{"id":98,"date":"2008-04-23T11:09:34","date_gmt":"2008-04-23T11:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/what-you-didnt-see-last-week-w.html"},"modified":"2008-04-23T11:09:34","modified_gmt":"2008-04-23T11:09:34","slug":"what-you-didnt-see-last-week-w","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/what-you-didnt-see-last-week-w.html","title":{"rendered":"What you didn’t see last week: Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

They are the majority of worshipers every Sunday (and through the week), and they make up some 80 percent of the more than 30,000 lay ministers (and growing fast) serving in the nation’s 19,000 parishes. There are more of them working in U.S. churches than there are priests. They distribute communion, raise the next generation in the faith, and younger versions of themselves serve as altar girls. Yes, they are Catholic women. And yes, they were nearly invisible during last week’s Pope-a-palooza.
\nBenedict got an eyeful of the American church while he was here, but not from up close. No women were allowed to distribute communion (nor lay people for that matter–only ordained dudes) nor were any girls allowed as altar servers. In fact, the liturgies that American Catholics are used to, with women and girls playing important roles, had to be re-gendered for the papal masses. Now many people will see this as just so much whining by wannabe women priests. But the reality is that women, especially lay women, make the church run “on the ground.” This has some critics fearing a “feminization” of the church.
\nYet it is simply the reality that was not acknowledged or even discussed last week. And it is one of those realities that we are left to grapple with as we move beyond the visit by the pope.
\nFortunately, we have Catholic women (and men) who are not only serving in parishes but also dedicating their lives and hearts and minds to this topic. For their thoughts, a good start would be this powerful essay<\/a> by Phyllis Zagano from Hofstra University. Zagano is a Catholic and the author of several books and she is thoroughly grounded in tradition. And from that grounding argues, among other things, that women could be ordained deacons–at least.<\/p>\n

“Can all this change? Will the next pope \u2014 or the next, or the next \u2014 be greeted by women seminarians, or deacons, or priests, or even bishops? Despite protestations to the contrary, neither 1976 nor 1994 produced an infallible “ex cathedra” declaration by the pope, or an infallible teaching of an ecumenical council. Catholic canon law holds nothing is infallible unless it is clearly stated as such.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Valerie Schultz is a free-lance writer and contibutor to the Jesuit weekly, America.<\/em> She has a post at America’s blog <\/a>in which she expresses gratitude for the pope’s visit but asks for a hearing for her gender:<\/p>\n

“I want the Pope to know that we women, who largely take care of the daily business of church, are becoming weary of hoping that the men will come around. We know that Jesus sees us as equal to men in devotion and capability, but we know that the hierarchy of the earthly church of Jesus does not. We are tired of being denied one of the sacraments because we lack male sex organs, and we are even more tired of scandals brought on by those same unruly organs. It seems to many of us that the critical shortage of priests might be alleviated by admitting the possibility of priestly vocation in the hearts of the roughly 50% of Catholics who are not male.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Finally, for those looking for a longer but very accessible treatment of the topic–and from a man, and a priest–check out an essay in Commonweal<\/a>, “Why Not? Scripture, History & Women’s Ordination,” in the April 11, 2008 edition. Egan’s in-depth treatment is masterful, and defies easy summary. (It is behind the magazine’s firewall, but consider forking over just $25 <\/a>for an on-line subscription–this essay alone is worth the price of admission.)
\nAs Egan writes:<\/p>\n

“To question this exclusion does not require that we conclude all gender roles are inconsequential. Gender roles are different in different cultures and in different historical periods. To what extent they are socially constructed or are rooted in natural sex differences is difficult to determine. Through most of recorded history, in most cultures, women were subordinated to men; today we believe men and women are essentially equal. Throughout most of its history, the church reflected this subordinated view of women; now it does not.
\nThe church cannot remain exempt from the principles of its own social teaching. Catholics cannot bear witness to principles of justice, equality, subsidiarity, and participation, and claim exceptions for themselves. The question is this: Has the tradition of excluding women from the diaconate, presbyterate, and episcopacy really been faithful to the teaching and practice of Jesus? Or has it been part of a mostly unexamined and partially unconscious bias for subjecting women to men\u2019s authority and power? Which is the more believable interpretation of our history as a people?
\nThis is a very important question, one that urgently needs and deserves an open, prayerful, learned, patient, and discerning conversation among Catholics today.
\nAnd yet it does not happen. And so the crisis deepens.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They are the majority of worshipers every Sunday (and through the week), and they make up some 80 percent of the more than 30,000 lay ministers (and growing fast) serving in the nation’s 19,000 parishes. There are more of them working in U.S. churches than there are priests. They distribute communion, raise the next generation…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat you didn't see last week: Women - Benedictions: The Pope in America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/what-you-didnt-see-last-week-w.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What you didn't see last week: Women - Benedictions: The Pope in America\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"They are the majority of worshipers every Sunday (and through the week), and they make up some 80 percent of the more than 30,000 lay ministers (and growing fast) serving in the nation’s 19,000 parishes. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}