God’s girl

If the Church believes God created man and woman in his image, why doesn’t it allow half of humanity to join the priesthood? MaltaToday put the question to leading feminist theologian Janet Soskice

The Vatican did not mince its words in the controversial letter to Bishops last August: Feminism is evil, it destabilises the family unit, and it puts homosexual and heterosexual relationships on the same footing, leading to gay marriage.
The latest Vatican salvo against trends it regards as undermining its teaching on sexuality and the family came in the form of a 37-page letter issued by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, chief advisor to Pope John Paul II and head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – the department in charge of defining Roman Catholic orthodoxy.
It is with this letter in mind that I meet Catholic feminist theologian Janet Soskice, brought over to Malta by the Curia’s Institute for Research on the Signs of the Times – Discern – to give a lecture aptly named “Girls and God.”
The Cambridge Professor from Canada is a leading theologian who has written extensively about religion and women, going to lengths in her works to illustrate the playfulness of Christian imagery and language on women through the ages, particularly in the symbolism of the Church as mother and Christ as a pregnant mother from whom the Church was born.
A mother of two daughters, throughout her career she has worked on the slippery grounds of feminist theology – an oxymoron for the Vatican according to its August letter which presents feminism and religion as antitheses to each other.
Prof. Soskice takes exception to the letter, which pontificates against the “lethal effects” of feminism. She says the letter “has got good parts and the bad parts” but what strikes her most in its critique of feminism is its outdated and simplistic vision of the diverse women’s movements, and their outright dismissal by the Church.
“Of course the document never names the enemy, it never says ‘feminism,’ it talks about ‘certain things in modern thought,’ and part of the trouble with it is that it takes to task a very dated and very specific kind of feminism,” Prof. Soskice says. “It’s a very angry letter inspired by a very North American civil rights notion based on flat egalitarianism that was never very popular in Europe. I think that a lot of European women were not attracted to feminism in this form.”
She says this kind of “Manhattan businesswoman feminism” is not the kind that impressed people – “certainly not the most Christian and Catholic people” – and so it remains unclear who the Vatican is addressing in its letter.
“What has interested people, like the bastions of feminism in the Christian Church, were the women’s religious orders, and even, surprisingly, some conservative-looking elderly sisters… you’d be surprised if you actually speak to them. What actually galvanised them is not the idea that I should be able to be head of IBM or that I should drive fork-lifters and trucks, but that, especially in the missionary orders, is that they’re working in situations of desperate poverty where the woman is the poorest of the poor.”
It is here, she says, that women have made the world aware that “poverty wears a female face.”
“The old, the very young and women with children are always the ones who suffer the most, so you’re meeting religious sisters, in South America for example, where women get married when they’re 15-16, by the time they’re 28 they have six children, their teeth fall out, they’re badly nursed, the husband leaves them… by the age of 28 they look old, they have no chance for another husband, and they’ve got these children to support, the situation is desperate. And of course we don’t even have to go into the question of Aids in sub-Saharan Africa. But the thing is, these issues have made the World Health Organisation, the United Nations, and the missionary orders very conscious, that we must pay attention to poverty and its victims.”
So who is the Vatican addressing in its letter? Of course it is intended for Bishops, but who is it speaking to here?
“I don’t know, it’s a very interesting question because, in a sense, Cardinal Ratzinger should be coming to people like me and saying, ‘thank you Janet for being a Catholic feminist’; you know, because a lot of secular feminists think religion is completely destructive to them… If you take certain kinds of feminism, you can shape it in a way that it looks perfectly malign. The idea that feminism applies a ‘polymorphous sexuality’… now some people say that whenever we get a document issued from Rome that’s about women it’s really about homosexuality in the end, because you don’t want to undermine, erode the structures of the sexual difference of marriage because then somehow homosexuality would creep in, but it does seem a very oddly put-together document and it does make you wonder who is supposed to read it.”
She says the letter has a negative, “hectoring tone” that can end up alienating women from the Church.
“From my point of view, I’m a woman trying to bring up my daughters to love the Church. How do I do this? Is this document really going to help me? I imagine it is going to be a great consolation to some young seminarians who think that way anyway, but is it really going to help me to talk to my daughters and their friends? And if the Church loses the women, what is the future of the Church? If you really alienate and can’t find a way in which the Church continues to be a source of life and truth for women -which I think it has been and is - it is to me, believe me, I’ve got far more joy out of my Christian faith than I have out of feminism, no question about that - but if it becomes so estranged from the life of women it won’t just be a Canadian woman sitting in a nice hotel in Malta, it will be an African, all sorts of women, and this is of concern.”
Prof. Soskice takes her critique further: the document reflects women’s lack of involvement within the Church.
“I did feel that at least there should have been someone there, it could have been a man but maybe better, a woman, who would have read some feminism more recent than that of the past 40 years ago, because this (Cardinal Ratzinger’s letter) seems to be spun out of air and that’s why it’s not hitting the target if you want to speak to a lot of women. Because the kind of things it disagrees with, much of feminism has moved away from anyway. So I do feel… what would be the harm to have more and more women involved in such things? More women in the Curia. I understand that there are fewer women in the Curia now than there have been in the last 50 years.”
She is equally sharp in her review when she says the Church doesn’t seem to understand the implications of its own statements when it states that women and men are “ontologically different.”
“You might think the Church has always had a lot of teachings on women; it hasn’t. This idea that women and men are ontologically different, as put in the letter to the Bishops, is quite new. I mean in the times of the Mediaeval Church, just in terms of biology, they didn’t believe women and men were ontologically different.”
Woman was believed to be a sort of sub-species of man, a defective male, Prof. Soskice says. I ask her whether that was the Church’s view of women up until last August.
“Well, it would be better to say the Church hardly thought about these things until the modern period; hardly thought about what women were, apart from being wives and mothers, because it thought about human beings. This was often an argument I can remember. An argument about why we don’t need women priests, because men and women are exactly the same so anything a woman could think, a man could think too. So the idea that we’re ontologically different is a new development and what is interesting to me is that if that is correct, then there’s more need than ever for women to be heard inside the Church.
“That doesn’t mean they have to become priests, but you can’t just continue to have all the higher structure of the Church involving only men. If you believe that women are ontologically different, how do we really make sure that we appreciate the richness of women in the Church? I don’t think I’ve heard any good answers to that so far.”
And what about the ordination of women?
I tell her that I was struck by her answer to a question from the floor the previous day after her lecture about this issue. She said theologians were not allowed to talk about the ordination of women. Why did she say so?
“Because it was explicitly said by the Pope that theologians are not to discuss it anymore,” she says. “It’s an official prohibition.”
Is that the freedom she enjoys to break new ground with her thinking as a theologian?
“In a sense, I can because I’m not employed by the Church. I’m not a professor in a pontifical academy. If I was, I couldn’t. A line was drawn and it is that it should not be discussed anymore, and that you could actually get in trouble for mentioning these things. And we had a case… it does seem odd that it has effectively silenced the discussion within the Catholic Church, but of course the debates are all out there in the world, in Britain and more widely in Christian churches, because of the debates among the Anglicans and other denominations, but especially the more Catholic Anglicans like the present Archbishop of Canterbury. The arguments used there were very interesting. Before he was a Bishop, and even when he was still a theologian, Cardinal Ratzinger was asked ‘are there any arguments, good theological arguments why women cannot be priests?’ He said ‘no, there aren’t any good ones.’”
She is perturbed by a lot of the arguments that were originally put forward about why women could not be priests.
“They would almost mean that women couldn’t be Christian, or that they could only be second class Christians, and I think that’s why those arguments weren’t used again, and instead the argument used was ‘we haven’t done this, we don’t feel we should change this now and we don’t have to talk about it’.”
So what are her personal views? She laughs at the inevitability of the forbidden question.
“Well I do think I’ve not seen many good arguments why women can’t be priests. Does that mean that women should be priests? I don’t know but from my point of view the Church should be open to testing that possibility and see what people feel.”
Surely, by banning discussion about it…
“Well that means you don’t keep open to people’s sensibilities; that’s certainly true. It would change things and there’s the questions of whether that would be a good change or a bad change” but, she adds, women can bring particular insight which the Church is somehow missing.
To explain what she really means concretely, she recounts the story of a woman in her forties she had gotten to know a few years ago, the mother of an 18-year-old daughter who was born severely disabled.
“Her daughter never developed beyond six months, she couldn’t walk, couldn’t feed herself. She had to be turned two or three times every night for 18 years so that she wouldn’t develop bedsores.
“I remember asking her (mother) what she thought about her child’s situation and she said ‘this is my body.’ She’s been turning this child in her bed for 18 years, doing everything for her, and she says ‘this is my body.’ I thought, what a wonderful insight into the Eucharist. This is her body. That isn’t a kind of insight a man could not have, but women have very profound experiences of tending to the very young, to the very old, that are really something marvellous and it’s interesting how much of the Eucharistic and New Testament imagery is to do with pregnancy and birth and new life.
“We almost don’t see that anymore, it’s very interesting because I imagine these documents were written by men, we don’t know in many cases who exactly wrote them but I think they were written by men who lived very closely with women, for whom all these reproductive things were quite close. And this still comes through, we see it in the echoes, but we tend to forget them, maybe because we’re not like them living so closely together in small communities.
“A very good example of this would be the story of the healing of the haemorrhage. Now if you hear a sermon about this, 19 times out of 20, more than that, the sermon would never mention that what she’s got is some kind of a female flow of blood. They never say what is the nature of the haemorrhage, people are a bit squeamish, but it’s not a nosebleed, it’s obviously clear.
“What’s important is that she’s menstruating constantly, so she’s constantly defiled, for 12 years. So of course for 12 years she couldn’t have sexual relations with her husband, she couldn’t prepare food for him, no one in her family was able to sit on a chair she sat on, she was totally isolated by this flow of blood, and Jesus heals her, and at the same time, the next story that’s lumped together in all three of the synoptic gospels is always together with the story of Jairus’s daughter.”
She is referring to the New Testament story of when Jairus’s daughter was about to die.
“Again it’s interesting because she’s 12 years old, so we’re told the woman had a constant flow of blood for 12 years, now this is a 12-year-old daughter. A 12-year-old daughter in Jewish terms is just about to become an adult, so this is a little girl who’s just about to move into womanly life and she’s going to die, Jesus goes in to where he’s told there is a dead body – and of course for a Rabbi entering a room with a dead body that would be a defilement – he goes in and says ‘get up.’ In both these stories there’s a defilement, and in both there is a sense of fertility restored, so they’re both about life and fertility, and that’s quite interesting and so much more imaginative of the early Church than we are now.”
Prof. Soskice says the Church does not necessarily need women priests to get such insights, “but sometimes I worry that there seems to be a squeamishness about bodies, female bodies in particular, that I don’t see in the Church’s earlier documents and scriptures, and I do wonder about that.”
Citing her own example, she says that apart from being trained as a theologian, she is “also a trained theologian who’s a woman, who’s been pregnant, who’s had children… it’s an interesting thing… It’s a voyage of discovery here and what I would like to see is many more women, and lay men too, studying theology, so that it informs their thinking about things and they can give back to the Church more broadly some of the insights they have.”
But would the Church be receptive to that? In breaking new ground in theological thought?
“It seems at present that the Church, as the institution, wants to keep tight reins on what seminarians do. It varies from place to place. This hasn’t got to do with feminist women, but there are certainly a lot of stories in places where appointments can be blocked. In many of the German faculties, for example, any women or men who express an interest in feminism are not appointed further.
“There seems to be pretty strong evidence in this direction, so there’s no encouragement there, which is a pity because by a blanket dismissal you’re ruling out the possibility that there may be faithful voices there.
“I don’t doubt that there would be some voices that are unfaithful… I can think of some really of the wider shores of things, fair enough. What’s happening now is that people are writing theology that is really nourishing and feeding people, it will be read, because you can’t stop it, and the Church should stop trying to control the Biblical scholars because it is in many of its aspects scientific, and it simply isn’t the case that you can ignore, if you’re working on a detailed aspect of some Armenians or whatever… you just can’t stop people thinking of certain things.
“If it becomes absolutely clear that Moses couldn’t have written the Pentateuch there’s really no point in the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith insisting that Moses did, which for a while happened. It’s obvious, it would go against reason and people won’t accept it. In a sense it’s a bit like a little boy holding his finger in the dyke, trying too hard to block these ideas.”
To the question as to whether she ever felt her own position was compromised she replies in the negative, but adds that even though she wouldn’t lose her job “for saying certain things,” there are certain areas where she opts for silence.
“There are some things probably I wouldn’t say because I would feel untimely, unkind. I have a loyalty to the Church, not from the point of view of lying or covering up things for the Church, but there are certain things I would feel it would be not faithful of me to talk about in public, but this is self-imposed. I don’t feel I’m doing this because I’ll go to hell or wherever. If there is something that I’m not sure about that is very difficult, I sometimes think it’s better to just keep silent. I don’t know, I mean I’m not God, I have my own opinion.”
I tell Janet Soskice that Hans Kung, the German dissident Roman Catholic theologian who had his theological professorship removed for his critical views on the papacy, remains a living reminder of what can happen to thinkers who do not tow the Vatican’s line.
“I don’t feel too sorry for him because I think he was in many ways too arrogant and not perhaps as good a theologian as he thought he was,” she remarks. “But there are a lot of people who are far more scholarly and devout who have been treated very shamefully and whom we don’t hear about as much as we do about Hans Kung.”
I ask her how she would like the next Pope to be. What should his (I can’t say her) priorities be?
“I would like the next pope to be Italian, to be a Bishop of Rome, a first among equals, and his precedence is not because he’s a global leader but because Rome is the prime see of the Catholic Church, and his attention should be that of listening to other Bishops and, of course, to Cardinals, and respecting their autonomy and dignity. I would like the next Pope to respect the fact that the Bishop is the teaching officer of the Church, not the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. It’s the Bishops who are the teachers in the Church. Of course they need help, but I do wonder about people who aren’t necessarily even Bishops, people very detached from life in a diocese, who are taking the main role in teaching. I think more power should be restored to local churches, particularly to the Bishops, they should trust their teaching authority.”
She is evidently concerned by the Vatican’s “bureaucrats” who have made it their job to take issue doctrinal edicts.
“If you look at the Church even in the 16 and 17 centuries there is far more diversity. Partly of course it was because you didn’t have telegraph, or television, telephone and fax or e-mail, but all this centralisation that’s happening in the Catholic Church… Well I do believe in the Holy Spirit guiding the Church and if the Pope is a man of prayer open to the Holy Spirit then who knows what we might see? I don’t think we’ll see something like the ordination of women.
“I think we might see the ordination of married men. The lack of vocations is obviously becoming a real crisis: the shortage of priests and the fact is that there are married priests in the Eastern and Anglican churches, is creating an anomalous situation. If you ask me whether it’s something I’d like to see concretely happening in the next papacy, I would like to see that.
“I think the priority above all is that the next Pope is a man of prayer. Even that would be better than an Italian who didn’t pray, obviously,” she says, laughing. “In the long run women are going to win, aren’t they, because every Pope has a mother.”
That, I thought, could only come from a devout feminist.