“Not Less Than Everything”: A Brief Reaction
Catherine Wolff recalls living through the Second Vatican Council. Existing in her was a tangible sense of hope that things were changing; the “Church that seemed increasingly rigid and authoritarian even to faithful Catholics was reaching out to us and to the wider world.” Fifty years later, Wolff experiences the Council being “subverted by those who would nullify or thwart many of its reforms.”
Many Catholics today, she writes, have grave concerns: “Discouraging are the twin scandals of clergy sex abuse and malfeasance on the part of bishops covering it up. A lack of transparency and accountability on financial matters has led to a fresh series of scandals, reaching into the Vatican itself. In the Unites States, bishops are intervening in politics and public policy in ways that violate prudent boundaries while refusing to welcome women into full membership and leadership in the Church or to address the retrograde, even ignorant teachings on human sexuality…”
She experiences the Church as having undermined its ability to mediate faith, and she notes many contemplate leaving the Catholic Church. Remaining is difficult for her personally.
In Not Less Than Everything: Catholic Writers on Heroes of Conscience, her gaze turns to ‘saints’: “Most of us have our own unofficial list of saints: people whose unusual courage and grace we have witnessed; people whose stories have been reverently handed down.” It is this interplay — between me (the writer) and the saint impacting me — that gives Not Less Than Everything its distinct tone.
Wolff has drawn together a diverse collection of writers and each reflects upon an individual whose experiences have had some personal impact. Those saints around which each chapter is built, it is hoped, will have something to say to those Catholics today troubled by their Church. Many, it is suggested, faced situations not altogether different from persons today.
James Martin, S.J. finds in Not Less Than Everything a “timely reminder that, quite often in the Church, the excluded become the embraced, the silenced become the prophets, the excommunicated become the saints, and the stones that builders rejected become the cornerstones.”
Perhaps in connecting with saints such as these — saints evidencing the abiding presence of God; a presence capable of transforming the structures in which such saints exist —- those disillusioned resist the extinguishing of their own hopes for a Church better able to mediate the love of God.
K.
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One thing that I wonder about calls for women in leadership (or even the priesthood) is the question of tokenism.
I pointed this out before, somewhere. Let’s say the next Pope is conservative in the mold of this one but caves to pressure and makes women cardinals (who theoretically don’t have to be priests; let’s not open that can of worms yet). Okay. What exactly will they add? Presumably, he’ll appoint women who are “like minded” in the same way he appoints men. It won’t be really “democratic” still, and do I really care if we get some Burke-but-with-a-vagina wearing a red suit and voting for Pope? What about her womanhood would be relevant at that point?
In truth, we might claim under-representation in leadership for several groups. Indeed, as a twenty-something, I’m inclined to ask about Age. Why don’t we have more young leadership in the Church? Why is Canon Law so “discriminatory” as to make bishops be over 35?? Why isn’t the college of Cardinals “proportionate” in terms of the Age-Spread in the Church (at least, for people over the age of 18)??
And yet, is that how it’s supposed to work. Surely there are unique “gifts of Youth” just like there are “Gifts of Woman”…but does that mean that any body of leaders should be “demographically” a microcosm of the group it represents? If that were the case, we wouldn’t have over a dozen Jewish Senators in the US! (We’d have maybe 2). And just look at the Senate, by “this” sort of thinking it should be 50% women (or 100% to make up for years of less than 50%). But is that really how leadership or representation works? I’m frankly not convinced women or blacks in power, for example, “add” anything. Rather, they become just tokens of the Hegemonic group, assimilated. They become White Men who happen to lack a penis or who have a real dark tan, but their “non-hegemonic” status immediately becomes pure Token by the very fact of being in power themselves, I tend to think. Power corrupts, absolutely.
Female priests won’t solve the problem of clericalism. They’ll just make it so that women are implicated in clericalism too. Instead of power-hungry old effeminate men, we’ll have power-hungry old men AND power-hungry butch women. Is that really adding anything of value?
Sinner, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were around during the Good Old Days when nuns ruled the parish, and priests had to toe their line. Of course, those were the Good Old Days Baby Boomer male fiction writers remember, not the real old days when women, in the Church and world alike, held only those jobs and positions men allowed them to have. A lot has changed for women in the past 50 years, much more so in the world than in the Church. Oddly, many Catholics accept the more or less total equality of women in the world while accepting without question the more circumscribed life of women in the Church. As a woman brought up in the Good Old Days who’s survived to today, experience tells me this is just another case of the Church lagging behind society, probably because of the clericalism you mention. I wish I could see some sort of higher meaning in the stubborn advocacy of ideas discredited long ago in the world at large, but I don’t. Most of it is baseless or biased or both. Certainly any given female leader in the Church (or out) could be just as “power-hungry” as a male counterpart. Does that make keeping all women out of leadership positions any less a biased an idea than it was when men used it to keep women out of leadership everywhere else? I really don’t think so.
My point is more along the lines of: groups don’t exist, only individuals do. And since “leadership” is always going to be a tiny subset of a total population ANYWAY (for example, clergy comprising less than 1% of Catholics)…does the “makeup” of that tiny subset matter, at that point? If leadership is always “representative”…does it matter who is doing the representing? If women were made priests, it would still only be a tiny percentage of total Catholic women (just like its only a tiny percentage of men)…a tiny percentage who may not at all be representative of the whole anyway at that point. It’s like: Even if we did have 50 female Senators and 217 female representatives, I’d be a lot more inclined to focus, in my analysis, on the fact that they are only 50 and 217 individuals (ruling, with an equal number of men, over 300 million!) In other words, the elitism would be a much more significant loyalty than their sex. They’d wind up with a lot more in common with male senators (on account of being senators) than with middle class women (on account of being women). I think it would work the same way in the priesthood: female clergy would become much more “clergy” than “female,” just because the former is the smaller and more elite group. They’d be much more like male clergy on account of their priesthood than like lay females on account of their womanhood. So at that point what are they “adding” except tokenism.
Basically, either men and women are essentially different or they’re not. If they’re not, then there is no “need” to admit them, as then they don’t “add” anything. If they are different, on the other hand, then that also raises the possibility that this difference justifies their exclusion.
Sort of a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” situation? Or words to that effect. Sigh.
I would love to see this happen:
A conservative woman is elected Pope.
She come out on the balcony and says “I declare and define ex cathedra that women cannot be priests, let alone bishops or popes.”
What will the liberals do with them apples? If she’s wrong and women can be pope, then she really was pope; yet used that authority to renounce the very grounds of her authority; even if they dont believe in infallibility, it would still be a huge blow to have a popessa’s first act then be wrong and so inimical to her own authority.
On the other hand, if women can’t become pope, then she was never really pope to begin with, so her statement becomes, ironically, non-binding and irrelevant to the question at that point.
What a paradox THAT would be!
Which interpretation, in that event, would be more favorable for the liberals?
For conservatives in this question, the latter option is easy to choose: she’s right, but not pope, so her statement, though correct, simply wasn’t really ex cathedra.
But liberals, in such a hypothetical case, really are “damned if we do, damned if we don’t.” It would be a “chess move” they can’t resolve. Therefore, they have the weaker position.
It’s a nice blog here, but lets face it. You block comments all of the time. So I find it really insincere of you to speak of people that may actually be feeling those things, while you block their comments, actually pushing them into the excluded category.
Every Christian has the ability if not the duty to make a difference in the church and make their mark in the church. Who has left a more lasting mark and touched more lives and will continue to touch lives? Pope Benedict or Mother Teresa?
This whining about us poor and disfranchised women is a ridiculous conversation.
Would you so readily refer to “whining” and complaints about being disenfranchised as “ridiculous” if those complaining were, say, African American males? The Church is the last major institution in the West to exclude a whole group of adults — women — from leadership positions. The fact that exclusion is based entirely on gender hardly mitigates what appears to be bias, plain and simple.
or to address the retrograde, even ignorant teachings on human sexuality…
Huh? I’m betting she hasn’t read any JPII on the subject.
I think the politics of clericalism (and especially the notion of the priesthood as a full-time celibate “lifestyle”)…are of much more practical import on how people engage the Church and participate in the life of the community.
Teachings that one considers irrelevant…one can ignore, or “negotiate,” etc. They’re just things some old men say, but can’t “enforce.” (Except when they do wind up causing differential treatment of perceived “public sinners”; usually divorced, gay, or cohabiting–a double standard in pastoral policy that does need to change.)
When it comes to the Church’s “relevance,” the official teachings in the abstract on moral questions are, methinks, much less important (for their very ignorability-without-consequence for most people) than the politics (and economics) of what sort of participation and leadership are allowed to people, the way initiative is stifled or not supported, the way institutional support is hard to navigate, the way social cohesion is neglected.
Not all Jews are Orthodox, but most still see Judaism a valuable communal identity for them. And plenty of Protestants are “cafeteria” while having vibrant communities.
Changing teachings in the abstract is not terribly important (though they could always stop emphasizing certain things; they’re there in the books for those who want to find them). Changing the communal/institutional social dynamic…definitely is.
Of course, I also think, when it comes to teaching, they need to stop their vision of implementing a socio-political order based on them, which causes so much wasted energy that could be spent on spiritual matters rather than all this crusading…
Thanks Kelly for the review. I’ll amazon it as soon as I can.
Not having read the book yet, I can’t predict all the moral and theological cards Catherine Wolff has played through her selections for the anthology. Still, it’s very important that Catholics understand that admitting women to major orders and permitting the Pill will not necessarily ameliorate all ills. When I was a practicing Anglican, I realized that the wheel of controversies merely turned to other hot buttons once women’s ordination and birth control became non-controversial for many Anglicans.
In recent years, there have been a string of biographies and popular nonfiction by what the Fr. Z troupe might call “cafeteria Catholics”, but I call “progressives”. Common themes are, not suprisingly, women’s ordination and Humanae vitae. Whenever I skim these books, I almost want to yell at the book, “ordaining women and okaying the Pill won’t solve every problem of the Church!” And yet, so many books by progressive Catholic laity share a common premiss that both liberalizations will automagically cease all ills.
Perhaps disaffected Catholics would do better to reflect on the reform of the sacraments and the rise of the therapeutic culture in liturgy. I sense that those who express anger at the requirements of HV also harbor great ambivalence about their place as laypersons in liturgy and personal prayer. Relatively few authors have described why they have continued to use birth control and remain regular communicants. There are not a few articles and books by Catholics who left Catholicism over HV, but what are the perspectives on liturgy from those who stayed despite inner conflict over birth control use?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this book for the tour.