The high point of the 25th anniversary gathering of the Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) came after lunch Friday. Some 20 Catholic WOC members, dressed in albs and stoles, posed for pictures. The scene resembled the traditional group picture of a class that had just been ordained; only a bishop was absent. They also displayed a model of WOC’s billboard recently erected in downtown Milwaukee: “You’re waiting for a Sign from God? Ordain Women.”
While affirmative and hopeful, the WOC event was not sanguine about the current climate. By making the ban on the ordination of women a virtual article of faith, the church’s magisterium is moving down a path toward self-destruction, said theologian Sheila Briggs in her presentation. The Vatican, she said, appears ready to risk scuttling everything in order to bar lay men and women from the altar.
“But what,” she asked, “is that invisible something, that metaphysical change in being, which is conferred by ordination” and which restricts the eucharistic action to certain, specified males only? “It” is constantly asserted but never explained in terms intelligible to people in the modern world.
In fact, she said, the eucharist’s “primary connection is to baptism, not ordination, for “the eucharist is the common meal of the faithful,” all of them radically equal by their baptism. “To deny an important role in the church to some people purely on the basis of their gender is to denigrate the dignity of baptism,” she added. Indeed, she noted, there is no evidence of an ordained priesthood in the first generation of Christianity. In his epistles, Paul never refers to a priest other than Christ himself, she said; he assumes the eucharist meal is celebrated equally by all since there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female in the Body of Christ.
Can the long-standing, twisted tradition be changed? If not, said Briggs, the future is in grave peril: “If Roman Catholic women are not ordained tomorrow, the priestly ministry may not exist tomorrow.”
Other WOC speakers were no less sober, though they chose to look ahead to what might happen if Roman Catholic women were ordained tomorrow. It would not amount to the second coming of Christ, cautioned ethicist Barbara Hilkert Andolsen. Overt racism would still exist in the church, she said. So would an economic system that discriminates against the poor, women’s inequality in the work force, and the cultural divide between Anglos and a spiraling population of Hispanics. The charisms of Catholic women priests would be greatly stretched, she predicted, in “nurturing solidarity in parishes and greater justice in society.”
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| Ready for ordination, WOC members are proud of the message on the latest downtown milwaukee billboard. |
Paula Nesbitt, an Episcopal priest, was no more euphoric discussing how women have fared in the 25 years since their acceptance in the Episcopal priesthood. Women priests still face dogged, overt discrimination in some dioceses, she said, and their movement into decision-making posts has been impeded by a subtle, yet real, “stained glass ceiling.”
Some women priests have gotten ahead, she noted, but did so by “being nice girls” and repressing any feminist tendencies. Should the ordination ban be removed in Catholicism, Nesbitt said, Catholic women “would have to find ways to maintain the radical edge that has pressured the church” for 25 years. Otherwise, she feared, Catholic women priests will “become handmaidens” within the institution, “coopted by men who will continue to hold the power.”