Such Sexism in Mass reading

by Letters Editor · September 23, 2009

I was to have been the reader at my parish church for the Saturday evening Mass of August 22 (21st Sunday). However, I found the second reading (St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians 5:21-32) such a personal stumbling-block that I felt obliged to withdraw.

In these selected verses, part of St Paul’s purpose is to set up an analogy between two relationships: between Christ and the Church, and between husband and wife.

No Catholic would wish to quarrel with the essential Christian belief that Christ is the head of the Church, but St Paul’s logical scheme, deeply influenced by his patriarchal context, leads him then to emphasise that the husband is the head of the wife.

Lest there be any doubt about his meaning on this issue, he elaborates the analogy by insisting that as the Church submits to Christ, so should wives to their husbands in everything.

In commentaries and sermons on this text it has now become common practice to create a sort of rewriting of St Paul in which it is made to seem that his concern is reciprocity. That is clearly what commentators or preachers, like myself, would prefer. Indeed one surely cannot conceive of Christian marriage in any other way than as an alliance of equal partners, involving complete reciprocity of loving concern, and shared decision-making. Yes, St Paul insists that husbands should love their wives, but he leaves us in no doubt that for him the role of wives is to obey and submit.

There is also a rather disturbingly anti-feminist inference in St Paul’s extended analogy through the idea of Christ sacrificing himself for [the Church] by making her holy, and the whole of the following sentence concerning cleanliness.

If the analogy as it relates to wives were to be made explicit here, it would imply that they are neither holy nor clean, but need to be made so by their husbands!

It would be acceptable in my view if we were enabled simply to read such passages as food for thought, reflection and discussion. But when one has to declare at the end of the reading: The word of the Lord, I find myself in a serious crisis of conscience.

Jack Kearney, Gillitts, KwaZulu-Natal