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The following article was written by Mary Anne Beavis, a member of CNWE (a member organization of W-CC). The article, an Op-Ed piece written after the election of the new pope, was published in the Winnipeg Free Press in Canada on Sunday, April 24, 2005.
Sun Apr 24 2005
Mary Ann Beavis, Ph.D.
The election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to the pontificate has been a shock to progressive Catholics everywhere, and, I suspect, to many moderates.
Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (until the 1960s, the Holy Office of the Inquisition) for most of the papacy of John Paul II, and Dean of the College of Cardinals, Ratzinger has long been the defender and enforcer of a conservative, traditional form of Catholicism resistant to modernity, change and reform.
Both he and the former pope have been criticized for blocking the liberalizing initiatives of the Second Vatican Council. The Cardinal presided over a disturbing series of investigations and even excommunications of theological "dissidents" (of the stature of Hans Kung, Tissa Balisuriya and Charles Curran), at least one book burning (of Lavinia Byrne's Woman at the Altar), the suppression of sex abuse scandals in the U.S. and elsewhere, opposition to gay marriage (even for non-Catholics), and the definition of homosexuality as an "intrinsically disordered" state of being.
Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, is a competent theologian whose most recent book Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, argues that interreligious dialogue and tolerance of religious difference is possible, with the proviso that Christians will continue to believe that Jesus Christ is the supreme mediator of salvation.
Unfortunately, within his own church, the new Pope has resisted dialogue, and refused to listen to voices begging for changes of policy on birth control, condom use in AIDS-ravaged Africa, clerical celibacy, and the ordination of women.
Dwindling
In a church where vocations to the priesthood are dwindling, and an ecumenical context where women function effectively as priests, ministers and bishops, he has forbidden even discussion of the possibility of women's ordination.
Rather than taking responsibility for the culture of secrecy that has nurtured church-tolerated sex crimes, the Vatican, under Ratzinger's watch, has blamed the media, society, feminists and homosexuals for clerical abuses. While advocating democracy, egalitarianism and even women's rights in the secular world, he stands for a hierarchical, centralized, clericalist, fundamentalist and authoritarian church.
The circumstances surrounding the new Pope's election were disquieting. Touted as the favoured candidate shortly after John Paul's death, he delivered the funeral homily and addressed the cardinals immediately before the conclave.
Once sequestered, the cardinals elected him as pope after a scant two days of voting. The quick consensus is no doubt the outcome of 26 years of papal appointments of conservative cardinals sympathetic to the doctrinal hardline favoured by John Paul II and his top aide.
The policy of stacking of the College of Cardinals, and the resulting predictable outcome of the papal election, has resulted in a lack of real catholicity -- a universality comprehending diversity -- at the highest level of church leadership.
It also bespeaks a lack of faith in the role of the Holy Spirit, whose influence is supposed to guide the cardinals in their selection of a new pope.
Benedict XVI, a less outgoing and charismatic figure than John Paul II, will find it more difficult than his predecessor to dazzle the media and the public with an appealing persona, and at the age of 78, is unlikely to enjoy a lengthy pontificate.
However, despite hopeful media speculations, he is unlikely to offer anything but more of the same, perhaps with less personal charm and finesse.
Liberals
Some Catholic liberals will regretfully leave the church; theological conservatives will feel vindicated. Most of the faithful will do what they usually do, function within -- or outside of -- their parishes with minimal awareness of the activities of the hierarchy.
Others, like the members of Canada's Catholic Network for Women's Equality, will continue to work towards a church that is democratic and egalitarian, that welcomes the full and equal participation of lay people and married priests, that recognizes women's full humanity and ability to image Christ as priests, that supports rather than silences theologians who ask questions, and that recognizes that the hierarchy is only a small and limited part of the church, the people of God.
At lunch with some shaken and discouraged Catholic friends immediately after the announcement from the Vatican, one of them half-jokingly asked whether the Holy Spirit could be wrong.
Of course, theologically speaking, the third person of the Trinity, being divine, cannot err -- but human beings, even high officials in the Catholic church, most certainly can, as history has repeatedly shown.
However, as John Paul II said on a windy day in Birds Hill Park in 1982: "You can stop the wind, but you can't stop the Holy Spirit."
Whatever the theological preferences of the new Pope may be, the Spirit will prevail.
Mary Ann Beavis, Ph.D., is a member of the National Working Group of the Catholic Network for Women's Equality (www.cnwe.org) and a former Winnipegger. She is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Saskatchewan.
Original source: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/westview/story/2735101p-3166011c.html
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The New Republic has published an op-ed from Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice (a member organization of Women-Church Convergence). TNR Online presents various writers making cases for their preferred successors to John Paul II. To read more of these pieces, click here.
The New Republic Online
April 14, 2005
Outside In
by Frances Kissling
Let's face it: Anyone I would want to be pope is not going to get elected. I'm not even sure I want a pope. I spent my first 20 adult years looking for an unjust government I could overthrow without getting thrown in jail and finally found it in the Vatican. I've spent the last 25 challenging the structure of the Church while trying to save my own faith--and I have no doubt that the modern papacy is part of the structure, not the faith.
But I'll engage in the TNR Conclave's thought exercise; I'll even take the exercise relatively seriously. I won't suggest a non-Catholic like Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu or a woman like Sr. Joan Chittister, but there is no way I can recommend a single living cardinal or bishop. For any of them, scratch the surface of what appears to be an unblemished record of advocating social justice and one finds some major problem of integrity. To be ordained bishop, each must explicitly or implicitly agree not to consider ordaining women; and, for the most part, they have turned a blind eye to the death sentence imposed by John Paul II's opposition to condoms. They play the game.
It's also true that the people who most influence the Church, the best and the brightest, rarely become popes or cardinals. So I searched the lower ranks for a candidate. I wanted a smart, holy, honest man of the twenty-first century--someone who would move us beyond the fear-driven papacy of John Paul II to a postmodern papacy open to a true engagement with the realities and suffering of our times. The Polish Pope was the cold-war pope, shaped by his fear of communists and feminists. Some thought him modern because he apologized for the way the church treated Galileo. I want a pope who has read Einstein and Thomas Berry. A pope for whom Nelson Mandela is a role model if not a saint and the South African victory over apartheid is a defining moment in the development of our common humanity.
And so I turned to the Dominican friar Albert Nolan. A white, fourth generation South African of English ancestry, Nolan's thinking and praxis is rooted in South Africa's political realities and the pain and injustice of apartheid, redeemed by its spiritual legacy of reconciliation and forgiveness. Africa, above all, honors the healer and God knows the Church needs a healer. We were torn apart by the Polish Pope--the good Catholics of Opus Dei against the bad Catholics of liberation and feminist theology.
Nolan is not as well known to the general public as the Latin American liberation theologians and there is no inkling that he has ever been in trouble with the doctrinal police in the Vatican. He did, however, get into trouble in 1984 with apartheid authorities in South Africa who considered his work as a liberation theologian to be subversive. He joined the Dominicans in 1954 and spent his first dozen years in normal priestly pursuits: a doctorate in theology from a university in Rome, chaplain to university students in South Africa, professor of theology. His shift to a more direct link between faith and politics emerged in the 1980s as South African Christians came to challenge the racist state and their own racism. A theology that ignored all this made no sense. Nolan noted: "Very often we wear ourselves out giving answers to questions people are not asking. ... By doing so we take no interest in the real questions being asked by Christians today, questions that touch upon issues of poverty, racism, the legitimacy of armed struggles." Nolan's inquiry starts from the actual experience of the oppressed themselves. John Paul's theology was rule bound; Nolan's is people centered.
In 2004, Nolan was awarded South Africa's Order of Luthuli for his lifelong dedication to peace and justice. His remarks on that occasion could serve as the model for his first words to the Catholic world. In that speech he spoke generously of the leadership that brought victory: He honored blacks, whites, women, and even communists like Chris Hani and Joe Slovo.
What the South African experience seems to be saying to us here is that justice, peace and reconciliation can be achieved only through good leadership, which does not only mean leadership that is strong and decisive, but leadership that is humble, honest, fearless, and unselfish, a leadership that is based upon a deep personal freedom. In Christian terms we might want to call it "holiness" or "sanctity." That this should have been found in people who sometimes had little or nothing to do with the Church is a challenge to our theology.
As pope, Nolan would not only challenge us to holiness, he would lift up our hearts, calling on us to grieve for the oppressed and the oppressor alike, to relish human freedom and live it fully, to tell the truth, forgive the oppressors, and empower the oppressed. That was the message of Jesus and His life's work--and surely the central task of the next pope.
Frances Kissling is the president of Catholics for a Free Choice.
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November 29, 2004
from a Lynchburg,VA newspaper
The News in Advance
By Margaret Goerig
When women earned the right to vote Aug. 26, 1920, it marked the final milestone on the timeline of the American Suffragist Movement. But for the then 72-year-old Women's Rights Movement, it was merely a major moment.
Now 84 years later, despite more access to birth control, legislation guaranteeing equal pay and rights in the workplace, and more opportunities in school, the military and government, there are still cases of sexual discrimination, such as the current class action suit against Wal-Mart. And there has yet to be a female president.
Furthermore, there is still one place where women are widely treated unequally next to men: the religious context.
In Islam, women are not allowed to be spiritual leaders, says Jeffrey Burke, program chairman and professor in the religion studies department at Lynchburg College, and of the world's three main Christian groups - Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox. Burke says only half of the Protestant churches ordain women as ministers.
"So actually," Burke says, "there's quite a long way to go in that regard."
And it is made more pertinent, Burke says, by the fact that of the 6 billion people on Earth, about 2 billion are Christian and 1 billion are Muslim.
Many churches simply remain steeped in historical societies that put restrictions on women, he says. Others, he says, read the verses literally, without leaving room for nuance or deeper meaning. Add to that his point about who has historically been in charge of creating sacred scripts, like Christianity's Bible, Judaism's Tanakh and Islam's Koran.
"The males were largely in charge of the scriptures for all three of these faiths," Burke says.
And while Burke says the last 35 years have seen change, since Presbyterian and Reform Judaism establishments started ordaining women as ministers and rabbis, for example, many denominations still leave it up to individual churches to take a stance on the issue.
That is the case within Southern Baptist churches, some of which have ordained women. At Hyland Heights Baptist Church, however, the Rev. Carl Weiser says women can serve in any number of leadership roles, such as teaching programs or leading committees, provided it is not ministry.
Weiser, also president of the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia, says he does not have anything against churches that believe otherwise. His church, he says, is simply sticking to the Bible.
"We believe that the Bible teaches the role of pastor is for a man," he says.
The evidence, he says, is in 1 Timothy 3:2, where it states the pastor is the husband of one wife. "In other words, the Bible says the role is for a man, the role of pastor," Weiser says. "(But) that doesn't have anything to do with your value or worth before God. It doesn't make a woman lesser, neither does it make a man greater."
One establishment that strikes the ordination of women across the board is the Roman Catholic Church. Despite groups like the Women's Ordination Conference (WOC), that have been fighting the Vatican's policy since 1975, the most change to come so far was two years ago in Austria, when a bishop ordained seven Catholic women on the banks of the Danube River. The church responded by excommunicating the women.
From her base in Falls Church, Bridget Mary Meehan is national co-coordinator of the Women-Church Convergence, a coalition of 45 grassroots feminist organizations - mostly rooted in Roman Catholicism - that believes women deserve equal status in the church.
In Genesis 1:26:27, Meehan says, it states that women and men were created in God's image and in Romans 16:1:2, there is evidence that women provided ministry in the church. And at the resurrection of Jesus, she says, Mary Magdalene was the original witness.
The argument has caught on in the mainstream Catholic Church, she says, and it is just a matter of getting the hierarchy to move. But with reports coming out that Pope John Paul II is deathly ill, plus the ongoing sexual abuse crisis and the worldwide shortage of ministers, Meehan says the traditional church is running out of reasons to keep women out of leadership roles.
"We just want to return to the earlier spirit of the gospel," she says. "We're not calling for some radical agenda. We're calling for a return to the spirit of Jesus Christ to call women to serve as disciples."
While it may like a fairly modern argument, it's what prompted the founders of the United Methodist Women (UMW) missionary group to form 135 years ago. On March 23, 1869, "at a time when women were supposed to be seen not heard," eight women organized the Women's Foreign Missionary Society to help women and children in India, according to the newsletter at Main Street United Methodist Church in Bedford.
Glynis Hopkins is president of that UMW chapter. She agrees the climate in the church has come a long way from even 50 years ago, when "as was typical with the times, women did not hold very important roles in the church." But she also says in her church, where women have held leadership positions on boards, councils and committees, she has never felt prejudice against her gender.
"As a matter of fact," she says, "some of the men at the church joke that if you want anything done at the church, get a woman to do it."
Indeed, as more women joined the UMW movement, they earned money through bake sales, fairs, flag festivals, quilting parties, cookbook sales, waste collection and flower-and-chicken raising efforts. Today, 1 million women belong, contributing more than $25 million to women and children, as well as the sick, poor, lonely and imprisoned everywhere.
The UMC denomination has always been known for being progressive, says Garlinda Burton, 46, general secretary of the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women. Growing up, Burton says her mom was active in UMW and that she heard the word apartheid from other UMW members before she heard it in the mainstream press.
Now, Burton and the commission regularly tackle issues like sexual abuse and misuse of clergy and equal opportunities for women in the clergy. Things have been improving, Burton says: the first Methodist woman was elected bishop in 1980 and six more were elected just this year, bringing the number of active, female bishops to 15 out of 50 total bishops.
Still, Burton says, women only comprise 6 percent of the church's overall leadership population, bringing to the forefront the "glass ceiling" issue. Then there are other semi-related issues still to tackle, she says, meaning the commission has a lot of work to do before it is irrelevant.
"I would love to live in a place where we did not have to remind folks that the teachings of Jesus teach us that racism and sexism are a sin," she says. "... I just don't think we're there yet. But we'll get there."
[end story]
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