by John N. Collins
published in Eureka Street (Journal of the Australian Jesuits) October 2002, p.33-35.
It’s time to take a fresh look at the nature of ministry.
FORTY YEARS AGO, the Second Vatican Council opened. A colourful but minor player there was Cardinal Bacci, whom it may not be unfair to caricature as the last of the Renaissance cardinals. In fact, at the time of the Second Vatican Council, people were still speaking of cardinals quite undemocratically (and untheologically) as ‘Princes of the Church’.
This prince was a Latinist of note, and throughout endless General Sessions of the council he had to sit through painful dialectical variations put upon his beloved language by German, Spanish and—God pity them all—Oxford-trained linguists. Topping that, he endured the indignity of complaints by US bishops that they did not understand what he was talking about.
At one point of an early debate on the Constitution of the church, he reverted momentarily to Italian. The aspect of the church then under discussion was the introduction of married male permanent deacons—that is, deacons who would not be on track for ordination as priests. This idea was meeting with a hostile reception from certain quarters. Cardinal Spellman of New York led the charge. The notorious Cardinal Ottaviani, head of the Holy Office (today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) was more or less outraged by the proposal. (In the end, it got up fairly easily, with 1558 votes to 525.) Marriage was the hurdle. Spellman put it this way: the Council had the option of creating a situation of ‘fewer priests along with permanent deacons, or more priests without them’. (What would he think today?
Bacci, on the other hand, got poetic. Horrified at the prospect of anyone who had received the sacrament of matrimony going on to receive the sacrament of orders, he evoked the image of the church as a building fitted with large and little windows. Inside were the celibate clergy, and outside were the laity, including the women who were the prospective partners in the matrimonial stakes. The ‘finistrella’ (little window) of married deacons, warned Bacci, would become the ‘finestra’ (large window) through which aspirants to the higher celibate order of priests would flock out of the church.
In the 40 years since that debate of 1963, much has disturbed the once-settled and seemingly immutable hierarchical order of the Roman Catholic Church. In more recent years, of course, the authority of the hierarchy has been undermined, under blazing publicity, by the sexual crimes and misdemeanours of bishops and priests, and by the inept or duplicitous responses from the hierarchy and even the Vatican itself.
A force at work in the ongoing destabilisation has been the increasing role of non-ordained women and men in pastoral roles and activities that were once sedulously reserved for priests and bishops. The new levels of pastoral involvement stemmed in the first place from new ecclesiology implicit in much of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of 1964 and in later conciliar documents. Thus pastors ‘should … assign duties [official] to them in the service of the Church’ (Lumen Gentium 37).
To push that theological line, however, is still to stir up a hornets’ nest. In 1997, the Vatican issued the instruction ‘On Certain Questions regarding the Collaboration of the Non-Ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry of Priests’, under the signatures of no fewer than eight heads of departments. The London Tablet characterised the document as ‘a sort of ecclesiastical apartheid’, and dubbed it ‘a rebuff to the Catholic laity’. The reality remains, nonetheless, that the theological issues have long since been overridden by what goes on in parish life, with the blessing of bishops in dioceses increasingly deprived of fit priests. In these situations, non-ordained men, but mainly women, administer parishes or collaborate intimately the range of pastoral activities historically rooted in the sacramental and pastoral theology of priesthood.
As well, and unavoidably in the context of modern ecumenism, what goes on in one church profoundly and increasingly affects understandings in another. Without doubt the most significant illustration of cross-pollination of this kind is in the divisive issue of the ordination of women, particularly as the issue works its way through pre-Reformation churches. Roman Catholics with irons in this fire look most closely, naturally, to the way this issue was developed in the Anglican communion. Although the agenda there contains a deal of unfinished and untidy business, the Church of England itself legislated for women to be ordained deacons (in 1985) and priests (in 1992). As this process got under way, Pope Paul VI promptly informed the Archbishop of Canterbury in their correspondence of 1975 that ordaining women priests would introduce ‘an element of grave difficulty’ to dialogue between the two churches. Just how grave this was to be became clear in John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter of May 1994, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. This short document taught ‘definitively’ that even the church does not have the authority to ordain women to the priesthood.
In Catholic circles, this declaration brought an abrupt end to long-standing public debates about the theological possibility of women priests. Indeed, the declaration proscribed discussion of the question, and bishops were required to do nothing that might foster women’s aspirations for ordination. For years these aspirations had been ardently expressed, especially in response to the Declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of 1976 ‘that the Church … does not consider herself authorised to admit women to priestly ordination’ (the phrase taken up 20 years later by John Paul II). Theologians who favoured the ordination of women, as well as lobbyists of the cause, felt particularly aggrieved by this decision in the light of the prior advice to the Congregation by the Pontifical Biblical Commission that on biblical grounds it saw no obstacle to the ordination of women.
Not unexpectedly, movements for the ordination of women emerged. In places, these movements owed much to similar earlier movements in the Anglican communion, which had been so effective in giving the issue a public profile and in the ‘conscientisation’ of enormous numbers of women and men. For many others it was feminism pure and simple that forged a new resolution. The organisations themselves are normally of a national character, but smaller groups operate, and an international umbrella organisation is also in place. You can see the range and style of the groups on the website www.womenpriests.org.
INTERESTINGLY, a significant part of the Anglican strategy has not been broadly applied in the campaign by Roman Catholic lobbyists. The Anglicans set up a first target in the ordination of women deacons. In many Roman Catholic circles, however, especially proactive English- speaking ones, the diaconate holds little appeal. In those countries where the male permanent diaconate is prominent (pre-eminently this means the United States, where over 11,000 permanent male deacons have been ordained, although geographically they are spread unevenly) the prevailing image of the deacon is of a liturgical assistant. The image is inadequate and inaccurate: deacons, in fact, are required to offer and develop a specialist area of social service, although for almost all of them this is a part-time and unpaid contribution. Members of the congregations, however, are mainly aware of deacons in their midst when they see them vestmented and distributing communion during Sunday Mass.
In Australia, which has only some 50 deacons across a handful of dioceses, the deacon has a low profile in local parish life. This is largely because professional lay pastoral roles were already in place—filled mostly by women—before some bishops moved to introduce the permanent diaconate. In the eyes of most women, accordingly, ordination to diaconate appears to be an irrelevancy. What’s more, they mostly reject what ordination as deacons appears to imply—converting pastorally active women into minor and subservient members of a clerical caste.
The picture has been very different for women of other cultural groups. In particular, Germany, which is the home of the modern diaconate, has had a vibrant movement for women deacons since the 1950s, supported by male and female theologians and sponsored by some bishops. Even earlier, in the 1930s, Edith Stein (the Polish philosopher who became a Carmelite nun and was executed as a Jew in Auschwitz) argued the case independently. And after
the brilliantly orchestrated campaign for male permanent deacons, to which Karl Rahner lent his weight in the lead-up to the Second Vatican Council, women seized the opportunity created by what men had achieved at the Council and advocated their own cause with increasing confidence.
The case of the German women was, however, simpler to argue because of the type of diaconate that the German men had described and promoted. Although the Second Vatican Council was to lay down a broad platform for a diaconate ‘of the liturgy, of the Gospel and of works of charity’ (Lumen Gentium 29), what the German founding group had envisaged and worked for was a diaconate of works of charity, expended especially on areas beyond the normal reach of traditional pastoral activity.
The group had an inspiring leader in the late Hannes Kramer. Collaborating with his wife and other female friends, he supported efforts for the inclusion of women in the kind of diaconate he and his peers were practising. Since its defining function was service to the needy, women and their supporters could easily develop theological justification for their inclusion in a diaconate of that kind. Although initiation into it would mean women receiving the sacrament of orders, as deacons of service they would not be encroaching upon the field of sacramental ministry exclusive to male members of the hierarchy.
Support was widespread. In 1969, the International Diaconate Centre was established in Freiburg im Breisgau (of latter years located in Rottenburg). The centre has sponsored international seminars on the issue, and its journal, Diaconia Christi, continues to publish studies by respected theologians. Prominent among these has been Professor Peter Hünermann, who has also been associated in similar endeavours elsewhere with Herbert Vorgrimmler and Yves Congar. From the 1970s onwards, several German and Swiss synods formulated sympathetic recommendations. Bishops like Cardinal Höffner of Cologne encouraged women to take the initiative in promoting their cause or, like Bishop Walter Kasper (now the Cardinal Secretary of a Vatican congregation), undertook to promote their cause in Rome.
The published papers of the First International Congress for Women’s Diaconate
in Stuttgart in 1997 provided over 400 pages of theological and historical studies. Published shortly afterwards, Dorothea Reininger’s magisterial study, Women’s Diaconate in the One Church (Diakonat der Frau in der Einen Kirche, 1999) mounted a comprehensive argument, with a foreword by the president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop (now Cardinal) Karl Lehmann.
In light of such a powerfully developing momentum, it is puzzling to see recent shifts in official thinking on the question of women deacons. In September 2001 Cardinal Ratzinger, who is himself on record as seeing no theological barrier to the ordination of women deacons, issued a Notification requiring the closure of courses designed to prepare women for the diaconate. Such courses, it was noted, aroused ‘hopes which are lacking a solid doctrinal foundation’.
If this has an ominous ring to it for advocates of women deacons, recent leaks from the International Theological Commission are even more dismaying. The Commission is a large international body of theologians which prepares briefings for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on matters relevant to its concerns. In 2001 it was asked to prepare a study on the diaconate. The outcome is confidential. Nonetheless, more than one member appears to have flagged the way opinion is developing. Significant are the comments of Gerhard Muller (professor in the Catholic faculty of theology in Munich), who has publicly indicated that, on theological grounds, the sacrament of orders is beyond the sphere of women.
Muller had previously rehearsed the theological grounds of his argument in two small books of 1999 which, in 2000, he brought together in a revised single volume called Priesthood and the Diaconate: The Recipient of the Sacrament of Orders from the Perspectives of Creation Theology and Christology. Included in his presentation of tight systematic theology and of a looser reading of biblical and patristic material is a dismissive critique of Dorothea Reininger’s volume.
With her scholarship out of the road, he launches into the main argument based on the essential differences between woman and man. The clinching argument, however, is that the sacrament of orders—at whatever hierarchical level—is intrinsically orientated to priesthood, an orientation that puts that sacrament out of the reach of women. In regard to the diaconate this is indeed an odd position to advance, especially as the Second Vatican Council cited the ancient dictum that deacons are ordained ‘not unto the priesthood, but unto the ministry’ (Lumen Gentium 29).
Over recent years, theology of the diaconate has been attracting considerable attention, most of it directed at establishing new understanding of the order. In the Roman Catholic context, in addition to the German colloquium alluded to above, Ein Amt fur Frauen in der Kirche (1997) and Reininger’s major study, Diakonat der Frau (1999), there are: Phyllis Zagano’s Holy Saturday (2000), which elaborates an argument for women deacons; a major Belgian colloquium, Diaconat XXIe Siecle (1997); and John Wijngaards’ No Women in Holy Orders? The Women Deacons of the Early Church (due November 2002). In the Orthodox context we have Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald’s Women Deacons in the Orthodox Church (1999), which follows the heroic initiatives of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel in the 1980s.
In the Anglican context, there is last year’s report to the General Synod, For Such a Time as This. On the ecumenical front: the Hanover Report of the Anglican-Lutheran International Commission, The Diaconate as an Ecumenical Opportunity (1996); the imminent third volume of the Anglo-Nordic Diaconal Research Project (1999-2002); and my own Deacons and the Church (due October 2002). Not all of this is in perfect harmony, but it could at least be said to be open-ended.
Roman Catholic women should take heart at the opening of many windows upon possibilities for them to enrich the life of their church through being called to the sacrament of orders. That certainly is the direction in which this sampling of the literature is pointing. But open windows work two ways. You can go in or you can go out.
John N. Collins is a New Testament scholar with a special interest in issues of ministry.