Saints and Sinners: Seeking sexual equality in the church
If I were the pope — and you will be happy to know that I have not been approached — I would maintain the church’s rule concerning an unmarried priesthood as the present pope has done. But I would also go to work on ordaining women ASAP, which Pope John Paul II has not done.
Ordaining women would, of course, help to alleviate the serious clergy shortage. But that would not be my main reason for doing it. Nor would the issue of equality enter into it (the argument put forth by various women’s movements).
The trouble with equality is that it has come to stand for sameness — same duties, same roles.
Equality is the great leveler between the sexes. It eliminates the peaks and valleys that make the domestic landscape interesting. It destroys the variety and richness of married life and the interplay of unequal forces that prompted the Frenchman to say, “Viva le difference!”
At best, equality between a husband and wife makes for happily married singles (rather than happily married couples), whose lives proceed along parallel lines rather than interconnecting ones. If you had a rope whose strands did not intertwine, it would break the first time you put any pressure on it.
The priesthood should be open to women, therefore, not on the basis of equality, but because a woman priest would bring something new and different — something related to her womanhood — to the office of priest. She would not be just a priest dressed in women’s clothing.
At a woman’s ordination conference I attended several years ago, much of the rhetoric was centered on the “injustice” and “inequality” of withholding ordination from women.
Perhaps it would be better to get away from talk of “empowerment” of women and stress that a priesthood with women in it would be more human and appealing.
Many of the women at the conference were warm, attractive feminine types. They did not fit into the classic mold of the saintly woman — “humorless, sexless, fearsome and forbidding” — as one nun at the conference described the stereotype of religious women.
Much of the scandal in the Catholic Church today is being blamed on the celibacy requirement. If priests were allowed to marry — so the argument goes — a lot of what ails the priesthood would go away. Not everyone thinks so.
I had a talk once with a bishop who said, “We Catholics are fortunate to have a celibate priesthood. A lot of Protestants wish they had it.”
He pointed to the time-consuming demands of the ministry and to the rising divorce rate among the Protestant clergy. Many ministers — like many priests — work 12 to 15 hours a day. Is this fair to their wives and children?
Then there is the problem a minister’s wife has of living up to the expectations of the congregation her husband serves.
It is often said that a married clergyman is better able to counsel people with marital problems, but I wonder how strong that argument is. Being married gives a man certain insights into married life that he wouldn’t have otherwise. On the other hand, as one priest has pointed out to me, the minister’s marital experience is confined to one marriage (or maybe two!). This experience would be of only limited help to him in dealing with the variety of marital problems that come to him.
Actually, there is a good deal of doubt about how effective clergymen are as marriage counselors.
“At least 15 percent of people visiting their physicians are primarily bringing a sexual complaint,” says a medical school professor. “An even greater percentage of visits to clergymen are sexual in nature. But for some reason, doctors and clergymen are woefully naive about sex relations.”
Is this another area where women priests would do a better job?
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)