Viewpoint Ordain women, change the abortion
debate
By EUGENE KENNEDY
Suppose the Roman Catholic church
changed its mind and announced it was going to approve the ordination of women
to the priesthood.
Suppose the church merely stated it would welcome and attend
carefully to a resumption of the theological investigations of the ordination
of women that it ruled out just a few years ago.
The earth would move beneath such a reversal of an opinion that
has been as mixed as metaphors get: a litmus test for bishops-to-be, a red flag
of warning to theologians, a line drawn across St. Peters Square, abandon
hope all you who even think of ordaining women. Aside, however, from the
logistical switches that allowing women to be priests would require in
ecclesiastical life -- what would happen to rectories and so on -- another,
deeper effect would almost certainly take place.
At the level at which things really happen -- the one beneath our
conversations and rationalizations of our attitudes and behavior -- this change
would strike the chains off the dynamic of control of women by men that lies,
seldom if ever talked about in Catholicism, close to the bone of the abortion
debate.
The pro-life position would be profoundly enhanced by this
operational recognition of the full citizenship of women within the church.
Why is the abortion debate so often spoken of as a "struggle"?
That description catches the hurly-burly of anguish at the death of the unborn
and the attendant noisy circus of angry exchanges, demonstrations, marches and
court appearances that crowd our view of it.
Something else is at work here. If it is not said aloud it is
still impossible to deny. Many women feel that the institutional church (not
necessarily or always overlapping with the church as a people of God) is pitted
against them, that the men have so long dominated women in matters of doctrine
and discipline that this masculine overseeing of their innermost lives seems
natural, indeed, supernatural -- the way, in other words, God meant things to
be.
This subterranean struggle against being overwhelmed by males
motivates many women who advocate the pro-choice position. Perhaps more women
than we know are not as much for abortion as they are against what they have
experienced as a historical oppression of them by men. The resulting impulse
for equality has asserted itself in dozens of ways in movements as varied as
seeking the vote, entrance into and equal pay in the professions, freedom from
workplace sexual harassment and, like it or not, the right to make their own
decisions about their reproductive lives.
The institutional church that has generously and bravely spent its
spirit and treasure in the pro-life cause has begun to wonder about some of its
failed strategies, such as seeking a Human Life Amendment. Have its leaders
even allowed themselves to explore the deep-down dynamics that may determine
more of the character of this "struggle" that many of them, in their pastoral
hearts, understand but cannot, in their official positions, discuss?
An institution run by men that refuses even to discuss women
priests sparks theological debate on the conscious level anyway. On the plane
of true transaction, it powerfully reasserts mens control over women.
And, no matter the flowing reassurances about the dignity of women uttered in
sermons, women receive the closed-caption version: Stay in your place, and we
will revere you.
It will be even harder for the church to defend this thinking at
the level of parish life if male clergy, as many assert, emerge over the next
generation struggling with their own gender identity.
How could women react otherwise when, while an abstract femininity
is exalted, male ecclesiastics tell women, even at the poorest and most
shadowed ends of the earth, that they may not choose contraceptive services
even if they suffer rape or incest? Were church leaders to welcome a
theological review of this question, they would thereby communicate their
acceptance of womens equality with men. Were this move by the church to
be genuine rather than political, the struggle beneath the surface of all
questions related to women, including abortion, would diminish.
In other words, making women equal in the church would address the
broad social struggle for womens equality with men, which is the real
basis for the reproductive rights movement. Men surrendering control over women
would lessen womens need to keep fighting for it, one of the chief
motivations of the pro-choice crusade.
The pro-life campaign will never completely succeed on the
conscious level until the church addresses these issues on the unconscious
level. The arguments against womens ordination will remain unconvincing
as long as ecclesiastics insist a spurious divine right to define and supervise
the spiritual and physical destiny of women.
Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic
church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and
author most recently of My Brother Joseph, published by St.
Martins Press.
National Catholic Reporter, May 28,
1999
|