrung and/or blinded by his culture” thesis is utterly lame. And this is doubly so because Greco-Roman culture had oodles of women priests. So let’s forget this ahistorical appeal to poor Jesus’ jitters at offending.

Similarly, appeals to women’s pastoral and rhetorical competence are quite beside the point. The Church has in her tradition abbesses, theologians, doctors of the Church and teachers aplenty in skirts and habits. The question revolves, not around pastors and preachers, but around the priestly office. Anybody can do pastoral, teaching, preaching, or administrative work. But that is not the essence of the priesthood. The essence of the priestly office is celebration of Christ’s Sacrifice in the Mass.

And that is why all such arguments are not addressing the issue, for the issue is the nature of the sacrament. What is a sacrament? It is a thing which not only does what it symbolizes but symbolizes what it does. In Baptism, the obvious symbol of cleansing, drowning and new life is water, not wine. And so wine, for all its admirable qualities, is not the right “matter” for the sacrament of Baptism. Likewise, in Holy Eucharist, wine — the blood of the crushed fruit — is the obvious symbol which signifies the blood of Christ, who was crushed for our iniquities. Like the blood of Christ, wine invigorates, inebriates, and reminds us of the tang of death and new life. Here again, water, despite being the right matter for Baptism and not in the least “inferior” to wine, is the wrong matter for the sacrament of the Eucharist. In short, certain things are natural images. It’s not a question of “equality” but of fittingness.

Now, Christ is, as he himself teaches, the “Bridegroom” to the Church’s “Bride” in the great eschatological Marriage Feast of the Kingdom (Matthew 25:1-13). Gender has, in ’s teaching, a real meaning and is not simply an accident of nature. And he ought to know, since he designed the human person and made it a participant in the mystery of maleness and femaleness. And so, every mass is a local “Marriage Feast of the Lamb” whereby we enter into the self-sacrificial love of that Cosmic Bridegroom for his Bride.

And that gets us right back to the question of symbols. For as with water in Baptism and wine in Eucharist, it is not that a man is “superior” to a woman in being “matter” for the priesthood. It is that man is a fitting symbol of the Bridegroom and woman is not. The priest is an “alter Christus” to the Bride in the mystery of the mass. He signifies. He does not primarily “administrate” or preach or pastor.

Ordination, then, is not a right. It’s a gift. It’s a sacrament that does what it symbolizes and symbolizes what it does, like all sacraments. Symbols therefore matter (particularly those which Christ himself has instituted) and the Church has no power to alter such symbols in their fundamentals. Christ and the apostles revealed what the “matter” of ordination should be just as they revealed what the matter of Baptism and Eucharist should be. The Church merely obeys. That is why the Pope says, “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’s faithful.”

* Let’s be clear — the priest signifies the bridegroom, Christ, in complement to the Church as the bride of the Lord. It is precisely the specific gender of the priest that is the symbol. And women are no less equal to men even though Christ does not, in the teachings of the Church, make provision for their ordination, because equality is not achieved on the basis of role.

Aside: When we state that and women are “equal”, what basis absent the divine can we found that claim on? Oh, we can say that men and women are equal “before the law”, but laws are fickle and can be changed by successive governments. We enshrined equal rights for women into Canadian law about a century ago, but a century from now some later government would still have the ability to strip those legislations out again.

So secular law is not a good basis on which to found the notion of equality. And while we can state that both men and women are human — in an attempt to appeal to naturalistic categories — the naturalistic view quickly breaks down as well: men and women have several key physiological differences, our bodies mature in different ways, and disparities emerge between genders in things like average physical strength, average body mass, and so forth. Also, men and women are ‘wired’ differently, think differently, look at the world differently, reason differently, and use both reason and emotion in wholly different ways and wholly different quantities.

So the naturalistic perspective is also not a good basis on which to found the notion of equality.

And so it goes — pick any other category that does not involve a notion of external divinity, and it will become rapidly apparent that the category in question is an insufficient basis upon which to base the notion that men and women are “equal”. Take it one step further, and begin adding different secular categories together, and still you will not have adequate foundation for the notion of equality.

Ultimately, the only category which gives any credence, foundation, or strength to the notion of male/female equality is the one that invokes an external divinity: men and women are equal in the economy of salvation, equal before the Lord, equal in God’s eyes. And any appeal to the notion of male/female equality must therefore necessarily be an appeal to some conception of divinity, because there is nothing that exists only in this world that can sufficiently justify and serve to defend said notion.

And here’s the point that needs to be stressed: just as, in salvation, works are meaningless, so too is it the case that in male and female equality, works are meaningless. By which I mean: true equality is equality of personal dignity which comes from the Lord. True equality is not the entitlement to perform the same roles. Nor should it be.

Men and women play different roles in many aspects of life outside of their — why wouldn’t they play different roles in God’s plan for humanity, in the economy of salvation, and in the life of the Church? That’s the second error that the various objectors that I know make; they erroneously assume male/female equality to mean equivalence, which it does not.

This is not the Church’s decision, in the end — this is a part of the ongoing revelation of the Spirit that the Church humbles herself to.

Why I’m Catholic (Reason 14)

Kenneth Hynek • 25th Jan 2010 • Religion, Catholicism • , , , , , , , , ,

From Dave Armstrong’s list:

retains the elements of mystery, supernatural, and the sacred in , thus opposing itself to secularization, where the sphere of the religious in life becomes greatly limited.

I mentioned rites previously, and it serves to note that I have also talked about, at various times, my preference for the liturgy of St. over that of . There’s many reasons for this, but it chiefly has to do with exactly what Armstrong is getting at, above — for me, at least, the Chrysostom liturgy (especially when I catch it in Ukrainian) better reflects the sense of mystery that one should necessarily find in the Catholic , and thus heightens the sense of the supernatural and the sacred that should necessarily imbue the Mass.

Not that the Paul VI rite lacks these things entirely, of course — I’m no Rad Trad. But I do find I struggle to discern them more in a Paul VI Mass than in a Chrysostom Mass. Part of that has to do with the formality of the affair; the Paul VI Mass is more informal. Part of it also has to do with the overall symbolism; churches which typically offer non-Paul VI Masses tend to be more decorated with icons and candles, and the vestments of the priest(s), acolyte(s), and altar server(s) tend to be more elaborate. And it’s through such details at this that I find I hear most clearly, through the symbols and gestures, the majesty and the humility, the transcendental mystery of all these little outward signs.

And when I can’t understand the language of the Mass, that adds even more to the experience, because it hammers home the sense that God is, to someone so merely human as myself, utterly incomprehensible to me save by His own good grace. Not that I think bringing the Mass to people in their common tongue is a bad thing, by any means…but I do wonder if sometimes, something wasn’t lost in the translation.

Holy artifacts…in space!

Kenneth Hynek • 22nd Jan 2010 • Religion, Christianity, The Sciences, Space • , , , , ,

I tweeted this yesterday, but it’s worth expanding upon.

From The Deeps of Time:

n cosmonauts have carried crosses, relics, and icons on the , reports:

“The Gospels, four icons, crosses and a relic of the have been taken aboard the Russian segment of the International Space Station (), a Russian cosmonaut has reported. A photo taken by the station crew shows an icon and a crucifix floating in zero gravity in the ISS.

It’s easy to forget, sometimes, that the exploration of space is often being carried out by men and women of earnest , not unlike how the exploration of much of the world was carried out by people of faith as well.

Not that this should be a surprising thing, for at the heart of every experiment and exploration is a very teleological — and very Christian — belief in a rational universe that will reward those who seek with great findings.

As fine praise as could be offered

Kenneth Hynek • 21st Jan 2010 • Religion, Atheism, Religion, Christianity, Entertainment, Literature, Health, Parenting, The Sciences • , , , , , , , , ,

Between the ages of about three and five, and perhaps for some time thereafter, I can recall being read ‘s on a fairly regular basis…almost a nightly basis. My dad had a very engaging and entertaining way of reading them, and to this day I am occasionally known to let the phrase “insatiable curtiosity” past my lips.

And I find I quite agree with ‘s quite excellent praise for the book and the virtue it served to inculcate in me:

Kipling — perhaps our greatest 20th-century prose author in English — was a satirist of the deepest kind. I say “deepest” because on the surface he is hardly a satirist at all, except in some rather overtly political verses; and even those are subtly loaded with paradox, under the surface. In the Just So Stories he was not merely trying to enchant young children, as adults think he was doing. He had a mind too knowing for that kind of play. He was instead arming his young readers to defend themselves against the faithless simplicities of their adult keepers.

No modern writer is quite so subversive as Kipling. And at the heart of him you find, in Just So Stories, the Jungle Books, and everywhere, this shining truth: that faith, good , good loyal faith, transcends all “explanations” of the unexplainable.

Note to self: retrieve copy of Just So Stories from Mom & Dad’s.

Warren’s larger point in heaping such fine praise on Kipling has to do with the tendency of modern materialists to lean on — and in particular — as a means of explaining away everything, from to (as a moral precept) Not that there are not natural components to these things; there certainly are. But neither is that all there is to them; they are not dysteleological.

And it’s good to inculcate kids against thinking in such absurd terms. Which I agree is one of the charming benefits of things line the Stories; they really help numb the power of “QED”-type statements, whether made by fundamentalists of the religious or atheistic variety.

The Christian basis…

Kenneth Hynek • 19th Jan 2010 • Religion, Christianity, History, Society, Men and Women • , , , , , , ,

…of the concept of “equal rights” should be obvious, and is inescapable:

. But, of course, [it is] not self-evident at all [that all are created equal]. It is, in fact, a purely mystical dogma inherited from the Christian teaching that “in Christ Jesus there is neiher Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” which was handed down to us by the old misogynist Paul. It’s also inherent in Genesis’ insistence that “In the image of God created he Man; male and female created he them.” That’s the sole basis for any claim of equality in dignity. Pagan men, being empiricists, saw no equal dignity for women and dealt with claims of equality by the good old fashioned empiricist method of beating up and killing women who got in the way — because they could. It turns out women are not, by and large, Buffy the Vampire Slayer but are documentably physically weaker than men as a rule. The only thing that ever turned around that fallen pagan male tendency was Christianity which, among other things, was inspired by the Cult of the Virgin to exalt women and which eventually played out its own internal imperative by overcoming the ancient pagan attitude toward women as inferiors.

Which is not to say that Christianity has a perfect record of treating women with the dignity that it knows — and knew before any other group — they are due.

But it is to say that the rights of women have only really flourished where faith in Christ flourished at some point.

And not just women, mind you, but all human beings; of all creeds or rational postulates, only the Christian profession affords one the basis upon which one can argue that all people — black, white, whatever — are “equal.”

There is no other suitable metric.

My latest post at Examiner.com…

Kenneth Hynek • 5th Jan 2010 • Religion, Atheism, Religion, Evolutionary Creationism, The Sciences, The Interwebs, Examiner.com • , , , , , , ,

…is up.

Thus ends an entirely unintented sabbatical from my only paying blogging gig taken over the duration of the Christmas break. Not that it was a bad sabbatical, by any means, however.