Sexuality and Authority in the Catholic Church by Monica Migliorino Miller (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 659 Sexuality and Authority in the Catholic Church. By MONICA MIGLIORINO MILLER. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, and London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1995. Pp. xvi + 286. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-940886-24-2. This book is an important contribution in the effort to find the right categories by which to understand the roles of women in the Church and to elaborate a consistent language to speak about the realities of feminine and masculine. It moves between the poles of a more adequate understanding of authority (source and cause of life) and femininity which is the embodiment of the receptivity and goodness of creation in its marital relation with God. This basic approach, particularly the notion of covenantal relationship, owes an acknowledged debt to the work of Donald Keefe. The first of the seven chapters in the book is dedicated to a critique of feminist theology, a presentation of patristic opinions of women, and a discussion of authority. Feminism is criticized for its failure to understand the nature of symbol, both as a mediation of reality that cannot be arbitrarily detached and replaced, and as extending to the male and female body person. Feminism shares the first of these failures with much modern thought, as recent work in psychology, literature, comparative religion, philosophy, and the interpretative disciplines has demonstrated quite conclusively. The recent work of Mary Douglas on natural symbols, applied by her to the question of the ordination of women (see "The Debate on Women Priests," in Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory [London and New York: Routledge, 1992], 271-94), highlights the need for more reflection on the symbolic and mediating function of the human body. In fact, while Miller's book is a contribution to the task of developing symbolic discourse that is adequate to an understanding of the question of male and female, it is also an indication that more studies are needed in order to bring the discourse to a "critical mass," enabling the whole effort to effect a development of doctrine in regard to Christian anthropology. The brief treatment of the Church Fathers' views of women shows once again their own ambiguity but also the need to put their thought into the context of their whole intellectual milieu. The same can be said about much pagan, especially neo-Pythagorean, thoughtwhichpresumed that, while women lacked the public efficacy of men's activity, they were in fact often more virtuous than their husbands. The treatment of authority, also in chapter 1, adds the notion of covenant to recent discussions critical of that postEnlightenment understanding which equated authority with power and power with the ability to impose one's will on others. Authority in a Christian context is linked to the giving and nourishing of life, is effectively symbolized by male and female, and finds its fullest expression in Eucharistic worship. The second chapter is concerned with the authority of Christ as Head of the Church and as the New Adam, and this involves a discussion of 1 Corinthians 11:3-16 as well as several passages in the Letter to the Ephesians, ·particularly 660 BOOK REVIEWS Ephesians 1:19-23. To use terms not employed in the book, authority in the Church, which is the capacity to effect redemption, is twofold, productive and receptive, and both types of causality, though they are asymmetrical, are necessary in order to bring about the effect. It is possible to retain the meariing of "authority" for kephalein 1Corinthians11, Ephesians 5, etc., while seeing that this authority has the notion of "productive of life," a notion that adapts the concept as it is applied to Christ's relation to the universe in Ephesians 1:22 where it clearly means "Lord." The receptive or feminine causality exemplified by Mary and existing in the Church can be understood as a necessary and completive causality in regard to Christ even if Ephesians 1:23 is not translated so as to make the Church the "completing agent" in the action of Christ who fills all things. I say this because this very difficult text is too controverted to become the principal foundation for a notion of causal authority that includes...