How Shall Our Church Teach?

by Maryanne Stevens, R.S.M.

from Where can we find her?
searching for women’s identity in the new church
edited by Marie-Eloise Rosenblatt , pp. 103-116

Published by Paulist Press,1991.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions

In November 1983 the United States Catholic bishops commissioned their third letter in that decade critiquing forms of power deemed destructive to the human person and thus to the mission of the Christian in the modern world. Using scripture and tradition as the twin sources of God’s revelation upon which Catholics rely, the bishops attempted to bring about public dialogue on the morality of the current faces of militarism, capitalism, and sexism, respectively.(1) Thus, all three documents solidified not only a shift for United States Roman Catholics as “Americans” and as Roman Catholics, but also a shift in the role of the bishops vis-a-vis their public.

As a minority church whose authority was vested in a foreign power, Catholics in U.S. history have worked to be understood as loyal to the American enterprise to the point of eschewing even the most conscientious criticism of civic and political leadership and organization.(2) As Americans whose pilgrim voyages were marked, in part, by the search for religious liberty and whose political culture is defined by political and civil rights, Catholics have struggled with a foreign leadership known for authoritarian pronouncements. The recent pastorals clearly affirm that the Catholic bishops understand themselves as leaders of a mainline church that no longer needs to prove its loyalty by an uncritical acceptance of U.S. military, economic or social policy.

Furthermore, as church leaders addressing the Catholic community in the United States, the bishops distinguish themselves from the Roman leadership by presenting moral judgments as prudential decisions rather than as laws.(3) The three letters took into account both the diversity of church members and the reality that circumstances not only change but also are often interpreted differently by people of good will. In short, the U.S. bishops did not write to tell us what to think about nuclear weapons, the economy or sexism, but rather to encourage us to think and to think together in the public arena about these forms of power that threaten the full realization of the human, and thus the Christian, enterprise.(4) Thus they might truly be understood as educators working to enable the church to critically reclaim its past so that it can work creatively through its present into the future.(5)

The purpose of this essay is to look more closely at the bishops as participators in the teaching office of the church, with the specific focus being the “teaching method” they have employed in their pastorals. I will argue that the method employed in the letters on women’s concerns, albeit imperfectly, offers an opportunity for the bishops to understand themselves as transformative educators, “those who enable men and women to deal critically and creatively with reality in order to discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”(6) By understanding themselves as teachers in this sense, the bishops may have their greatest opportunity to call forth a community of conscience free and creative enough to scrutinize both the church itself and the world within which the church dwells. Such discernment, although often enough left unencouraged, is indispensable to a community seeking to carry on the work of Christ.

This essay will proceed in three parts: first, a brief excursus on the teaching office of our church in the light of contemporary educational theory; second, a critical analysis of the teaching method used in the first draft of the letter on sexism; third, some suggestions for continuing reflection on the role of the bishops as teachers.

The Teaching Office of the Church

The classical view of the teaching office of the church has associated it with the magisterium, referring exclusively to the authority of the pope and bishops.(7) These were understood to possess a “different source of knowledge” from that of the ordinary Christian, who had no teaching authority. This source of knowledge, the Holy Spirit, allowed those who were privy to its assistance to discern the “faith” and communicate it in its integrity. All those who were not members of the magisterium were to receive the “deposit of faith” from the pope and bishops in obedience.

This paradigm, which placed the pope and the bishops between the Spirit and the faithful, exemplifies that which is termed “banking education” by the Brazilian literacy expert Paulo Freire. This type of teaching merely facilitates the integration of the younger generation or the convert into the logic of the present system and attempts to bring about conformity to the rituals and mores based upon the system. Education becomes an act of depositing, in which the teacher deposits mores, rituals, doctrine and laws into the students. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues answers and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. The students’ only opportunities for creativity are the techniques for cataloguing and collecting the things they store. But, in the last analysis, it is the people themselves “who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.”(8) For apart from questioning, from entering into communication about our world, from reflection upon action, we cannot be fully human. The underlying belief engendered by banking education is a belief that the world is here to be looked at, to be memorized, not to be recreated or changed.

It follows logically from this notion of education that the role of the teacher is to organize a process to fill the students with deposits of information. The educated person becomes the adapted person, because he or she fits into the world. Students are to receive, to adjust; they are not to interact, to seek solutions, to be creative. In practice, banking education, according to Freire, is well suited to the purposes of oppressors whose tranquility rests on how well their faithful fit the world they have created and how little they question it.(9)

The parallels between freire’s “banking ”education and the classical teaching paradigm operative in our church are all too obvious. And although it is too simplistic to blame all evidence of alienation or lethargy in the pews on teaching methodology, developmental studies, social analysis, and our experience confirm the destructive consequences of submitting to a “world” created by another. However, my concern is not so much to criticize or bemoan an operative model of teaching as to suggest that another model, the inspiration for which is found in the documents of the Second Vatican Council and in the most recent pastorals by the U.S. Catholic bishops, might be more effective to the education of a community of conscience seeking to transform the world into a greater approximation of the reign of God.

Hints of a Paradigm Shift?

In contrast to the vertical pattern of the classical model of the magisterium, the Second Vatican Council emphasized that all people of God are led by the Spirit in the labor of deciphering authentic signs of God’s presence and purpose in the happenings, needs, and desires of life.(10) More pointedly, Karl Rahner’s scrutiny of the documents of the council led him to applaud the attempts, admittedly sporadic, to overcome the “one-sided state of affairs in which the official teachers do all the speaking and their point of view alone is expressed while the church of the faithful listening to them is in the position merely of an addressee obediently accepting the church’s teaching authority as vested in her bishops.”(11)

These initiatives, while for the most part remaining at the level of initiative, do provide the impetus for considering Freire’s model of transformative, liberating education as a model that might be more appropriate for the teaching office of our church. Termed “problem-centered teaching,” this model calls upon the teacher to reject the banking concept in its entirety and adopt an understanding of people as conscious human beings whose consciousness is intent upon restructuring relationships so that the world might be more peaceful and free. The teacher’s role is to observe the life situation of the students and pose as problems the contradictions to freedom seen in the environment. Through dialogue about the “problem,” the teacher-student contradiction is dissolved and all concerned consider the world and its contradictions, because the teacher recognizes that he or she inhabits the same world as the student. Therefore, students and teachers become jointly responsible for a process of considering the problem. Arguments based on “authority” are no longer valid; no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. Men and women, students and teachers, learn from one another how to approach the world.

The students – no longer docile listeners – are now critical coinvestigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers . . . earlier considerations as the students express their own . . . . Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. (12)

While banking education resists dialogue, problem posing education regards dialogue as indispensable. Banking education domesticates students; problem posing education allows them to be critical thinkers. In banking education, questioning the teacher is eschewed, whereas in problem-posing education, neither teachers nor students need apologize for uncertainty. It is assumed that evolving thought will be tentative. The foundation of problem-posing education is creativity. It stimulates true reflection and action upon reality and thus responds to the call of each woman and man to engage themselves in the transformation of the world. Freire insists that it is only this type of education that corresponds to our historical nature. Problem-posing education affirms women and men as beings who can transcend themselves, who can look ahead and move forward together. One must look at the past, but the exercise need not be a means of stultifying immobility. Rather, our past becomes a source for understanding more clearly why we are who we are in the present so that we can become free to change as we shape the future.

Building on Freire’s methodology, Mary Field Belenky and others have studied the learning process. InWomen’s Ways of Knowing they offer the metaphor of midwife teacher as an antidote to the banker teacher.

Midwife teachers assist others in giving birth to their own ideas, in drawing them out, in making the others’ own tacit knowledge explicit and elaborating it.

Midwife-teachers do not administer anesthesia. They support the persons’ thinking but they do not do the thinking for them or expect the persons to think as they do.

Midwife teachers’ first concern is to preserve the others’ fragile newborn thoughts, to see that they are born with their truth intact, that they do not turn into acceptable lies.

Midwife teachers focus not on their own knowledge but on the others’ knowledge. To them, the baby is not theirs, but the other person’s.(13)

The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World describes the Second Vatican Council itself as a midwife. The document presents humankind as struck with both wonder and anxiety at its discoveries and power. We question our place in the universe, the meaning of our individual and collective strivings and our ultimate destiny. Therefore the teaching church at the time could provide “no more eloquent proof of its solidarity with the entire human family with which it is bound up . . . than by engaging with it in conversation about these various problems” (#3, emphasis added). Even more clearly, the council fathers acknowledged the necessity for the church to be in a dialogic stance in order to discern truth.

It must rely on those who live in the world, are versed in different institutions and specialties, and grasp their innermost significance in the eyes of both believers and unbelievers. With the help of the Holy Spirit, it is the task of the entire people of God . . . to hear, distinguish, and interpret the many voices of our age, and to judge them in the light of the divine word. In this way, revealed truth can always be more deeply penetrated, better understood, and set forth to greater advantage (#44).

It is beyond question to assert that either these words or new teaching models that honor the entire people of God as enjoying the assistance of the Spirit in discerning truth have been less than adequately incarnated.(14) However, it is fair to say that the U.S. bishops, as teachers, are struggling to develop a process for moral discernment and moral teaching that not only honors pluralism, but also encourages dialogue about the contradictions that humans who experience themselves as disciples of Jesus face in the context of modern living. The method used to draft the first letter on women’s concerns can serve as a case in point, even though it is only fair to say that the church’s teachers have a lengthy journey ahead to the full appropriation of their role as transformative educators.

Partners in the Mystery of Redemption

Taking a clue from the development of the first two pastoral letters, the six bishops named to write the letter on women’s concerns first widened their writing committee by adding consultants from various disciplines, all of whom in this case happened to be women. The committee then made itself available for “listening” sessions in which they heard testimony from national Catholic women’s organizations and read testimony received from local sessions organized in dioceses across the country. The first hint of midwife education came in the opening statements of the draft which asserted that the pastoral “is not meant to define women, to prescribe roles for them or to tell them who they are and what they should do” (#20). The desire was to contribute to ongoing dialogue about sexism (#20), the sin which breeds an oppressive mentality and divides and destroys human community (#40). Furthermore, the bishops argued that their writing was only a beginning and that they wrote “with a sense of incompleteness.” They called for reflection and action “as an honest, pastoral expression of [their] desire to learn from women and to respond to their concerns” (#21).

In a significant stylistic departure from their own previous letters as well as any other major church documents on social or personal concerns, the bishops began each chapter (women as persons, women in relationship, women in society, and women in the church) with the experience of women, quoting both positive and negative comments made by women in the listening sessions. These sections, “listening to voices of affirmation” and “listening to voices of alienation,” preceded sections of each chapter in which the bishops reflected on the traditions of the church, “our heritage,” and made recommendations for continuing study and action, “responding as bishops.”

The unconventional quoting of the negative and the positive questions, concerns and musings of women suggests that the bishops were attempting to face the problem of sexism with women. It was women’s voices which “name the world” or frame the issues and questions for consideration. I do not think it is an overstatement to deem this confirmation of dialogue between women and the bishops revolutionary. It is precisely women’s experience that has been shut out of biblical hermeneutics and theological reflection in the past, and the tradition, for the most part, has been shaped to exclude them. Thus, I would argue that the bishops presented themselves as unconventional educators with an approach that took its cues from the initiatives of Vatican II and the Freirean methodology.

However, they were unable to follow through when it came to reflecting on the tradition or making recommendations for further study and action. Here the dialogue ended and the dialectic between teacher and student collapsed. Women’s voices were suppressed throughout these sections because the Bible and church documents which were relied upon to review “our” heritage were written by men and interpreted by men, and are once again proclaimed in a patriarchal church.(15) Even though the Bible and the tradition are the twin sources of God’s revelation upon which we as church have relied, there was scant recognition that these are carriers of sexist attitudes incorporated throughout our history into ritual, symbol, law, doctrine and dogma. What appeared to be the beginning of a shared, critical look at the challenges and limitations of our communal history with a view toward its further development was truncated as the bishops resorted to banking education by quoting the Bible and other documents of the church and making too few guarded recommendations for actions which might challenge patriarch mind-sets.

It may be naive to think that the powerful could carry out a liberating dialogue that would ultimately undercut their power.(16) The only way to retain power is to maintain the status quo. But, it is more and more obvious that church members in the United States, women and men alike, are stating that they too enjoy the assistance of the Holy Spirit. They thus understand themselves as equipped to discern with the church’s teachers the contradictions inherent in traditional assessments of God’s revelation and an adequate grasp of what is necessary for discipleship.

How Might Our Bishops Teach?

Despite the major caveat of the last few paragraphs, I would still argue that the bishops’ unconventional dialogue with women throughout the process of developing the earliest document, their assertion in the draft title that women are partners in redemption, and their premise that the pastoral was to be understood as a beginning signal a revolution for the teaching office in our church.(17) As sanguine as that may sound, it should not be understood as such. Revolutions imply conflict. The understanding that anyone or any system which claims to have the final answers to life will be threatened by problem-posing education prompts the question of whether any of us as religious people can bear education in its Freirian sense at all.(18)

The bishops are teachers representing the wider church, and, as teachers, they have at least two choices. They can either attempt to indoctrinate others into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it or they can enable church membership to deal critically and creatively with reality in the interest of creating a more human life for all. The latter implies nothing less than class suicide, death to the role of making deposits which gather interest and are then returned. The former, however, guarantees not only continued dehumanization, but also further contraction of the very message that the bishops are attempting to lead the public to embrace through their pastoral letters.

Further consideration must be given to how church leaders understand themselves as teachers and perhaps, even more importantly, how church membership understands church leaders as teachers. For “the enemy of the freedom to act toward the destructive forces within theworld or within the church as a responsible and critical adult is seldom one man or a few men in high places; the educational obstacle is almost always a system of assumptions and practices that needs patient and intelligent examination.”(19) This insight cuts both ways: the bishops need to reconsider why banking education, which is questionable as education at all, has heretofore marked their communication as teachers, and those of us who are not bishops need to continue to examine why we might be tempted to continue to read the world through others’ eyes.

One way to examine our ideas about the future of education in our church is to consider what metaphors we might use to describe teachers. Eliot Eisner in his Educational Imagination argues that one’s image or metaphor for teaching is crucial as it shapes the behavior and attitude of the teacher. Eisner describes teaching as an art, comparing it to the disciplined and sustained effort involved in dancing. Just as dancing provokes the imagination and allows the dancer and the audience to enter together into a conversation or a story, so does teaching.(20) Maria Harris echoes Eisner’s concern for imagery, suggesting “midwife” as the most apt metaphor because teaching, like midwifery, “occurs when someone with knowledge and skill enables and empowers someone else to come into self-possession.”(21)

Midwifery and birthing might be the best metaphors for our church to linger upon as it attempts to shape future conversations between bishops and other believers about women’s concerns and other agendas. Birthing, as Harris points out, is not a power to be taken lightly, for in addition to its wonder, we know that some births are stillborn and others aborted or not allowed to occur for whatever reason. And, we know that all birth involves pain. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the power for birth is shared by both women and men. Birthing presupposes bonding. In the best of circumstances that bonding implies a mutuality, a communication of love, a desire to express care and concern for one another, and a desire to see communication bring forth new life. Human birth is bearing bodiliness, enfleshment, new life, passion, emotion, feeling, blood, water and pain.

The Second Vatican Council in describing the bishops as teachers asked them to manifest “maternal solicitude for all . . . .”(22) Bishops and other believers who take seriously both Vatican II and the process of education might first ponder how we might learn about “maternal solicitude” and then ask what birthing demands that we bear. We may have to bear seeing woman-church breathe new life into our understandings of how to be bound to God. We may have to bear seeing our tradition reshaped as rituals and symbols are reassessed by the new life in our midst. Furthermore, birth might ask us to see and feel change in forms, systems and structures which must be shaped to accommodate the newness. Finally, thinking about themselves as midwives might ask our church’s bishops to understand the role of our church’s teaching office as providing impetus for informed and intelligent conversation about those forces that impede new life in our church and in our society.

Whatever the metaphor, we must teach our bishops to practice their teaching office in such a way that we might all understand ourselves as partners in the mystery of redemption.

Notes

1. The pastorals are The Challenge of Peace: Cod’s Promise and Our Response, 1983; Economic Justice for All: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy, 1986; and the first public draft of Partners in the Mystery of Redemption: A Pastoral Response to Women’s Concerns, 1988.

2. See Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History of Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday, Image Books, 1985) for an excellent survey of the multi-faceted United States Roman Catholic Church’s struggle to “fit into” U.S. society.

3. For a full explanation of this assertion and a comparison of Roman documents and U.S. documents, see Charles E. Curran, “Catholic Social and Sexual Teaching: A Methodological Comparison,” Theology Today BOLIV:4 (April 1988) 425-550.

4. For a further understanding of that which is fully human as that which is fully Christian, see Hans Küng, On Being A Christian (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1976).

5. It is beyond the scope of this essay to deal with the contemporary controversy over the role of a bishops’ conference. However, it is important to note that the U.S. bishops have attempted to respond dialogically to the Vatican’s efforts to restrict their understanding of the teaching authority of the conference. See Origins 17, 731ff for the Vatican statement and Origins 18, 397ff for the U.S. bishops’ response. Of related interest is Avery Dulles’ “What Is the Role of a Bishops’ Conference? Origins 17, 789ff.

6. This definition of a transformative educator comes from the work of Alice Frazer Evans, Robert A. Evans and William Bean Kennedy. See their Pedagogies for the Non-Poor (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987).

7. Magisterium derives from the Latin magister, master, one who rules others or has control, authority or power over something. Aquinas argued for two magisteria, magisterium cathedrae pastoralis, that of a bishop and magisterium cathedrae magistralis, that of a theologian. However, the latter position never drew much support, and in church usage magisterium refers to the teaching office of the pope and bishops. See Michael G. Lawler’s “Freedom of Inquiry, Thought, and Expression: The Theologian in the Catholic Church and University,” Horizons 15:1 (1988) 108-115 for further elaboration.

8. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum Books, 1983) 58.

9. Ibid. 63.

10. “The Church Today,” # 11.

11. “The Teaching Office of the Church in the Present-Day Crisis of Authority,” Theological Investigations XII (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 5.

12. Freire, 68.

13. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

14. Examples abound. For critics, see especially Margaret Farley’s “Moral Discourse in the Public Arena,” in William W. May (ed.), Vatican Authority and American Catholic Dissent (New York: Crossroad, 1987), and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s “Claiming Our Authority and Power,” in J.B. Metz and E. Schillebeeckx (eds.), The Teaching Authority of The Believers (Scotland: T & T. (:lark, Concilium Series, 1985).

15. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza recommends that a warning label be

placed on all biblical texts: “Caution! Could be dangerous to your health and survival!” because of the sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, militarist context from which most of it arose. See her “The Will To Choose or Reject: Continuing Our Critical Work” in Letty Russell (ed.), Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1985).

16. This is Freire’s assertion, even though he recognizes that the former elite will have to be drawn into the dialogue for the “revolution” to be complete.

17. Both the content and tone implied in the U.S. bishops’ letter differs markedly from that of Pope John Paul I I’s recent apostolic letter, “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women,” released 9/30/88 and reprinted in Origins 18:7 (October 6, 1988).

18. Gabriel Moran first posed this question in Religious Body (New York: Seabury Press, 1974).

19. “Of a Kind and to a Degree,” in Marlene Mayr (ed.), Does The Church Really Want Religious Education? (Alabama: Religious Education Press) 25.

20. New York: Macmillan Press, 1979.

21. Maria Harris, Women and Teaching, 1987 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) 5.

22. Decree on the Bishops’ Pastoral Office in the Church, #13.

RECOMMENDED READING

Harris, Maria. Teaching and the Religious Imagination: An Essay in the Theology of Teaching. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. In both poetry and prose, Harris presents the power of teaching and her insight into the steps that must be taken in order for the role of the teacher to be of human assistance.

Hellwig, Monika K. Christian Women in a Troubled World. 1985 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1985. Here, in a very readable form, is a clear presentation of the issues women face in attempting to find a “usable past” in the Christian tradition.

May, William W. Vatican Authority and American Catholic Dissent. New York: Crossroad, 1987. An anthology of articles, including the work of theologians Margaret Farley, Lisa S. Cahill and Anne E. Patrick, this volume presents both the necessity for reshaping the structure of teaching in our church as well as some ideas for how to do so.

Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Press, 1976. Although not overtly about education, this book reviews the various doctrines of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and exposes how they have influenced the education of women and the education of men about women in the Roman Catholic tradition.