A MATTER PREORDAINED
Steinfels, Peter
III I AM sT was and elections and A energy crises and New York still teetering on the edge of bank- M/tl'l'r-lt ruptcy and newspaper reports of P I E O I [ ~ A I N E D three-year-olds being...
...They have caught the note of fear in this preemptive strike, fear of themselves, fear of the future, and theym wemare quite rightly hurt and angered...
...A similar rule appears to hold for the Vatican: whatever it officially condemns is sure to come about...
...The PETER STEINFEI~ very magnitude of the shift in perspective underway ought to reduce drastically the constraints of traditional practices...
...but the assertion of such a claim is undeniably an emergent fact of our world...
...There is, I must add, something reassuringly familiar in that sense of hurt...
...The Church, in other words, faces a moment of unusual freedom in regard to women - - a n d as though suffering from vertigo, the Vatican has sent Rs lawyers scurrying to lash things down...
...Within a decade women will be ordained, probably because some bishop .takes matters into his own hands...
...the apostles were glad for the humiliation they had undergone and promptly returned to their preaching...
...One report has it that "the most forward resolution on women's ordination was proposed by a bishop" at Detroit...
...That "Rome" was not alone in this maneuver, however, is a more dispiriting thought...
...John Kenneth Galbraith once announced the law that whenever a politician denies something three times, it is sure to be true...
...if it is of God, you will be wrong to oppose it...
...Though the Sanhedrin accepted Gamaliers advice, it had the apostles flogged anyway and forbade them to preach...
...There are probably more partisans of women's ordination today than there were before it was issued...
...It was not simply the brushing aside of the serious theological and scriptural studies that have dealt with women's ordination...
...Why then was Imwere we---so offended by the Vatican's statement opposing the ordination of women...
...Where the claim of women to full recognition of their personhood will take us, we do not yet know...
...In this I think I was joined by most of my friends, women and men...
...The Vatican document reminded me, as I had not been reminded in a long time, of being a Roman Catholic...
...The dismay we felt was at least the negative sign of an attachment I had often feared was almost altogether dissolved...
...It is a real, and saddening, possibility...
...It seemed a perfectly sensible, indeed an inevitable idea...
...Once our mentalities have been thoroughly alerted, as with slavery and anti-Semitism in modern times, the fact that the Church has cohabited with such phenomena in the past may be problematic and painful, but it no longer has guiding authority for our future...
...I doubt whether the Sacred Congregation's verbal flogging will be any more effective...
...Why did these few thousand words, despite the wellintentioned if condescending gesture toward female equality, sting like a gratuitous insult...
...Already I have heard individuals (male) who are extremely sensitive to the importance of consensus and procedural regularity speak as though a development on the pattern of the Episcopal experience were now the only plausible outcome...
...Had some inquiring social scientist asked us last December to speculate on opinions held concerning women priests in precincts such as the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, I suspect our replies would have captured the substance of the eventual document...
...For of course the statement will do no good...
...and I wished its advocates well...
...Millions of women who are not terribly interested in the priesthood, who are not even decided about the eventual direction of their own movement, have been told that Rome knows, that God has revealed to the bureaucrats in the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith the precise limits of this unprecedented reordering of male and female roles...
...It has been a good while since most of us have staked very much on pronouncements from Rome, and we could not really say that the content of this one was a surprise...
...III I AM sT was and elections and A energy crises and New York still teetering on the edge of bank- M/tl'l'r-lt ruptcy and newspaper reports of P I E O I [ ~ A I N E D three-year-olds being beaten to death by their mothers' boyfriends, I cannot say that the ordination of women has loomed very large in my mental landscape...
...No, there could be no possibility that the work of Paul was to be completed, or even that the Church might heed the patient words of Paul's teacher, Gamaliel: if this movement be of merely human origin, it will collapse of itself...
...The desperate flimsiness of the statement only exposed what lay behind" it--the grim hope of cutting history off at the pass...
...I have no way of knowing to what extent American bishops urged the Vatican statement (conspicuously pre-dated to the week before the "Call to Action") as a means of evading any response to the Detroit request, or of forestalling any serious discussion with fellow bishops...
...But I was more apt to be worried about what we really mean when we affirm the Good News on Sunday than about the sex of the person officiating...
...There is always a price to be paid for such irregularities, but Rome seems determined to render them likely...
...At the end of October, the Detroit "Call to Action" asked the American bishops to "initiate dialogue with Rome . . . to allow women to be ordained...
...It was not simply the quality of the argument, with its unexplicated theory of "natural resemblance," a theory that could as easily justify limiting the priesthood to circumcized Jews or the primacy to Galilean fishermen...
...So why the hurt...
Vol. 104 • March 1977 • No. 5
