In the Paraclete I trust: women, the priesthood, & the patriarchy

Commonweal, May 6, 1994 by Marian Burkhart

After discussions with angry women and after perusing the angry words of other women on the subject of the hierarchy and the possibility of ordaining women, I found myself wondering why the situation arouses so little ire in me. I have no desire to be a priest, it is true, but neither do I like to have my qualifications as a full-fledged human being called into question, nor do I like it when other women suffer such abasement. Yet I remain calm.

I understand the problem very well. Motherless from the age of nine, I grew up the daughter of one male chauvinist and the sister of another. It was recognized in the family that I was bright, a trait considered cute in a girl child. It was a quality I was expected to outgrow; I would settle for stenography, should I need at any point to cam some money; but, most important, I would smarten up enough to dumb down to get a husband. In the meantime, I was to practice serving that husband by serving my brother, and I was not to hold out for even the common courtesies of "please" and "thank you," for my brother's proper study was to learn to be a patriarch. He did.

But my father loved me, too, enough to wonder how wise it was to rear me in an ambience so unalleviatedly patriarchal. He had some doubts even about the wisdom of dumbing down, doubts nourished in his pragmatic mind by how little evidence I had given of being disposed to do so. Thus, when he learned of a girls' boarding school in a nearby town and discovered that the Benedictine nuns who ran it charged little and were ladies, he sent me there. What I found was a revelation. These women who took charge of me, these ladies, acted like gentlemen: They ran their own lives, cherished their own intelligence, and nurtured mine. No student was expected to dumb down, and those who seemed about to were mourned. How explain this paradox? How did such an institution occur not just within the context, but with the encouragement, of the patriarchal church?

The answer is that the hierarchy may be made up of patriarchs, but they are Christian patriarchs, and Christianity modifies patriarchy, when it is attended to, as it modifies every other human attitude, habit, or idea, a modification that takes place in the light of at least two aspects of the Christian Zeitgeist.

The first is the fact of Mary, a wholly feminine person without whom Christianity would not be. Compare her with the female avatars of the Greeks. Hera, wife and mother, is a shrew. Aphrodite is a pain in the neck, light-minded, frivolous, and a troublemaker. Artemis is aloof. Irene, it is true, makes peace when she can, but then there are Eris and Ate, too. The only goddess whom the Greeks both approved and esteemed is Athene, sprung full-blown from the head of Zeus, and Zeus' daughter all right--no touch of the feminine about her. Henry Higgins's paradigm is she, a woman just like a man. It might be argued that these versions of the goddess are the work of men, that women might view the goddesses differently. Indeed, I think they did, but then Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are men, too, and what they wrote exalts the feminine.

Mary fulfills the traditional roles of women. She is wife and mother, and she is a virgin. No Miltonic "he for God, and she for God in him" here. Her relationship to God is direct, unmediated, and acceded to with great-souled courage. When Mary says, "Be it done unto me according to thy word," she may be submitting herself to God, but she is putting herself in jeopardy in a patriarchal society whose ethos declared that women taken in adultery were to be stoned. A gutsy gal, indeed, for if she trusted in God, she had no really strong reason yet to trust in Joseph. And consider with Joseph her power. To her eternal glory, she said "yes" to God, but her "yes" earns that glory because she could have said "no," thereby compelling God himself to change his plans.

Then there is the nature of the marriage with Joseph. To outsiders it may have looked like any other Near Eastern marriage, but its dynamics were radically altered. Mary may have baked the bread and darned the cloaks while he planed and sawed, but her needs and the needs of her child determined the course of their lives. To his eternal glory, Joseph recognized that to be a patriarch need not mean to dominate but rather to protect, and to protect, furthermore, a woman who was in no way merely an extension of her husband, a possession to be cared for because she was his. She wasn't. She was God's, and the child to whom she was devoted and for whom she required Joseph's devotion was not his child. A patriarch who thinks at all objectively about all of that has to revise from the bottom up his socially acquired and approved idea of what it means to be a patriarch.

In Galatians 3 and 4, Saint Paul discusses another patriarchy-modifying consequence of Christ's entry into human history. I started thinking about the passages when I followed an exchange of letters in the Tablet (London) about the felicity, or lack thereof, of Paul's use of the word "son" in Galatians 4: "But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, |Abba, Father.' So that you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, an heir also through God." A gentleman, acting as lector in an English parish, wrote that the women in the congregation had need of consciousness-raising because they took no umbrage at Paul's sexist language. After trying to determine what other word Paul could have used to convey the whole of his message, I found myself entirely on the side of the women. To object to "son" is to undermine the gift of God Paul sought to clarify. No other term will do.