YVES CONGAR ON PATIENCE

...and to love them "well...

...I It...

...The first is historical...

...Not long ago I heard Sarah Coakley, of Harvard Divinity School, say: "The question is, how is the love we know from sexual differentiation and attraction related to the love of God...

...I mean a certain disposition ol soul and of spirit mindful of necessary delays, a certain huinilih and pliant y of spirit, the awareness of imperfections., even ot inevitable ones, lean (iuitton believed it possible to characterize the Catholic mentality as one of lull ness and the Protestant one as a search for purity...

...Ihe ftitUm>in$ excerpt...

...Now she may well have been a woman of poor taste (and who knows, she may have had a bit of a past as well), but she loved...

...Jn order that reform be realized in the chnnh, it is necessary that it be accompanied by patience: by which 1 mean much more than watihing the clock or presuming that everything takes lime...

...Paul writes to the Galatians, who could use a good dose of eschatological freedom: "All of you who have been plunged into Christ have been invested with Christ...

...In reality, all reform is a small anticipation ot the eschatological kingdom, of its justice and of its purity...

...1 le all but puts Uh* church in the position of living to meet his demands, <»r else lie quits it...

...But why ordain men and not women...

...does not rcspccL thi.1 delays of God and of the church, the delays of life...

...My unexpected visitor's question was: "Could it be that the sacrament of orders is lopsided precisely because it is a sacrament...

...Yes, if there were nothing more to eros than sociopolitical influence, equality before the law, human justice, and ethical resolve, where would human intimacy's transparency toward the God of love be...

...Could it be that part of the sacramental structure of orders is: for men to portray Jesus Christ by learning to understand and even practice the Christian things that women are congenitally made (as well as socially conditioned, often inexcusably) to understand and practice: emptying themselves and caring and surviving and giving life and letting themselves be sucked dry, with a toughness that is not male, either congenitally or by dint of social pressure...

...So here I go...

...Drawing upon Scripture, tradition, and the ma^i^terium, Congar outlined tour condition* tor authentic elan i h reform: the primacy ofclnirihi and pu^toml < arc...

...For you are all one person in Christ Jesus" (Gal...

...Why otherwise keep the Song of Songs in the canon of Scripture...

...Only after about two weeks does a critical move occur: the pre-embryo's own genetic code gets the better of the maternal materials and begins to direct the embryo's development, including (depending on the presence or absence of the Y-chromosome) its development as male or female...

...That is practically the opposite of what Aristotle and Aquinas taught, that is, that women are men who have suffered a developmental mishap...

...But it was legitimate to ask whether the independence of the Holy See would be seriously damaged, and thereby one understands why the responsible powers refused to follow immediately the prophets of a freedom based on the absence of territorial guarantees...

...Two final questions have occurred to me...

...Accordingly, then1 is an immense difference hetu een a truth perceived solely by the mind, dialecticallv, and a truth matured in solitude or in faithful service, a truth thatone has long carried within oneself and nourished with one's life...

...I Ic moves with a rigid ,ind exasperated logic toward "all-or-nothing" solutions in which viable elements are cast off with all others...

...So this is what I make of what came to me, like a thief in the night...

...J lovvever, others, to whom one cannot deny some perspicacity, predicted thai the loss of temporal rule would be the ruin of the church...

...see Luke 7:36-50...

...First off, Viagra is one of the last things we need on the way to mature masculinity...

...Hny conclusions...

...There are no male and female...

...Only i\ hat has been done with the collaboration of time can conquer time...

...But the Gospel parable teaches us to respect the delays in the growth of the seed and the harvest, and not to encroach upon this by an impatient search lor purity, "for fear that with the weeds one also will tear out Ihe wheat" (Matthew 1 .V24...

...Now here the theological ice is getting considerably thinner...

...In other words, in the matter of ordination, I must try to interpret the arrangement we have before proposing the inclusion of women in the ministry...

...they are born "agonistic," not consensual or convivial...

...Initially, its cinulation aws restricted by Rome, which adds resonance to the selection that follows...

...And even as they count on the Holy Spirit they have received, can they count on us, too, who by virtue of imposition of hands are authorized, by that same Spirit, to exercise oversight, not as if we were being forced to do it, but willingly, God's way, and not out of a vulgar appetite for gain, but eagerly, not as lords over our charges, but as examples to the flock (see 1 Peter 5:2-3...

...To the consternation of his uncomprehending disciples (who by then should have known better), he even allowed one such woman to embarrass him with far too expensive a gift, in far too maudlin a mood, a mere three days before his arrest and execution...

...he (along with his male disciples) even accepted the care of women "who used to put themselves at their service, out of their own means" (Luke 8:3...

...and a ti uc development based not upon novelty but on a return to the sources of tradition...

...Unconventional as he was, he was regularly seen in the company of women...

...It is fair to suggest that preoccupation with power and jurisdiction has bedeviled the ordained ministry to this day...

...3:27-28...

...Paul VI once wrote that theologians must try to find arguments in support of magisterial teaching, and I have no reason to assume he implied that in so doing we had to trade in intellectual integrity for toadyism...

...The u hole work of life, at least here on earth, presupposes delays which do not allow themselves to be breezed over or put aside...

...Surely, many nineteenth-century Catholics had maintained that a church untangled from entertaining an illusion if we believed that the joys and the vicissitudes of incarnate love are a matter of this life alone, and have nothing to do with the God of love...

...Needless to say, both the practice of the "spiritual sword" being wielded by the secular arm and the theories to justify the practice helped obscure the fact that the sacrament of orders was sacramental and not executive, let alone definitive...

...Also, from my friend and colleague Jim Walter, a capable bioethicist, I have learned the following: Upon fertilization, the nucleus of the fertilized ovum already contains the pre-embryo's own distinctive genetic code, but the fertilized ovum's effective life is still dominated by the massive presence of the ovum's extranuclear materials, which are maternal and hence female...

...There is neither Jew nor Greek...

...End of confession...

...Who knows...

...1 fcresv comes, in large part, from a purely intellectual grasp of a single aspect (of doctrine]: a grasp which easily becomes an impatient one, treeing itself from the delays of life and from the lengthy schooling of living perception...

...Would we not be tioiis of life?—develops with time other aspects, which a dialectical spirit could not haw grasped on its own...

...In this regard...

...That this must happen by us men priests learning how to love men, women, and children, as well as the aged and the marginal of every stripe...

...Small wonder the sacrament of orders became widely as well as dangerously associated with masculinity understood as power (a development unknown in the Oriental churches forced to live under Muslim domination...

...at j time of theological leniiou in the Catholic church, he mote True iind False Reform in the Church, which he htmiI in 1968...

...No wonder either that within a few hundred years, legions of disenchanted Christians in the West, including the Franciscan spirituales and the women who became known, in the late thirteenth century, as beguines, began to find the church unspiritual and the clergy secular and domineering...

...It is an acceptance of the proposition that if orders is sacramental, there is an a priori plausibility of its bearing marks of provisionality...

...What we do need is Jesus' style of masculinity, and his theme was service, not male dominance or performance...

...Factually, the sacrament of orders is traditionally limited to men...

...If I am to make theological sense of this, I find myself appealing to the "already" and the "not yet" typical in the sacramental order as a whole...

...The eminent medievalist Sir Richard Southern, in The Making of the Middle Ages and Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, is only one of many historians who have shown that as early as the sixth and seventh centuries, bishops and abbots were becoming part of the emergent administrative structure of the West...

...Obviously, too, he was neither afraid of women nor embarrassed by their affection...

...I he reformer is always tempted not only to begin development, but to hurry it...

...Surely the dramatic relationships involved in human love cannot be this pedestrian...

...The mind easilv grasps a one-dimenMonal truth, but an idea, in the process of life—in being held and sustained b\ the life of a man or woman, in finding itself in contact with the questions and condiCommonweal 14 January 29,1999 different...

...Could ordained ministry mean this: men encouraged and indeed ordained to live and act with inner freedom and authority, not like unbridled (if often wellintentioned) males, but in the Spirit, spending themselves by helping a whole community pray, care, and teach, in persona Christi ? ? Commonweal 1 6 January 29,1999...

...In Christ, men and women are really one, but for the time being the struggles and incoherences that come with sexual differentiation are still with us, as Saint Paul well saw (witness more than one passage in the first letter to the Corinthians...

...all of us, whether male or female, begin our lives in a female mode...

...Qhe innovdlor, whoso reform turns into sthisrn, !,n:ks patience...

...There is neither slave nor freeborn...

...Time revealed the groundlessness of this position...

...Walter Ong's book Fighting for Life (1981) occurs to me...

...so, like Jesus himself, she sensed that he was a dead man, as good as buried...

...But the fact is: while truly, really, and substantially saved from the powers that be, from prejudice racial and cultural, and from the stress of sexual differentiation and attraction, the church is church: sacrament of the kingdom, not kingdom come...

...Thus this condition of patience must be added to the first condition [tor reform | that I have set forth: a subordination of the intellectual and the systematic to the pastoral...

...Accordingly, being born male means: having faced a critical such temporal matters- would be more free for action in the world...

...That ordination must teach us male priests how to grow in patience, gentle firmness, endurance, and kindness, so as to anticipate, in imperfect but symbolic deed and in facing frequent but temporary distress, the things that truly are the last things...

...reality and lite are not...

...A too-rapid (ormuhition—the fruit of a purely dialectical intelligence—yields a dried-out product of little inner substance...

...Now if this were actually accomplished, that would be kingdom come...

...Sexual differentiation, in other words, does not occur until the ovum's influence ceases to be dominant...

...And, of course, by helping demonstrate that the idea of the kingdom is not for women to be nice, but to take their rightful place in the body of Christ and in the ministries that support it...

...That is to say, an end, sort of...

...Obviously, this is no argument either for or against the ordination of women (or, for that matter, of men...

...I am inclined to believe that Catholicism and Protestantism differ still more— in terms ol" temperament and the manner bv which believers receive and come to their religion—in being a religion oi life, and of life in its fullness, on the one hand, and a religion of searching, of purity, of searching for purity, on the other...

...the preservation of i. ommumon among ail Ilie faithful, patieiue...

...He explains that even before they are born, men have a far more precarious physiological and emotional balance than women do...

...The future proved them right...

...Hut, could one have foreseen, in 18711, the consequences for the Holy See's freedom of this loss of sovereignty...

...And Jesus made this scene of fond abandon part of the gospel, "in memory of her" (Mark 14:3-9...

...Protestantism is more intellectual than Catholicism...

...not only to clear the field, but to want it free from all weeds...

...If certain decisions or changes are to be taken, it is essential that time reveal wlut meaning certain events concealed, what was to become of certain possibilities, whose mysterious character—often very disturbing—it may have been impossible to guess...

...An idea can be pure...

...In any case, the Catholic church has thus far considered only men valid subjects of the sacrament of orders, and Pope John Paul II has insisted that there is more than custom here...

...Fither by their judgment and condemnation on history and its inadequate achievements, or by their *.onslrut tivc movement toward realizing a state of affairs approaching greater perfection and purity, revolutions and reforms are like partial anticipations of the apocalypse...

...rcTioush/ un translated and rendered here by Cliristoplwi Ruddy, con ecru* Ihc essential role of patwnw in church reform...

...Accordingly, everything should be attempted to turn this around (but discerningly please, not with a vengeance...

...l;or example, many Catholics thought, in the last third of the nineteenth renturj and the first quarter of the twentieth, that the 1 loly bee might do well to relinquish its temporal possessions...

...in due course, they became "peers"— peers, that is, of the barons and counts and viscounts and dukes and kings, just as the pope came to be regarded as the peer of the emperor (often to the disquiet of both...

...Could it be that they could think this way because they were shaped by a "patriarchal" world, in which men are forever ready to defend themselves (and women and children, of course) by force, and to take after women and dominate them at least partly to reassure and gratify their nervous selves...

...In W27, when the Libra n Treaty was signed, il seemed to them a true libera tion...

...y\ i-.b t.ov ,.\r Commonweal 15 January 29,1999 modification in the pre-embryonic phase of life...