Ethical Challenges Confronting the Roman Catholic Women's Ordination Movement in the Twenty-First Century
- Ethical Challenges Confronting the Roman Catholic Women's Ordination Movement in the Twenty-First Century
For more than thirty years, I have advocated the ordination of women to the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church. I attended the first conference on Catholic women's ordination in Detroit in 1975. Throughout the 1980s, I immersed myself in the emerging discourses of feminist theology and spirituality to better understand women's ordination and related questions. In the 1990s, I became a women's ordination activist, working with the Southeast Pennsylvania Women's Ordination Conference (SEPA-WOC), and serving as board member (1997–2002) and president (2000–2002) of the U.S. Women's Ordination Conference (WOC). I was one of two keynote speakers at a SEPA-WOC–sponsored conference in Philadelphia in 2005 celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of WOC.1 I continue to believe that the exclusion of Roman Catholic women from the priesthood is wrong.
Even as the women's ordination movement evolved, however, massive social changes were taking place around the world. These include the rise of Latina, black feminist, Asian American feminist, and queer identities, the eruption of the Global South into world consciousness, and the shift of the center of the Christian faith to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These and related historic developments—some would say dislocations—make a reconsideration of the movement for women's ordination essential. An examination of actions and presentations by a group called Roman Catholic Womenpriests, including ordinations that they have performed in Europe and North America since 2002, will be a significant component of that reconsideration. [End Page 149]
World-Historic Eruptions
The movement for the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic Church is often associated with a series of momentous social transformations occurring in the decades after the Second World War. These include the anticolonial wars of liberation, the U.S. struggle for civil rights, and the women's liberation movement. I have no doubt that the investment of labor, suffering, and human lives in these world-historic liberation movements was ethically essential.2
The oppression of women in church and synagogue was one of the foci of the U.S. movement for women's liberation that began in the 1960s. In fact, a number of mainline American Protestant denominations began ordaining women before the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963. An Ecumenical Task Force on Women and Religion was part of the National Organization for Women (NOW) from its inception.
The movement for the ordination of Roman Catholic women in the United States and Europe was also shaped by another world-historic development, the renewal of Roman Catholicism after World War II that culminated in the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). In the United States, many Catholics associate Vatican II and the rise of liberal Catholicism with the various revolutionary movements that took place beyond the official confines of the church, for example, the civil rights movement.
But certain critical distinctions obtain between the postwar renewal of Roman Catholicism and these other revolutionary movements, distinctions having to do with the unique situation of the Roman Catholic Church in the modern period. The wars of liberation in Africa and Asia after World War II, for example, constituted, in many respects, a rejection of the colonialism that had been integral to modernity since the sixteenth century. The anticolonial wars of liberation can be considered, then, first steps into what is sometimes called the postmodern period.
From the time of the Reformation, however, and particularly in response to the democratic revolutions that occurred from the late 1700s through the mid-1800s, the official church—the Vatican, the hierarchy, and institutions they controlled—set itself in opposition to the modern view of the world. (This is not to say, of course, that it did not also participate in that same modern world.) A critical component of this ideological opposition to modernity was the revival at the end of the nineteenth century of the theology and philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas as the official intellectual framework of the Roman Catholic Church. Though the first phase of this revival, under Pope Leo XIII, was in some respects life-giving, the...
