The Church and women

From the headline, some readers might fear — and others might hope — that this is going to be a liberal tract about the second-class role of women in the Church. That is not my intention. Instead I would like to use the marking of National Women’s Day as a chance to try and understand what can be done to bridge the gap that there is now between the way in which the role of women is seen by the Church and by most of the rest of society.

I say “now” because this is, I think, a recent phenomenon. The Women’s Liberation Movement—a term which now seems outdated and quaint — dates with force from the 1960s. Since that time the world has seen, in country after country, the rise of 51% of the population in so many spheres of life: universities, politics, business, medicine, the professions, the arts.

British universities often now see more women than men qualify as doctors and as lawyers (and incidentally as Anglican priests).

Meantime, the charge goes, the role of women in the Church has stagnated or even gone backwards. Many outside the Church would dismiss it as an organisation that is always opposed to the fulfilment of women’s potential. But is this really true?

For centuries in Europe it was actually the Church that provided a place of empowerment for women. When it was almost unheard of for women outside the nobility to learn to read and write, or to take on positions of public responsibility, it was Catholic convents which provided a haven. Women were encouraged to study and were ruled by other women not by men.

We might look back on pictures of cloistered nuns in habits as prisons for sexually frustrated maidens; another interpretation is that they were liberating spaces in which it was safe for women to be themselves away from the rule of fathers, husbands or brothers.

It was in turn these women’s religious congregations who started many of the first schools for girls in Europe, and then later in the Americas and in Africa.

Those schools then provided the foundation of a professional training for women, albeit initially as nurses and teachers, which enabled women to earn a living outside the home and gain status based on their own and not their husband’s position in society.

But now, the Church is often seen as set against the empowerment and equality of women, rather than leading it.

In reality the life of the Church remains as indebted as ever to resourceful, talented, visionary, hard-working, spiritual, educated and educating women. I suspect each one of us can list with ease several women in the Church who have personally inspired not only our faith lives but also our sense of mission. Yet the institutional Church seems reluctant to acknowledge this or to give space to the voices of women in its ranks.

Those who believe in Freudian conspiracies might charge that this is all tied up with attitudes towards sex and fear of what might be unleashed by women’s bodies. They claim that the Church offers women only one of two models to follow: Eve or Mary, temptress or virgin.

But the Church’s anxiety may stem less from Freud and more from the free market. The drive to benefit from the skills of the whole breadth of the talent pool has seen every previously “male” profession become successfully unisex. This has even resulted in many religious groups shifting their stance on female ordination.

Meanwhile, as we know, the Catholic Church has remained absolutely committed to an exclusively male priesthood, invoking strongly-held theological and traditional arguments. But while this reserves sacramental duties to one gender, that need not mean that men have a monopoly or a preference in all roles in the Church.

I fear, though, that many Catholic leaders have been unable to recognise the opportunities they do have, within their own theology, to empower women in the Church and to be seen as leading liberation rather than opposing it.

Fifty years ago, when women were metaphorically burning what constrained them, the Fathers of the Vatican Council stressed the importance of women participating more widely in the various fields of the Church’s apostolate (Apostolicam Actuositatem 9).

But the leadership contribution that women could make in the Church as community leaders, theologians, administrators, catechists, charity directors and so much else still gets marginalised out of a misplaced fear that this will open the floodgates and bring about calls for women priests.

Right at the end of the Council, Pope Paul VI spoke presciently: “The hour is coming, in fact it has come, when the vocation of women is being fully recognised, the hour in which women acquire in the world an influence, an effect and a power never previously achieved.”

We have certainly seen this in the last 50 years and especially the last 20 years in South Africa. The South African Church has begun this long walk to freedom, but perhaps still has some way to go.