From the Editor's Desk

'Jesus is too much for us'

Let’s play fantasy Vatican for a moment. Imagine that at least three of the major congregations in the church’s top bureaucracy are led by women. I said this was fantasy, so indulge me for a second.

When I say led by women, I mean these would be women who have the same job security as their male counterparts, who understand that their positions no longer depend on deferring to Cardinal So-and-So. They have real authority and the same decision-making power as their male counterparts.

Everyone knows what happens. It’s a no-brainer. The dynamics of the institution -- of the closed little universe of single men -- changes dramatically. It’s a new game. The exclusive male hold on power dissipates like white smoke up the papal chimney. And then what?

Burst the fantasy bubble.

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The thought occurred to me for two reasons -- I’m reading Garry Wills’ wonderful little book, What Jesus Meant (Penguin Books), and I’ve just reread John Allen’s piece on Franciscan Sr. Maria Rosa Leggol of Honduras ( see story).

“The opposite of hierarchy is equality and Jesus was a radical egalitarian. The early church reflected this value,” Wills writes, before quoting the verses from Galatians where Paul declares “there is no more Jew or Greek, slave or free, man and woman.”

“The equality of men and women was a thing so shocking in the patriarchal society of Jesus’ time that his own male followers could not understand it,” Wills says. “ ‘At this point his followers arrived, and were thunderstruck [ethaumazon] that he was speaking to a woman’ -- and a Samaritan woman at that,” he writes, quoting the Gospel of John.

Parenthetically, I suggest it will only be in some future era of church life that the significance of Wills’ contribution to the community will be properly acknowledged. He simply is not safe enough for the moment. He knows too much and writes too much about what he knows.

It is difficult to imagine, in fact, any age widely embracing someone who cites the section in Luke admonishing believers to “Love your foes, help those who hate you, praise those who curse you,” the whole litany of nonviolent response and utmost selflessness. Wills then concludes: “Tremendous ingenuity has been expended to compromise these uncompromising words. Jesus is too much for us. The churches’ later treatment of the Gospels is one long effort to rescue Jesus from his ‘extremism.’ ”

But I’m moving too far down a side road.

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The point is this: Somewhere between a future fantasy and sober scholarship on Jesus’ attitude toward women, we live in the tensions of real time. Some women, worn by the tensions, move on to live their faith in other communities. Others -- and here one marvels -- stay despite the sting of exclusion. The fact is, as John Allen put it in his Web column, that while the church remains a “boys’ club” at the hierarchical level, the church would cease to exist without the involvement of women in countless other ways.

And then, occasionally, you run into a Sr. Leggol, one of those women who appear to function within the church and at the same time a bit apart from the fussiness and the protocol. They seem to occupy some zone of self-assurance, exhibiting, simultaneously, an utter freedom and a total dependence. Call it faith in the extreme.

Actually, they are a more than occasional occurrence. I think of Mercy Sr. Mary Scullion, who has literally saved hundreds, if not thousands, of women from the streets of Philadelphia and has transformed entire blocks of one of the bleakest urban landscapes in America. When I met her some years ago, her residence was a room the size of a small cell on one of the upper floors of a drug rehab house she had founded.

I think of people like Mercy Sr. Camille D’Arienzo of Brooklyn, N.Y., teacher, writer, administrator and longtime advocate for those on death row and against the death penalty.

And in that line of ministry there was the pioneering work of St. Joseph Sr. Helen Prejean, who dragged America’s conscience inside the death row cellblocks to confront the twisted logic of execution.

There is the courageous witness of Mercy Sr. Theresa Kane, who took the opportunity in 1979 to boldly speak up to Pope John Paul II about women and their place in the church, and that of Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister, connected both within the church and with interreligious and human rights groups the world over advocating for the rights of women. More than a few women have told me without reservation that Chittister’s writing keeps them connected to Catholicism.

Endless lists of advocates for peace, for justice, who place themselves on the margins of life and persist in the work of redemption form a thick web of women’s radical existence. One of the easy analyses of the day holds that because the orders’ numbers are dwindling, something must be wrong. I tend toward the notion that it is form, not substance, that’s changing. I think such women are leading us toward something new, even if, momentarily, we hesitate to follow.

When I meet such women, or read what they write, or read about them, I have a sense that they understand, better than most, how radically Jesus altered the relationship between men and women. A point that may be more fully appreciated in some future era of church.

-- Tom Roberts

National Catholic Reporter, April 20, 2007