Responses to Rome
Novak, Michael
Michael Novak Michael Novak holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. What progressives these days are not doing is try- ing to...
...Nonetheless, we may hazard some informed guesses about what the logic of ordaining females might lead to: a quite different theology of the body...
...Reached in a very human manner, guided by the Holy Spirit, these precise words are a metaphor for the Incarnation itself, finite embodiments of self-conscious faith...
...Its theology of the body, celebrated in its liturgies (Eastern and Western), has often been a stumbling block to those who inquired of her...
...A church of priestesses might be tempted to become a church of the "spirit," rather than the far more humble, limited, despised, and rejected Incarnation...
...Each woman and each man is made in the image of God, the church teaches, but not in isolation from one another...
...A priest is not a minister...
...a depreciation of the role of Mary, the mother of God...
...Absent this nuptial reality, a life consecrated to celibacy would make little sense...
...and so is his self-revelation in the Incarnation...
...The priestly role is cultic and representational...
...It validates the female as female, the male as male...
...and of a female with Christ, her bridegroom...
...In ministerial roles, women do as well as, if not better than, men...
...The Catholic faith is a faith of history, the concrete, and the flesh...
...Catholicism is not a gnostic religion that treats the gendered body as insignificant...
...As C.S...
...Further, had the second person of the Trinity become incarnate as a woman rather than as a man, the moral and cultural impact of Christian teaching would have been quite different...
...The council's actual words deliberately and clearly protected the traditional role of the bishop of Rome as the confirmer of our common faith, communion with whom is a sign of our faith's unity and fidelity...
...a quite different doctrine of Incarnation and the resurrection of the body...
...Presumably, God had a point in becoming incarnate as a male...
...On the contrary, our bodies are nuptial, made for the union of male and female...
...but not Christianity-and there are reasons for that uniqueness, worth meditating on...
...we should watch and learn...
...And the gender of these symbols seems to matter...
...The complementarity of the genders, and the differences between them, are crucial to its self-understanding...
...It is not a spiritualizing religion that attends only to our souls, not our bodies...
...A transval-uation of ancient values was accomplished...
...As one who covered two sessions of Vatican II in the flesh, I remember painstaking arguments over the letter of Vatican II-over its precisely worded documents...
...In ways not yet fully reflected upon, God's trini-tarian self-revelation is inextricably entwined in the differences and complementarity between male and female...
...What progressives these days are not doing is try- ing to offer contemporary reasons why Jesus did as he did in ordaining only males, and why the tradition of the church in holding to that practice seemed until the last twenty years entirely reasonable...
...Lewis noted, virtually every religion ordains priestesses...
...a different symbolic approach to the Trinity...
...Aside from being non-historical, "Mother, Daughter, and Holy Spirit" would have communicated a very different set of relations and a very different idea of God...
...On such matters, the Catholic faith has often been a scandal to sophisticated persons of every era...
...What God is like we do not see, but in his revelation of himself God persistently used engendered symbols: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one in their communion...
...By this path, as both Friedrich Nietzsche and Henry Adams have observed, the fierce warrior-male was humbled and taught instead to be a gentle man...
...and a radical devaluation of the tacit wisdom embodied in tradition...
...It is in their nuptial union especially that the full image of God is shown forth...
...a different theology of the sacraments...
...Religions in which there are no priests, only ministers, will of course ordain women...
...That is why the practice of celibacy is a searing self-sacrifice, justified only because of its sublimation of the flesh into a nuptial communion of a different order: the communion of a male with the church, the bride of Christ...
...Pope John Paul II is asking us to make this gender-alive dimension of our faith the object of renewed reflection, meditation, and inquiry...
...It celebrates the different roles of male and female both in the order of nature and in the order of grace...
...In short, we should anticipate a different and quite modern gnosticism, appealing to many, spreading rapidly, and ordaining its own priestesses and establishing its own counter-church (probably within the true church because that's cheaper...
...The Catholic church in particular is fleshly and incarna-tional in its fundamental doctrines...
...The future of churches (or parts of churches) that are now ordaining priestesses is not yet clear...
...I am struck, finally, by increasingly frequent appeals on the part of progressives to "the spirit of Vatican II...
...Creative speculation is called for, in faithful religious assent to a tradition that is not only providential but guided by the Holy Spirit...
...The figure of Jesus Christ, a male, will become "problematic" to it-as it already was to the Women's Ordination Conference during its 1995 meeting...
Vol. 123 • January 1996 • No. 2
