THE ORDINATION OF WOMEN IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH Unmasking a cuckoo’s egg tradition by John Wijngaards, 204pp. Darton, Longman and Todd. Paperback, £10.95. 0 232 52420 3.
by Rowan Williams
Archbishop Rowan Williams, is a well-known preacher, teacher, biographer, and theologian. He is Primate of the Anglican Church in Wales and a former professor of theology at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. His books include The Wound of Knowledge; A Ray of Darkness ; Resurrection; Christ & the Ideal of Detachment; Teresa of Avila and many others.
A displaced male orgasm?
0pposition within the Catholic tradition to the ordination of women as priests is a distinctive theological phenomenon. While the condemnation of artificial contraception is still based firmly on a doctrine of the natural purpose of coition, and the condemnation of abortion rests on the belief that any termination of the life of a human organism is homicide, the picture is notably less clear with women’s ordination. The dominant reasons for not ordaining women in the past are not the ones most clearly in evidence now, and the most sophisticated and frequently heard modern argument is virtually unknown before the late twentieth century. This marks a serious difference from the terms of reference in the contraception and abortion debates ? which is why it is in one way a pity that John Wijngaards treats this issue as one of a raft of equipollent liberal good causes, true as that may seem in the daily life of the Roman Catholic Church.
In other words, the Church has always advanced reasons for not ordaining women, but they have not always been the same reasons. Wijngaards tabulates with great clarity the major arguments advanced in the Middle Ages by various authors, and leaves us in little doubt that the case made by Aquinas or Bonaventure simply could not be put today. Too much depends on the pervasive assumption that a woman is in some sense defective as a human and deficient in the image of God or in membership of the Body of Christ. This is Wijngaards’s “cuckoo’s egg”: an aggressive importation from Aristotelian biology that has occupied a good deal more than its fair share of the Christian nest.
Lately, however, the argument in the Roman Catholic Church has turned increasingly on a metaphysic of “gender essentiality” unknown to the Fathers or Scholastics, and on a fairly radical reworking of the doctrine of the priest as image of Christ. Wijngaards rightly notes the innovative character of all this, and offers some disturbing illustrations of how it can now be expressed (the Mass as a displaced male orgasm ? and that from the greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, Hans Urs von Balthasar).
It is true enough that a practice may, over time, be thought to be wrong for successive sets of reasons, not always compatible, and may still be wrong; but Wijngaards produces enough unsettling evidence that there has regularly been an underlying argument of the kind: “the Church has never done it, so it can’t be right; there must have been a reason for the prohibition, and it’s up to us to find one.” And this does not inspire confidence, at least to the extent that it forecloses a properly open discussion on the grounds of agreed theological principles. Wijngaards again has no difficulty in showing that a comparable method applied in other areas would have left the Church still justifying slavery.
All in all, this is a valuable book, crisply and accessibly written and presented. I have some hesitation about the great amount of documentation from websites at the end of each chapter. Some of these (like the author’s own) are obviously credible, but the nature of many websites is such that ill?digested research or uncritical erudition is put forward without much help in assessing or placing it. I also suspect that Wijngaards is too sanguine in accepting some of the claims made for the priestly ministry of women in the Church’s earlier ages; it is hard to find any really substantial evidence that women celebrated the Eucharist anywhere, and the well?known uses of presbytera on memorials seem more like refer to consecrated widows than to priests. But there is just enough to make one wonder; and the Joan Morris material about the rights and dignities of female religious superiors in the Middle Ages has still not been comprehensively overturned ? though you have to remember just how far a dedicated writer might go to establish the independence of superiors from episcopal jurisdiction, and at least some of the language (abbesses ordained as “sacerdos maxima”) here must be to do with this issue.
There is another issue about method which will give some readers a measure of unease. Wijngaards is inclined to take the classic, liberal Protestant line that everything was much all right to start with and was then corrupted by alien forces. Thus, nothing can be attributed to Jesus or even Paul that strikes us as unjust or “ridiculous”. This prompts a few questions, as it implies a tidy standard of religious rationality shared between Jesus, Paul and ourselves; and things may not be so simple. It is this passionately optimistic enlightenment that gives the book much of its energy and attractiveness; but it may also give hostages to a sceptical traditionalist fortune and even obliterate the really clear and decisive points made about the curiously heterogeneous theological legacy that the author is so effectively challenging.
Rowan Williams
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