The Ordination of Women in the Catholic Church: unmasking a cuckoo’s egg tradition, John Wijngaards. New York: Continuum, 2001. 204pp.
by Diana Wear
vol. 24 (2002) Spring edition, p. 7.
The women’s ordination movement in the Roman Catholic Church owes enormous gratitude to John Wijngaards for his most recent effort advocating the cause. He wrote this book as an insider, as a man who was not only trained and formed to be a Roman Catholic priest but also as a scholar who knows the documents on women at a deep and penetrating level. He knows the history and development of these documents and he has scoured the archives in search of root meanings and the decisions that sprang from them. In addition, he reports on the plethora of secondary literature that has engaged theologians in vigorous debate on the issue over the past quarter century.
Wijngaards has an intensity that can be off-putting to some people—he is very passionate and ruggedly determined. At the same time, he knows only too well what women’s ordination is up against and he takes on the issue with undiluted fervor. Wijngaards is like most prophetic voices throughout history who have had to tell their stories at a fever-pitch before anyone would listen and take heed.
Wijngaards employs the “cuckoo’s egg tradition” as a metaphor throughout his book. The cuckoo bird has a tradition of laying its eggs in other birds’ nests. In time their eggs hatch and push the other hatchlings out of the nest, and then it takes ownership of the nest somewhat illegitimately by adopting the foster parent birds as its own. Even as these birds grow up larger and different in size and shape than their foster parents, these new parents take the cuckoo as their own, feed, and defend them. So it is with those in power in the Church, says Wijngaards. They have taken these inauthentic teachings about women (the falsely placed cuckoo eggs) and appropriated them as their own even when others have shown them repeatedly that they are not authentic or true teachings at all.
The reasons the church uses for denying holy orders to women can be condensed in the following: women are not in fact imago Dei (in the image of God) but are considered lesser beings (from the Aristotelian philosophy adopted by Thomas Aquinas); women still carry the burden of Eve’s sin (found frequently in Paul’s teachings); Christ did not choose women among the 12 apostles; women may not teach in church (from 1 Timothy 2); and lastly, women, as imperfect human beings, may not represent Christ, a man. Wijngaards takes us on the journey to discover where each of these teachings has its genesis and he proceeds to demonstrate the inauthentic basis of each finding. Wijngaards then carefully refutes each reason one by one. In the end, none of them stands the test philosophically, theologically, nor scripturally.
Wijngaards tends to excessively repeat Paul’s teaching in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, man or woman in Christ Jesus.” We can excuse him this redundancy, however, for clearly this is what the institutional arm of the church steadfastly refuses to grasp. In that regard it cannot be iterated enough.
There are a couple of shortcomings in this otherwise complete book. Wijngaards constantly refers to the “Congregation for Doctrine” as the home for documents on women. It is actually the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or CDF. Perhaps this was his pun, that is, to call the organization in the church as he sees it, as a place of “doctrine,” not “faith.” While one may be amused with this omission, it also can be distracting to the careful scholar. Secondly, while Wijngaards’ commentary on Scripture is fairly adequate and up to date, he gives short schrift to the role of Mary Magdalene as the apostle to the apostles. The institutional church frequently repeats the mantra that Jesus chose only men as apostles and yet, Mary Magdalene, as recounted in all the canonical gospels, was the first person to see the risen Christ, “sent as a messenger of the good news,” which is the definition of apostle. Why Wijngaards doesn’t seize on this issue as he did so many others is perplexing.
Catholics interested in women’s ordination would do well to read Wijngaards’ book. Anyone trying to understand how in this day and age the Roman Church could be so obstinate on an issue that seems so utterly obvious to most modern people will find many answers in this book. No person should graduate from seminary without reading The Ordination of Women in the Catholic Church. It might even be fun for NWNC readers first to read this book if they are not formally schooled on the topic, and second, to send a letter about it to their local seminary (for the less ambitious, a photocopy of this review might suffice) urging this book as required reading for everyone training for priesthood. This book is appropriate for courses in church history, ecclesiology, and theology of ministry. It also might be appropriate for members in the CDF should they want to clean house of old, dusty, out-of-date documents while coping with empty-nest syndrome.
Diana Wear
Further information on the book: