Matters of Church and State

A Holy War on Women

            Even presuming a heart brimming with Christian charity and a willingness to give others the maximum benefit of doubt, it’s hard to understand the logic of Vatican thinking.  Maybe those silly hats they wear have choked off oxygen to their brains. Whatever is happening, it makes no sense.  My initial reaction was to title this posting: “Dumb and Dumber.”  But, in deference to good taste, I declined.

In case you missed it, the Vatican is now cracking down on American nuns who, it says, have been influenced by “radical feminism,” as evidenced by their falling “out of step” with church teaching on homosexuality and women’s ordination, as Catholic columnist Melinda Henneberger reported in today’s Washington Post.

American nuns?   The crown jewel of the Catholic Church?  Laborers in the vineyard who are doing the work of the Gospel:  feeding the hungry, ministering to the sick and the poor, educating the disadvantaged in America’s inner cities?  Are you kidding me?  Say it isn’t so, Holy Father…  Sorry, no help there because recently Pope Benedict XVI, in a Holy Week address, chastised priests – males, no less -- who even had the audacity to raise the topic of women priests.

Ironically, the Holy Father thought it fit to raise this issue on Holy Thursday even as Christians were commemorating the passion of Christ – a time when women showed the courage to stand firm with Him during those ghastly days while his male “disciples” scattered like scared rabbits.  Whom did Jesus appear to first after his resurrection?  Yes, a woman -- Mary Magdalene, of all people.   And who carried the good message to the trembling disciples hiding out in an upper room?  A woman, of course.   And this is the Jesus who wanted to restrict the successors to his disciples to a male-only fraternity?

I have concluded regrettably that the Vatican and its disciples walking lockstep throughout the world have either lost their way or lost their minds – or maybe both.  To be fair, they all haven’t lost their minds.  Benedict XVI, for example, is a brilliant man – and a brilliant theologian – whose publications on Jesus and his message are wonderful.  But, I have concluded that he, along with others in the Catholic hierarchy in Rome and throughout the world, are trapped in a bureaucracy of fear and “creeping infallibility,” a term I saw recently but can’t remember where I saw it.  They have concluded they can’t be wrong and so they will do whatever it takes to stay the course and stay on message.  How sad.  Who would want to belong to an organization that could never be wrong?

A few weeks ago, during a liturgy at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Washington D.C., I was listening to the Gospel story about the woman at the well, and  I couldn’t help but imagine how a Vatican representative of a bishop from the U.S. Catholic Bishops conference, for example, would have handled the situation Jesus ran into.  The reading was from John’s gospel (John, Chapter 4, 9-19) and it had to do with Jesus striking up a conversation with a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in the town of Sychar. 

For non-Christian readers, the story involves a rather playful conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, underscoring the deeply human, compassionate and caring side of Jesus.  First of all, for Jesus to be having a conversation with a Samaritan woman at all would have been regarded as deeply scandalous to both Jews and Samaritans at the time.  Moreover, the conversation revealed that the woman had been married five times, and the man she was living with at the time was not her husband.  So, Jesus was violating some serious taboos here, as He was not reluctant to do on so many occasions.

Yet, He never made the woman feel ashamed or degraded, nor did He suggest that she had to clean up her act and get right with the law and authorities before she was worthy of the living water He was offering.  This story, as with so many stories throughout all four Gospels, illustrate the Good News that Jesus came to bring – that God loves us broken human beings, no matter how messed up our lives are and no matter where we come from or what country or tribe we belong to.  He came to save, not to condemn.

Now, for a moment, imagine, as I did at that Mass, a representative from the Vatican or from the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference dealing with the Samaritan woman at the well.  It doesn’t take a wild imagination to suggest it would have played out as a dramatically different story.  

Circling the wagons when their authority is being threatened is not unique to fearful Catholic Church prelates.  It’s true of all deeply entrenched bureaucracies.  And, sadly or amusingly, depending on your perspective, the enemies they are supposedly trying to keep at bay are standing right next to them, inside the circle.  Pogo was spot on:  we have met the enemy and he is us.

Meantime, Catholic nuns and other women live out their lives in accordance with the Good News as they understand it and carry on despite the Catholic hierarchy.  They know a side show when they see it.

Gerald E. Lavey