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161 8 Wo/men and the Catholicity of The*logy Karl Rahner has argued that the most important event of the Second Vatican Council was the manifestation of the world-church where for the first time bishops of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim acted together with the pope as equals when articulating and deciding the the*logy of the Council.1 Rahner rightly criticized the Eurocentrism of Roman Catholic the*logy2 and church but he did not recognize its andro-kyriocentrism.3 Yet, one must not overlook that the Second Vatican Council’s representation of world-catholicism was totally male, since wo/men were not among the bishops of the emerging world-church. The absence of wo/men from the ranks of bishops is not an historical accident but the result of systemic discrimination and legal exclusion; it is due to the structural sin of sexism and misogyny and its the*logical rationalizations . As long as wo/men are excluded from church leadership and governance not 1. See Karl Rahner, “Basic Theological Interpretation of the Second Vatican Council,” in Concern for the Church: Theological Investigations, vol. 20 (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 77-89, and “The Abiding Significance of the Second Vatican Council,” 90–102. A different version was published as “The Struggle for the Catholicity of Theology,” Bulletin ET: Zeitschrift für Theologie in Europa 12 (2001): 207–28. 2. For an exploration of the task of the*logy, see Claude Geffre and Werner Jeanrond, eds., Why Theology? Concilium 6 (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994). 3. By stressing andro-kyriocentrism, I do not want to detract from the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism that has indicted the “European mode of military-missionary expansion.” This military missionary expansion according to Jan Nederveen Pieterse “was projected outside Europe during the Crusades, which produced Europe’s first overseas colony, the Kingdom of Jerusalem. . . . Christianity thus appears historically as part of the politics, the civil institutions, and the cultures of empire.” See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ed., Christianity and Hegemony: Religion and Politics on the Frontiers of Social Change (New York: Berg, 1992), 3-4. 162 | Transforming Vision just by custom but also by law, the catholicity of the world-church is jeopardized. Hence, the exclusion of wo/men from full ekklesial citizenship with all rights and responsibilities is not just a “woman question” but a fundamental the*logical problem .4 The world-church lacks the fullness of the catholicity of ekklēsia if half of its members are systematically excluded and discriminated. Today this lack of catholicity is even more obvious because other Christian churches have welcomed wo/men as official ministers, priests and bishops with full rights and responsibilities. True, in the past forty years or so Catholic wo/men have engaged in the study of academic the*logy in ever greater numbers and have become acknowledged as leading the*logical scholars. They have created feminist the*logy5 and wo/men’s studies in religion6 as a new academic discipline that has produced significant research and scholarship. However, this scholarship has had only minimal impact on ecclesiastical discourses and policy in Roman Catholicism. To my knowledge feminist the*logians are still not invited as consultants to bishops’ conferences, Vatican congregations or papal commissions. We still experience silencing and exclusion. Not just for me but for many others the experience of becoming a catholic the*logian has been and still is an experience of struggle:7 the struggle to find our own the*logical voice, the struggle for its integrity and truthfulness, the struggle to articulate a different vision of catholicity and the*logy, the struggle with a kyriarchal tradition and doctrinal discourse that on principle has excluded wo/men as the*logical authorities and increasingly speaks the language of silencing , control and violence. Consequently, the struggle for the catholicity of the*logy is not just a struggle for wo/men’s ordination. It is also the struggle for freedom of thought, intellectual independence and personal integrity, for eleutheria and parrhēsia, for the free and uncensored speech of citizens of which St. Paul speaks. Such freedom is the sine qua non for the practice of the*logical catholicity. This struggle for a 4. I presented this paper at the Congress of the European Society for Catholic The*logy. The concluding lecture by Cardinal Lehman eloquently discussed Catholicism’s realization in a European context but was not prepared to adequately address my question as to the fundamental problem of wo/men’s exclusion from...

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