THE WOMEN IN MY LIFE
Beeck, Frans Jozef van
THE WOMEN IN NY LIFE An intuition about the celibate male priesthood Frans Jozef van Beech Haution to the reader: This is not going to be an argument either for or against the ordination...
...We really receive God's forgiveness in the sacrament of penance, yet we know from experience that we will have reason to return, often with better grounds for compunction as our consciences get more refined...
...What a splendid handful...
...In 1969, the Dutch Jesuit Haye van der Meer argued in his doctoral dissertation (published in 1973 as Women Priests in the Catholic Commonweal 1 1 January 29,1999 Church...
...Theologically, where do I stand on the issue...
...In spite of this, I have never seen fit to join other theologians in positively supporting, let alone advocating, the ordination of women...
...Finally, I did decide that the issue as raised in the U.S...
...Such elemental facts will raise the most fundamental human issues: issues of faith, hope, love, and theology...
...She taught me first- and second-year English: grammar, syntax, pronunciation, phonetics, idiom, and conversation...
...Once, when I was seventeen, the assistant principal summoned me, inquiring darkly about the young woman with the New Look flowery below-the-knee dress in whose company I "had been seen" at a piano recital in Diligentia Hall...
...Sacraments axe for the interim, like the church itself," my teacher Pieter Smulders used to repeat back in the sixties...
...The late George Cornell of Associated Press had kindly helped me prepare a statement for the press to make sure that my views would be reported correctly...
...By contrast, the women in my life till I was forty were nuFrans Jozef van Beeck, S.J...
...But here I was, in the thick of it: fairly soon my paper appeared in a theological journal, followed by a piece in a Swiss opinion journal run by Jesuits and an essay in a collection on women's ordination put together by two Episcopalians...
...I am making this confession as an adult and as an intensely happy man of God...
...Intellectually as well as factually, I was educated in a male world...
...Actually, some of them dearly want to be priests...
...Catholic church today distracted from even more central matters of faith...
...Christian marriage is a school of perfect love, not an achieved state of eschatological perfection...
...They were the young university women who walked into and out of the corners of my eyes, discouraged by my black suit and Roman collar...
...I don't know exactly when it came...
...I do know the answer to that question: wherever sexual differentiation and attraction arise, life turns stressful...
...For years, the encounters were clumsy and often laden with ambiguity...
...Thus, not until I began my university education in Amsterdam in 1954, at the age of twenty-four, with six years of pre-Vatican but exciting Jesuitry under my belt, did I have a woman teacher...
...With the wisdom of age, I now realize that at home, for about six years, I had a strained relationship with my sister, five years younger than myself—something that upset my father...
...It obviously had not been a case of breaking and entering...
...No wonder the final editor of Genesis puts sexual differentiation cheek by jowl with God: "And God created man in his own image...
...Yet I must entertain it, for all it said was: "Think again...
...even my grade-school teachers had been men...
...when I noticed it, it felt more like a drop of water falling on a sponge, or a quiet guest having come in through the back door, for a visit...
...yet he is present as the Absent One, calling us to growth in unity in love by the giving of our lives, feeding us as we travel, for the time being...
...Praise be to God for integrated love...
...We profess "one baptism for the forgiveness of sins," but that eschatological affirmation must remind us that baptism in water, while really making us children of God only puts us on the way to the eschaton...
...In the world of sacramentality it's all very real, but also very provisional...
...Yet not until I was fifty-seven did I meet a woman colleague without fear (expectation...
...But what is equally striking is that I now have literally dozens of women friends, including married women, who would make terrific, competent, loving priests...
...And just what does the anointing of the sick symbolize and embody...
...merous...
...And she has remained the only one—a fact most Americans find nearly impossible to imagine...
...THE WOMEN IN NY LIFE An intuition about the celibate male priesthood Frans Jozef van Beech Haution to the reader: This is not going to be an argument either for or against the ordination of women, nor, for that matter, the ordination of men...
...But I did learn, especially from mature women who were both affectionate and unafraid...
...Last but far from least, there was my mother: intense, unconventional, with seven years of education, strong views on most things, a lifelong appetite for reading, and a fierce love of the church...
...So why should we expect the sacrament of orders to be Commonweal 14 January 29,1999...
...So here I go—thinking, not taking sides...
...is senior professor of theology at Loyola University (Chicago), and author of the multivolume systemic theology, God Encountered (Liturgical Press...
...What I got to entertain was an intuition, and an unlikely one to boot...
...Then, last May, I got this visit from an unexpected "guest...
...As early as August 1974,1 got involved in the discussion of the ordination of eleven women by retired Episcopal Bishop Edward R. Welles...
...of sexual, or at least erotic, involvement...
...I was educated by Immaculate Conception brothers, laymen, and Jesuit priests...
...Still, I have assured one Anglican bishop who voted in favor of women's ordination at Lambeth that I could see the force of his arguments...
...Haye has long recanted this position...
...While indelibly marked by God's image, God's people travel precariously, supported by holy signs and symbols, en route to that holiest moment: the vision of God face-to-face...
...man and woman he created them" (Gen...
...Those among us who are married genuinely embody the mutual love of Christ and the church, but married people are reminded every day that promises are not predictions...
...accordingly, up to now I have respected, if with some inner reluctance, Pope John Paul II's urgent call for a moratorium...
...the problem was that almost all of them (a clutch of aunts and cousins were the exception) were distant...
...What does it mean...
...So it is not all that surprising that I just found myself jumping straight from women's ordination to the story of my growth toward maturity in regard to women...
...In the early seventies, I had finally gotten over my worst fears of women...
...I had no taste for a public fight, for the entertainment of the American public-at-large, between the Episcopal bishop of Kansas City, Missouri, and a Dutch-born Jesuit...
...So Mass is neither kingdom come nor the new heaven and the new earth in full actuality...
...In one of these pieces, I warned, ominously, that "both women and men could lose their integrity by seeking ordination...
...That September I read a paper at the annual meeting of the North American Academy of Ecumenists, in which I disagreed, reluctantly, with Bishop Arthur Vogel, at whose urging the Episcopal bishops had declared the ordination of the "Philadelphia Eleven" null and void...
...We really receive the gift of the Spirit, but as a pledge, not a consummation...
...An all-male priesthood is such a stressful situation, and the all-male celibate priesthood of which I have been part for thirty-five years even more...
...5:23...
...But something came to me, as follows...
...So I knew I was not master of the situation...
...By "well," I mean "spirit, soul, and body, blamelessly" (1 Thess...
...Readiness for the last breath...
...They are about as numerous as the dozens of men I know and love, married and unmarried, who are making/could make/would make/will make competent, mature, loving priests...
...The Lord Jesus is "truly, really, and substantially" present in the Eucharist...
...The only women in the classroom I can recall befell us in grade school: the nurse who paid her annual visit to check us for eyesight and our heads for lice, and the school physician who discovered I had an inguinal hernia when I was eleven, just young enough to be an acceptable surgery patient at the Children's Hospital in The Hague, where the wards were mixed...
...Return to health...
...Assurance of God's mercy in front of the dark portal of death...
...This is what came to me: sacraments are both real and provisional...
...Not until I was nearly forty did I actually get to meet women, most of them undergraduates...
...Let me get back to the credentials, though...
...In all probability, I had developed those fears at least partly under the influence of notable absences...
...in God's image he created him...
...Now, at the age of sixtyeight, I have five very close women friends (yes, K., G., ]., M., W., I mean you, of course) who have come to "love me well" Commonweal 1 2 January 29,1999 (as W. likes to put it) and whom I, too, have come to "love well...
...What is it...
...Long before that, there had been the countless girls who became the objects of my teen-age attention...
...three or four got to feel not just my interest but also my hands—a dangerous thing to do except under cover of darkness, for the Jesuits had a way of letting on that you were either a student at Aloysius College or seen in female company...
...I still hold to it...
...Before I entered the order, all my gymnasium teachers (several of whom had doctorates and two of whom became university professors of distinction) had been men...
...What I do know is this: it had not yet come to me on Tuesday, May 12, and it was quietly sitting in a shadowy corner of my mind in the late afternoon of Wednesday, May 13...
...besides, only select elements of the cosmos itself—bread and wine, "the work of human hands"—are transformed, as Irenaeus wrote eighteen hundred years ago...
...that the current theological arguments fail to clinch the case against the ordination of women...
...Previous to that, all my professors in classics, art history, and the various philosophical disciplines had been Jesuit priests...
...1:27...
...A deep (if sometimes painful) satisfaction, this...
...All of them are (that is, they are becoming, some faster than others) humane levers—loyal and deep, in God, in Christ, in the Spirit...
...It was not a "concept" I had "developed...
...thus we learn how to join Jesus in willingly taking responsibility for the sins of others...
...VVj^PH ow wait a minute, where did all this stuff come from ? I ^^HI I started this piece with a reference to women's or¦ ^k^ ¦ dination and instead I am confessing to my per¦¦^HbH sonal history with women (albeit without the less virtuous details, most of which have been graciously turned, over time, into sources of wisdom and emblems of God's creative mercy...
Vol. 126 • January 1999 • No. 2
