On Agency, Patience, and Women’s Ordination: A Gaudete Sunday Reflection

Isaiah 35:1-6, 10

James 5:7-10

Matthew 11:2-11

In the Year of our Lord 1853, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, an abolitionist and suffragette, a physical and social scientist, a philosopher and poet, was ordained to the ministry in the Congregational Church in South Butler, New York. Brown Blackwell was the first woman to be ordained to the ministry in this country’s history. At the ceremony, Rev. Luther Lee preached on the text Galatians 3:28, “there is neither Greek nor Jew, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Said Lee, "I cannot see how the text can be explained so as to exclude females from any right, office, work, privilege, or immunity which males enjoy, hold or perform.” Lee continued, “If the text means anything, it means that males and females are equal in rights, privileges, and responsibilities upon the Christian platform."

The Disciples of Christ began ordaining women thirty-five years later, in 1888.

The Unitarians and Universalists also have been doing so since the 19th century.

The Assemblies of God USA, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States, has ordained women to the ministry since its inception in 1914.

Methodists and Presbyterians began ordaining women in 1956.

The Lutheran Church in America (now the ELCA) followed suit in 1970.

The Episcopalians voted to approve women’s ordination in 1976, nearly a decade before I was born.

Just three weeks ago, Pope Francis was interviewed by the editors of America magazine, who questioned the Pope on a range of topics including sexual abuse, Ukraine, China, political divisions, abortion, racism, and more. The editors also pointed out, “many women feel pain because they cannot be ordained priests.” They asked Francis, “What would you say to a woman who is already serving in the life of the church, but who still feels called to be a priest?” Pope Francis launched into a discussion of the Petrine, Marian and administrative dimensions of the Church, which I’ll unpack in a moment. Then, candidly, he said, “why can a woman not enter ordained ministry? It is because the Petrine principle has no place for that. Yes, one has to be in the Marian principle, which is more important. Woman is more, she looks more like the church, which is mother and spouse.”

And so, 169 years after Antoinette Brown Blackwell was ordained, we American Catholics find ourselves in the company of the Mormons, Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Missouri Synod Lutherans, and Southern Baptists, as religious institutions that continue the injustice of barring women from ordination.

As a person, I will confess that I am not particularly patient. I do not like to wait at red lights, and I especially do not like to wait as the train takes its sweet time lurching past Oak and St. Catherine streets as I come and go from my Catholic parish in Louisville. But patience is about more than waiting. The word “patient” comes from the Latin “pati” which means “to suffer.” To suffer, in a philosophical sense, is to be acted upon by someone else. Think of a “patient” in a hospital, for example, whose role is a passive one, namely to undergo treatment. Merriam-Webster’s sense 1 for “patient” reads, “bearing pains or trials calmly or without complaint.” So, to be patient can mean: to wait serenely, to be acted upon, to suffer, and even to receive pains without protest. No, I am not very good at any of these things, nor am I convinced that patience is a virtue. Again, in a philosophical sense, human beings are not only patients, but we are agents. We have agency, power, choice as we confront the circumstances of our lives.

And so I do not know what to do with the letter of James’s insistence that Christians “be patient” in “suffering hardships” as we await the return of Christ. I do not know what to do with Isaiah’s insistence to take courage because “God is coming to save you.” And further, I do not know that these calls for patience harmonize with the Advent message we receive in Matthew’s gospel. Here, John the Baptist is trapped in prison for speaking truth to power. Rather than patiently awaiting his end, however, John sends his messengers to bluntly ask Jesus, “are you ‘the One who is to come’ or do we look for another?” This is not a patient question. It is a demand that Jesus identify himself. And Jesus responds by praising John, asking the crowds, “what did you go out to the wasteland to see—a reed swaying in the wind?” No, John the Baptizer was not simply “swaying in the wind,” passively blown about here and there, patiently and idly waiting to be saved. Instead, Jesus says, John was a prophet, a messenger, who has been sent “to prepare your way before you.”

We often hear that Advent is a time of waiting, but I think this is wrong. I want to suggest that the active challenge of Advent is to prepare the way, rather than swaying like a reed in the wind. The global Catholic Church is in the midst of a three-year Synod process, in which, so we were told, the intention was to discern the movement of the Spirit by attending to the voices of all Catholics in the world, and listening especially to those who have felt marginalized. The Synod preparatory document explicitly signaled its commitment to prioritize those who have felt sidelined because of their gender, and to reach out to those who have been so wounded that they have left the Church. We learned, a few weeks before the Pope’s interview with the editors of America, that the working document for the Synod’s upcoming continental phase “distills several major themes that emerged in listening sessions with millions of Catholics across the world, who over the past year articulated a desire for a ‘listening’ church that reaches out to the marginalized, especially the LGBTQ community, and that allows women to serve in leadership positions, including ordained ministry.”

In light of this, the timing of the Pope’s interview is especially troubling. To return, briefly, to his reasoning: the Pope suggests that the Church consists of a few “dimensions”: 1) the Petrine dimension, which is ordained ministry restricted to men; 2) the “Marian” dimension, which Francis calls the “feminine” principle, since the Church “is a woman and a spouse” and thus reflects “the dignity of women”; and 3) the “administrative” dimension, which one assumes has to do with the unacknowledged and unheralded labor of women in the tasks of keeping the books, serving on committees, cleaning the sanctuary, and the like. Notably, while ministry and administration are reasonably clear, it is not at all obvious what the active role of the “Marian” principle even is.

Francis’s essentialist and sexist stereotyping of women is in keeping with that of his predecessors. John Paul II, the architect of the theology of gender complementarity who “closed the door” once and for all to women’s ordination in his encyclical Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, was fond of praising women for “your sensitivity, your intuitiveness, your generosity and fidelity”; noted that women’s bodily features have a “power of a perennial attraction” and “are in strict union with motherhood”; observed that women have a “beauty—not merely physical, but above all spiritual,” and this beauty makes woman a “great treasure”; claimed “the female personality” is fulfilled in “virginity and motherhood”; that this motherliness predisposes women toward caring for others, such that they “see persons with their hearts”; that women exhibit a “yearning for peace”, which they express in times of tragedy “by the silent eloquence of their grief”; and while their social progress is good, John Paul cautioned, “the public role of women should not however detract from their unique role within the family.” Like Francis, John Paul lavished women with praise by comparing them to Mary, the Mother of God, as a seeming consolation prize for the categorical rejection of their claims on power within the Church.

In the America interview as elsewhere, Francis laments that we have not developed a “theology of women.” But frankly, this is not the problem. What we need is not to develop a new theology “of women,” but rather we need men like Francis to study and learn from feminist theology and theory—instead of railing against a “so-called gender ideology” of which one wonders if they have ever read a word.

So I am not, and I think it’s safe to say this community is not, patient. We do not consent only to be acted upon, to have things done to us, to suffer pain calmly and without complaint—and the consistent demand from the Catholic hierarchy that the faithful should act as a submissive spouse and mother only demonstrates that this hierarchy remains saturated in a culture of misogyny and sexual abuse. Now before you bring out the pitchforks, let me remind you that the Synod preparatory document published by the Vatican admits as much. I quote: “The whole Church is called to deal with the weight of a culture imbued with clericalism that she inherits from her history, and with those forms of exercising authority on which the different types of abuse (power, economic, conscience, sexual) are grafted” (6).

So, I am tired, frustrated, embarrassed, and frankly intellectually bored that we are still having this conversation in the Catholic Church. I was once asked by a queer formerly Catholic student whether I worried that by serving in a progressive Catholic Church like ours, I was giving cover to a systemic culture of abuse and exclusion, granting legitimacy to a corrupt institution by ministering within it. Yes, I answered, I am deeply worried about that. I worry about it more every day. Why do I remain here? Because, although I am not patient, I am indeed quite stubborn! And perhaps like many of you, I am still here because of that stubbornness, as embodied in the transgressive ministry of Jesus and the Jewish prophetic tradition he inherited, Jesus who praised the persistence of the widow pestering the judge for justice, Jesus who upended hierarchies between Greek and Jew, slave and free, male and female. But mostly I suspect that we are all still here because of each other—because of our bonds of friendship, family and community, and because of the hope that together we are doing our part of the Advent work of preparing the way. Preparing the way for what? I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out.