Patriarchy

In his Southern Cross article (19-25 September issue) Cardinal Wilfrid Napier argues that patriarchy is not the source of all evil.  Maybe not, but the rule of the fathers’ men– which is the meaning of patriarchy, is certainly a central cause of much of the evil in the world, past and present. Patriarchy asserts that the male is the norm in every way.

A few examples:

Wars are almost exclusively declared by men (Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War in the 1980s is a rare example of a war led by a woman).

Slavery, which devastated Africa in so many ways, was a commercial enterprise of men. The first protests against were made by Quaker women in the late 1700s in England who began to stand up in meeting to demand an end to the slave trade.

Apartheid was the creation of men and justified by male theologians.

The never-ending sexual abuse scandal in the Church has been primarily caused by men. Although there are some religious sisters who abused children and young people, the overwhelming majority of perpetrators have been male clergy. And the cover-up of the scandal has been done by men–bishops, archbishops and cardinals since the Roman Catholic Church is a hierarchical patriarchy. Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston in the US fled to the Vatican in order to escape prosecution for his role in the cover-up and was rewarded by a high profile position at St Mary Major in Rome; he continues to influence the appointment of bishops in the United States.

In the Church, women cannot share decision-making and leadership with men because jurisdiction (authority) is linked to ordination. Sometimes a woman does have a major administrative position such as Sister Hermenegild Makoro CPS, the Secretary General of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, but she cannot share decision-making with the bishops. Interesting note: as far as I can find, her name does not appear on the SACBC website.

Patriarchy and sexism are linked, and sexism is a sibling of racism. In both people are excluded on the basis of physical characteristics: racial appearance and biological sex. Theological reasons are used to justify the patriarchy of the Church.

The cardinal questions whether Woman must be equal to man in everything and in every way possible. That’s the bottom line. But is that the truth? He continues to speak of original sin which destroyed harmonious relationships between men and women. Patriarchy, sexism and racism are all social sins, embedded in social structures, which do great harm to relationships between men and women.

The refusal to name the sins of patriarchy does not assist men and women to realise how skewed and distorted the relationships in the Church truly are.