Newsweek, April 3,
2010
A
Woman’s Place Is In The Church
By Lisa Miller
Here they are, the
members of history's oldest and most elite all-male club, trying
to manage what began as a domestic crisis. For decades, certain
priests in America, Europe, Ireland, Brazil (and God knows where
else) abused—raped or otherwise molested—children and
teenagers not in the frescoed halls of the Vatican but in their
own backyards: on camping trips and in cars, in dormitories and
confessionals. Those few boys and girls confident enough to tell
their secret whispered it to the women they trusted: mothers,
aunts, grandmothers. Those few women brave enough to question
authority or seek justice from the bishops were hushed up and
shut down. In this case Jesus was wrong: the meek did not inherit
the earth. They received pious and self-serving sermonizing.
"To be sure,"
wrote Boston's Cardinal Humberto Medeiros to one mother incensed
over the sexual abuse of seven boys in her own family, "we
cannot accept sin, but we know well that we must love the sinner."
Even with a mother, Mary, at the center of the Christian story,
the women of today's church have found themselves marginalized
and preached to amid the interminable revelations of the sexual-abuse
scandals. Their prayers to the Virgin, protector of humanity,
seem to have gone unanswered.
No wonder the men now charged with damage control face such a
credibility gap, a sense that they—who read apologies from
teleprompters—appear insufficiently aghast at the damage
done. On Palm Sunday in New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan condemned
sex abuse from his throne in St. Patrick's looking for all the
world like a well-fed Fortune 500 CEO. A YouTube clip shows Cardinal
Sean Brady of Ireland—where 15,000 children were abused over
four decades—peremptorily dismissing calls for his resignation.
After a New York Times story reported that Pope Benedict XVI (then
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) failed to defrock a priest who abused
200 deaf children in Wisconsin, the pope lashed out against the
news media. Faith, he said, allows one not "to be intimidated
by the petty gossip of dominant opinion." Time and again,
the pope and his surrogates fail to convince us of their grief.
The problem is not, as so many progressives claim, the fact of
their celibacy. Nor is it their costumes—the miters and capes—though
these vanities do serve as reminders of the great distance between
the men with power and the people without. The problem—bluntly
put—is that the bishops and cardinals who manage the institutional
church live behind guarded walls in a pre-Enlightenment world.
Within their enclave, they remain largely untouched by the democratic
revolutions in France and America. On questions of morality, they
hold the group—in this case, the church—above the individual
and regard modernity as a threat. We in the democratic West who
criticize the hierarchy for its shocking inaction take the supremacy
of the individual for granted. They in the Vatican who blast the
media for bias against the pope value ecclesiastical cohesion
over all. The gap is real. We don't get them. And they don't get
us.
By keeping modernity at bay, though, the men who run the Catholic
Church have willfully ignored one of the great achievements of
the modern age: the integration of women in the workforce and
public life. In America, 50 million women work full time; in the
European Union that number is 68 million. Within most mainline
Protestant denominations, these battles over the professionalization
of women were fought—and lost—half a century ago. In
Denmark, Lutheran women were granted ordination rights in 1948;
in the U.S., the first female Episcopalian priest was ordained
in 1976.
But in the Roman Catholic corporation, the senior executives live
and work, as they have for a thousand years, eschewing not just
marriage, but intimacy with women and professional relationships
with women—not to mention any chance to familiarize themselves
with the earthy, primal messiness of families and children. Indeed,
it seems the further a priest moves beyond the parish, the more
likely he is to value conformity and order above the chaos of
real life.
"I see [the hierarchy] as outrageously indifferent to the
welfare of children," says a fuming Elaine Pagels, professor
of religion at Princeton. "For you and me this is hard to
understand. It seems to us out of step with the world. But they
don't want to be in step with the world."
Over and over I have heard mothers (and fathers) mourn. One parent
in one room where a bishop was deciding the fate of an abusing
priest would have saved countless families from a lifetime of
misery. "It's a pretty good guess that we would not be in
this same predicament were women involved," says Frank Butler,
president of FADICA, a group of Catholic family foundations. "For
sure."
It is a reforming moment, then, a time for the men of the Vatican
to take the wisdom of their own words to heart. The Second Vatican
Council in the early 1960s was an effort to better integrate the
antique church with the modern world, and its documents overtly
address the changing place of women. "The hour is coming,"
read the council's closing documents, "in which women acquire
in the world an influence, an effect and a power never hitherto
achieved. That is why, at this moment…women imbued with a
spirit of the Gospel can do so much to aid humanity in not falling."
Pope John Paul II expounded on the centrality of women to the
church in his 1988 letter Mulieris Dignitatem ("On the Dignity
of Women")—even as he firmly reiterated six years later
the church's refusal to consider their ordination.
The chasm between the church's stated principles and its functional
reality yawns wide. In the U.S., 60 percent of Sunday massgoers
are women; thus most of the contributions to the collection plate—$6
billion a year—are made by women. And yet the presence of
women anywhere within the institutional power structure is virtually
nil. The number of women who hold top-tier positions in any of
the dicasteries, or committees, that make up the Vatican structure
can be counted on one hand. Few women retain high-profile management
jobs, such as chancellor, within dioceses. And though nuns dramatically
outnumber priests worldwide, they are mostly so invisible that
when a group of them speaks up, as they did recently on health-care
reform, everyone takes notice.
Eight years after the Boston scandals, "it's just men listening
to themselves" on sex abuse, says Kathleen McChesney, the
former FBI official enlisted to study and remedy the problem of
sex abuse in American dioceses after 2002. "To my knowledge,
there's no woman in the Vatican who's involved in sex-abuse issues."
Kerry Robinson traveled to Rome last month to talk to cardinals
about promoting more women. Executive director of the National
Leadership Roundtable, a group of American businesspeople who
hope to bring corporate best practices to the church, Robinson,
together with a group of female colleagues, hoped to make a point.
"A young woman looks at the corporate world and sees that
she can reach the highest levels of leadership," says Robinson.
"She is frustrated at the lack of opportunities to live out
her leadership in the church. The grave consequence of that is
that the church becomes less and less relevant to women. And the
consequence of that is that it becomes less and less relevant
to her children."
"It matters," adds Robinson, "how the church is
seen. Right now, it's seen as sins and crimes committed by men,
covered up by men, and sustained by men. To overcome that, the
church has to absolutely include more women."
Women aren't a panacea, of course. History shows that women in
power can be as ruthless and self-serving as men. And the mere
presence of women does not, obviously, inoculate an organization
against criminality or corruption—just ask Lynndie England,
who smiled for the camera as she humiliated prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Moreover, it's difficult to prove that the male-dominated atmosphere
of the Roman Catholic Church creates a unique hothouse for sexual
predators; and indeed, the majority of good priests throughout
the world continue to care for the faithful. (The perpetrators
in a few of the recent European cases have been women.) Researchers
believe, in fact, that rates of abuse within the church probably
compare with those of other denominations—and of youth organizations,
schools, and families. It's frighteningly high. "Surveys
indicate that one out of three girls experienced an unwanted sexual
approach from an adult before age 18," says Margaret Leland
Smith, a researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who
analyzed the data from the U.S. sex-abuse cases. Among boys, she
says, the rate is one in five.
Indisputable, though, is that the all-male Catholic hierarchy
has responded to the crisis too slowly and—even after the
revelations in the U.S.—in a way that has instinctively protected
its own interests above those of the children. "The Catholic
Church could have pulled these people any time they wanted and
defrocked them," says the Rev. Marie M. Fortune, a minister
in the United Church of Christ and founder of FaithTrust Institute,
a multifaith organization aimed at ending sexual violence. "You
can make a good argument that part of the problem is the hierarchy,
in terms of it being a boys' club, an institution that is so ingrown
and conservative and out of touch with people."
Studies show what we intuitively know: without checks and balances,
insular groups of men do bad things. History professor Nicholas
Syrett, author of The Company He Keeps: A History of White College
Fraternities, says studies suggest that 70 to 90 percent of gang
rapes on college campuses are committed by men in fraternities.
Obviously, he adds, important differences exist between the Roman
Catholic hierarchy and college frats—"fraternity men
are encouraged to have sex with lots of women. Clearly priests
are not." But in both cases, "men are encouraged to
believe that they are in positions of power for a reason…I
do think if the hierarchy of the Catholic Church doesn't discipline
these people because they are concerned about reputation, they
create a space where those [abusing children] are led to believe
that whatever they do is OK."
Richard Sipe agrees. He is a former priest who has spent the past
three decades researching the sexual teachings of the church and
their effects on clerical behavior. "Clergy," he says,
"are a group that are very privileged in their own mind.
They have a sense of entitlement. Think about it. What other culture
do you know of that's all male, theoretically and practically?"
Jesus, of course, said nothing about the role women should play
in his future church. As the leader of a small and radical movement
he invited all to join his band, including married women, single
women, and prostitutes; and the Gospel accounts give women a special
role. They are the ones who first encounter the resurrected Lord
and report back to the men on this supernatural event.
Women probably worked in the early church. In his letter to the
Romans, written in the late 50s (A.D.), the Apostle Paul writes
of a deacon named Phoebe; a "fellow worker" named Prisca;
and "workers in the Lord" Tryphena and Tryphosa. He
even mentions an "apostle" named Junia—a fact so
shocking to generations of scribes who imagined that apostles
could only be men that they intentionally misunderstood Paul's
meaning. "Very, very frequently [Junia is] changed into a
man's name," says Diarmaid MacCulloch, author most recently
of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. "You get
a sense that the early church is rowing away from women having
positions of power."
It would be a mistake, therefore, to view the first centuries
of Christianity as any feminist heyday. Women were regarded almost
universally as lower beings, over whom a good Christian man had
to exercise control. "Our ideal," said Clement of Alexandria
in the second century, "is not to experience desire at all."
And—despite the fact that clerics and even popes were often
married—women's ability to arouse sexual desire in Christian
men relegated them to the role of the temptress Eve, in cahoots
with Satan. For women, celibacy was one way to gain any power
in a man's world; by emulating Mary, a woman might find independence
and strength.
By the 12th century, the separation of men and women in the church
was complete. Clerical celibacy became mandatory in 1139, and
in the great universities of Europe, where Christian intellectuals
were establishing the foundations of modern philosophy, math,
astronomy, science, literature, and theology, women were excluded
completely. The only way thereafter for a Christian woman to gain
prominence was as a prophet or a mystic, observes MacCulloch—and
then her brethren might regard her as cracked.
One more brick, and the Vatican clerics would shut themselves
off from their faithful for good. Kevin Schultz, a historian at
the University of Illinois at Chicago, explains that Rome objected—strenuously—to
the individualism that led to the French and American revolutions.
In reaction, Catholic intellectuals revived some of the ideas
of Thomas Aquinas, especially his insistence on holding the community
above the individual. The preeminence of these ideas essentially
formed an "opposition to what the church sees as modernity,"
explains Schultz. "It creates us-versus-them. There becomes
this level of secrecy. The popes become much more powerful."
No explanation better illuminates today's great disconnect between
all the pope's men and the progressive faithful. In a world where
the whole really matters more than individual parts, a rigid—sometimes
brilliant, sometimes mean-spirited—morality reins. This elevation
of the church above all things explains how an institution dedicated
to serving the sick and the poor might also refuse condoms to
those at risk for AIDS. It explains how an organization committed
to families could deny birth-control pills to mothers. And it
explains, sadly, how a bishop faced with a pedophile in a parish
might decide not to call the cops.
To break the old habits of insularity and groupthink, the embrace
of modernity that started with Vatican II must begin anew. "I
want to throw open the windows of the church so that we can see
out and the people can see in," said Pope John XXIII of that
effort. The first, and perhaps easiest, place to start is with
women.
More than 60 percent of American Catholics support the ordination
of women, and though traditionalists insist that's a pipe dream,
realists think otherwise. With priestly vocations in steep decline
in the U.S., and women running 80 percent of parish ministries,
female priests seem an inevitability. A small group of about 100
renegade women have already been ordained "by a bishop in
good standing," says Eileen McCafferty DiFranco, who is one
of them. Though excommunicated, DiFranco remains unbowed. "Jesus
never said only men can be priests."
In the U.S., reported incidents of sex abuse in Catholic dioceses
are dropping, thanks largely to the work of McChesney and her
team. Now every American diocese must establish an advisory board
on sex abuse, a group professionally and personally concerned
with the welfare of children. McChesney believes these advisory
boards should be replicated in dioceses worldwide—and at
the Vatican. "Benedict needs to establish a group that is
not just clergy. He needs an advisory board of people who are
expert in child abuse, in investigative issues, in problem solving.
You need the involvement of lay professionals." If these
people are women, so much the better.
On her diplomatic mission to the Vatican, Kerry Robinson had another,
more spiritual goal. Over the years, stories from the Gospels
and the Old Testament about women have slowly disappeared from
the Sunday lectionary, the scheduled Bible readings that massgoers
hear. Robinson gently brought this to the cardinals' attention
and found that some hadn't noticed the stories were gone. "It's
all men, all the time," says Robinson. "They go to mass
all the time, they don't distinguish, they don't think of it from
the perspective of a woman who goes to mass on Sunday." Mary,
the mother of Jesus, was human. A traditional girl, she made the
best of an extraordinary situation and then watched, stoically,
as her child suffered. This is a universal story. If the stories
of the women and girls of the Bible aren't told, then mothers
and daughters will stop seeing themselves as part of the Body
of Christ. They'll walk away. And they'll take their children
with them.
Lisa Miller is NEWSWEEK's religion editor and the author of Heaven:
Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife.
With Pat Wingert, Jessica Ramirez, Ian Yarett, and Daniel Stone
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