Open letter from Leonard Swidler to Josef Ratzinger

Catholic New Times, Sept 12, 2004 by Leonard Swidler

Dear Josef,

I am writing this as a man-to-man letter regarding your latest document concerning women, On the Collaboration of Men and Women.

We have known each other since 1964, when I published an article of yours promoting ecumenical dialogue in the first issue of the new scholarly journal my wife Arlene and I launched, the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. Further, we were fellow faculty members of the Catholic Theology Faculty of the University of Tubingen in the late 1960s, along with our mutual friend and colleague, Hans Kung.

I have to say that you have made the most fundamental mistake possible in writing this letter, namely, that you, a male, write it, telling women what they should and should not be. One of the first things I learned from Arlene decades ago was that, because the essence of being human is the freedom and responsibility of defining oneself, that essence includes women and paramountly so, because for eons they have suffered the oppression of being defined by men.

You get off on the wrong foot in your very first words. You write: The church, expert in humanity, And of course, by the church, in this instance you mean Josef Ratzinger. Josef, if Arlene were not lost in the mists of Alzheimer s for a dozen years, she herself would have told you that you are at, most, an expert on only half of humanity. Since she and I spent decades sharing each others writings and thoughts, I will have to say for her what I know she would have added: given our long history of years of male domination over women even that half-expertise is distorted, just as a master s humanity is distorted because of slavery.

Josef, you also write that you wan! your words to be an impetus for dialogue with all men and women of goodwill. That is good. If you truly wanted a dialogue, why didn t you invite a group of the outstanding women we have in the Catholic Church to talk with you? In your Holy Office, you have a whole staff of theological experts who provide you with the results of their research. Afar as I can tell, none of them are women theologians of which there is no dearth.

Already back in 1977 over a quarter of a century ago! Arlene and I found a large number of expertly trained Catholic women theologians to contribute to our book Women Priests: Catholic Commentary on the Vatican Declaration.

So, Josef, no excuses about not having anyone to dialogue with before you made the mistake of writing this letter on you r own T You made a second major mistake already in your third paragraph. You fault women for seeking power because they have been abused by power. That is a classic move of blaming the victim, Joseph, you are the power. You should not be shaking your finger at women but should be asking them how you have abused them and then write to response about how you are going to change and cease oppressing them.

But Josef, in your section six you really shock me with your misreading of the second chapter of Genesis. It is almost as if you didn t read Hebrew! You write, God placed in the garden which he was to cultivate, the man, who is still referred to with the generic expression Adam. You know perfectly well that in chapter one the text states that God took some earth (Hebrew; adamah), breathed his spirit into the earth (adamah) and created ha adam (The Earthling). In chapter two of Genesis it is not the man (I wonder, did you in German write der Mann (the male) or der Mensch (the human being), and surely it is not that guy Adam who is spoken of. It is ha adam, the earthling (ungendered, as the rabbis recognized and discussed at length later) who is lonely, and hence Yahweh created all the animals and brought them to the earthling. The earthling (neither a she nor a he) names them one by one, but in the end finds them all a bit of a bore; ha adam is still lonely.

Then comes the story, which you know almost all scholars point out is one of many etiological stories (a story that explains the origin of something) in the Bible in this case, the origin of male and female. Thereafter it is correct to speak of Adam and of Eve, but not before.

Josef, here I am still at the beginning of your letter, and there are many faux pas. But you don t really need to hear from me. You need to hear from women all kinds of women. If you are going to talk about theology, which is your job, you need to read and hear widely from the many excellent Catholic women theologians. Then you with some women writers might be in a position to write about the relationship between women and men

Leonard Swidler, Professor of Catholic Thought, Temple University, is the co-founder of the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church.