Only One Problem

This Easter, I will have been in full communion with the Catholic Church for three years; this summer, I will have been regularly attending mass for four. During that time, I have come to know several priests and sisters who have given me a new and different idea of what it means to serve Christ. I have come to know and love the mass to such a degree that I sometimes forget that to the vast majority of my friends, it would be a deeply strange experience. I have come to shape my prayer life according to the traditions of the Catholic Church, which has been very helpful for someone who found it difficult to pray without outside direction. I can honestly say that my participation in the Catholic Church has been beneficial to my spiritual life overall.

My mom sometimes says that I perhaps would not even be a Christian at this point if I had not become Catholic, and she might be right. This is not to say that it was strictly necessary for me to become Catholic or that I have derived nothing but benefit from it. During my freshman year at Olivet, when I was going through my "Catholic fundamentalist" phase, I was insufferably proud, certain that I had found the unadultured truth. I applied the worst of the "evangelistic" techniques I had sometimes been encouraged to use as a child, with sometimes alienating results. I displayed a bias against Nazarene worship traditions that I have only recently begun to put behind me -- only in the last year have I been able to go to a Nazarene church without carrying with me the idea that I was somehow "corrupting" myself or at best that I was participating in something very stupid and misguided. And only very slowly am I coming to realize that Nazarene does not strictly equal fundamentalist -- there are certainly far too many fundamentalists in the Midwestern Nazarene church, but in my opinion any number of them is too many.

As I'm reaching this enlightened time in my life when I can perhaps embrace a more "lower-case catholic" view of things, when I can perhaps take the opportunity to worship God without first making sure it's been labelled properly, I am starting to see that there is perhaps a problem in the Catholic Church -- they don't ordain women. While indulging myself in a Nazarene service this morning, I heard a sermon by Pastor Boone of College Church that said that the domination of man over women is a symptom of the sinfulness of the world and that Christ calls men and women to live a life of mutual self-giving that will be something truly new in this sinful world. He drew the natural connection to women's ordination, a Nazarene tradition of which he was rightly proud.

Women in the Catholic Church are allowed to do virtually anything other than be a priest. They are allowed to distribute the communion elements, to read the Scriptures in mass, to be pastoral ministers, to teach classes, to be spiritual advisors -- but they are not allowed to administer any of the seven sacraments (except for emergency baptisms). They are not allowed to proclaim the words of the gospel or (technically, though not always in practice) to give a homily. They are not allowed to receive the sacramental sign of ordination, a sacrament that represents a commitment to the service of Christ that many Catholic women are already living out.

The pope says that this is a closed issue, that the church simply does not have the authority to ordain women. And as long as he says that and maintains that practice in the church, he is absolutely right: "Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." I have no quarrel whatsoever with the institution of the pope as the spiritual leader and universal pastor of the Catholic Church -- but to me, spiritual authority is not something to be horded or defended. Christ, who was God himself, did not view authority as something to be grasped, but took the form of a servant, and the pope, as spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, should follow his example. Rather than worrying about the "authority" or "power" of the church, he should worry about what will be most conducive to the spiritual growth of his flock, about what will make the Christian community truly distinctive in the world. More loosing than binding needs to be done.

I know that change is hard in any institution, especially in the institution that has positioned itself as the most stable and trustworthy institution in the Western tradition. I know that the great tragedy of the Reformation led to misguided attempts to preserve "tradition" for its own sake, to hold on to everything in the fear of losing everything. I also know that the years since the Second Vatican Council have been years of growth and opening for the Catholic Church and that there are millions of Catholics around the world who want to carry the spirit of that council out in every area of the church's life. Many things must be done to carry out the work of opening, of loosing -- perhaps letting up on the strictures against birth control, perhaps freeing clergy to live the married life, perhaps opening the communion table to all those who believe in Christ -- but the ordination of women is among the most urgent changes. There are certainly many "pragmatic" reasons to ordain women -- the current shortage of priests, the negative image of the church hierarchy in many circles, the massive loss constituted by those women who leave the church in order to go to the Protestant seminaries that welcome them with open arms -- but the primary concern of Christians should never be simply what is "pragmatic." Rather, in a world that has done so much evil to women, has too often denied them the opportunity to be anything but "near occasions to sin," the Christian church as a whole needs to show the true dignity and equality of women as creatures of God by trusting them with the responsibility of leadership at every level.