While the Church needs more holiness and fewer bureaucrats, women have every right to be heard, says Australian theologian Tracey Rowland.
By Tracey Rowland
I THINK that a general problem with the Church in western countries is that its management structure is more and more resembling that of a modern corporation and when that happens, ‘participation’ gets defined as holding down offices in the corporation.
Pope Benedict XVI has been highly critical of the Catholic Inc model of the Church. The following are all statements from him about this issue:
1. Saints, in fact, reformed the Church in depth, not by working up plans for new structures, but by reforming themselves. What the Church needs in order to respond to the needs of humanity in every age is holiness, not management.
2. The saints were all people of imagination, not functionaries of apparatuses.
3. I have said very often that I think we have too much bureaucracy. Therefore, it will be necessary in any case to simplify things. Everything should not take place by way of committees; there must even also be the personal encounter.
4. Paul was effective not because of brilliant rhetoric and sophisticated strategies, but rather because he exerted himself and left himself vulnerable in the service of the Gospel.
I think, therefore, that the notion of participation is being construed too narrowly in bureaucratic-corporatist terms.
However, if one does want to look at this then I think that what most women really want is to feel as though the priests and bishops listen to them when they speak about something which is within their field of expertise. They certainly don’t want to be treated like dumb sheep. But I think so long as they feel as though they can speak directly to priests and bishops and get a respectful hearing, they are not too concerned about matters like how many women sit on the finance and property committee of a parish or diocese.
For women with school aged children, sitting on committees is often a logistically difficult exercise, and this is not a high priority for them. When I go to Rome to meetings of the John Paul II Institute high command, I am always in a situation where I am one of only a handful of women present, but all of us women who are professors are treated with the greatest of respect as academic colleagues or peers.
There has never been the slightest suggestion that because I am female I am only good for making the tea. If one can write interesting papers as well as the men, and field theological questions from a floor of people with doctorates, male and female, gender is completely irrelevant.
The number of women attending these meetings over the past decade has also steadily increased.
When I am the victim of male chauvinist treatment it is almost always because the male at issue has a low level of education and sees no value in tertiary education or the intellectual apostolate.
I think that the fact that many seminarians of the present generation have been to university and spent a few years in the workforce before entering a seminary is a good development. It will mean that they have had experience of working alongside women as colleagues. If one looks at the present and most recent pontiffs, one finds two men who are both intellectuals, both world class scholars of their generation.
They had both mixed with intellectually inclined women as university professors and they have both been of the view that apart from the ordination of women to the priesthood, which they see as impossible for various theological reasons, there are no theoretical barriers to women’s participation in any other work of the Church.
Indeed, John Paul II, following the ideas of Edith Stein spoke of the ‘genius of women’ and thereby affirmed the value of their contributions in a broad range of fields.
If women want to be appointed to a particular committee within the Church I think my advice would be to get to know the Chairman of the Committee, convince him or her (but most likely him) of the value of your potential contribution and of your availability to serve in this capacity. This is how, from my experience, these things seem to work in the world outside the Church. One has to get noticed because of some achievement or set of skills, and then get into the circle of people who could use those skills, and then receive invitations to sit on boards.
I think that new website developments like the Sydney Catholic Weekly’s “Catholic Jobs on Line” will help to inform women of positions for which they can apply and that this is a really practical improvement in this area.
It might also be a good idea when bishops are thinking of making some new appointments to committees to alert people to this through a website so they can apply for consideration.
This would help both lay men and women.
In general, however, I do think it is a bit sad if the participation of women in the Church is reduced to a notion of sitting on committees of ecclesial bureaucracies.
This would rule out the contributions of many of the great women in the Church’s history, including all those who have been declared Doctors of the Church.
I can’t think of a single one of them whose service took the form of sitting on committees.
Quite a few, however, have run whole hospitals, schools, convents and university colleges and reared functional families and these too are forms of participation.
Tracey Rowland is author of Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI and Dean of the John Paul II Institute of Marriage and Family Studies in Melbourne.