From The Month
257 (December 1996) pp. 485 - 493. With permission of the author and editor
here published for the first time on the Internet.
In exploring the idea of Mary as priest from the perspective of
the contemporary Church the author defines the need to develop a coherent
theology of women ’s priesthood ‘that would not simply absorb women into male
hierarchies’.
ON CHRISTMAS Eve 1904, Mother Claret of la Touche had a vision of
Mary’s priesthood. After having described Mary’s youth as her diaconate, she
continued:
“On the day of the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit
coming upon [ Mary ], . . . she received by divine unction thc sublime
character of Mother of God; thus the priest, on the day of his final
ordination, is marked through the Spirit of love by the priestly character,
divine and indelible. She became a priest that day, the Immaculate Virgin; she
received, as well as priests, the power to sacrifice Jesus, the right to touch
his body; the duty . . . to give him to souls. . . Then she rested for nine
months . . . preparing herself for her first offering.”
“Jesus came into the world . . . for the first
time she took him between her virginal hands, and lifting him towards the
heavenly Father, offered herself her first sacrifice. Oh! This first mass of
Mary in the silence of the stable .. the infinite cost of this sacrifice.” (1)
Mother Claret was one of a number of victim souls, women who in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century felt a profound longing to be
priests, allied to an unchallenged conviction that this was impossible because
they were women. In the 1840’s, Caroline Clement wrote, ‘How I regretted that
my sex does not allow me to offer the holy Sacrifice! . . . My sorrow was such
that it sometimes made me ill. . . It was tearing at my soul.’(2) In the end,
these women (who included Thérèse de Lisieux), solved what appeared to be an
insurmountable problem by becoming quite literally the soulmates of male
priests, devoting themselves to lives of prayer and victimal spirituality to
support good priests, and to make up for the deficiencies of bad priests. Their
ideas about the form and meaning of this spiritual priesthood accorded central
significance to Mary’s role in relation to Christ, drawing on maternal imagery
of giving life and nurturing. According to Réné Laurentin,
‘They sense that all this leads not to a second
official priesthood, but to a sort of spiritual maternity.’ (3)
In what follows, I explore the idea of Mary as priest from the
perspective of the contemporary Church. I am asking if the tradition of the
Marian priesthood does amount to the revelation of what might be called
‘a second official priesthood’, with the emphasis on maternity and birth rather
than on sacrifice and death. Would this allow for a pluriform understanding of
the priestly role which would enable women to be incorporated into the
sacramental priesthood in a way that affirms rather than negates the symbolic
significance of sexual difference?
Since Vatican II, there has been uncertainty as to the role of the
priesthood, and a searching for appropriate models. As I see it, the solution
does not lie in a liberal democratic model of Church with a non-sacramental
ministry of leadership (which is an essentially Protestant ecclesiology), nor
in an androgynous model of priesthood that incorporates women into existing
structures (which is the Church of England’s solution). Rather, I think we need
a new appreciation of sacramentality that can grasp the enormous significance
of God mediated to humanity through the material realities of the created
world, and supremely through the embodiment of the human being as male and
female in God’s image. How we understand this sexual embodiment in terms of the
sacramental priesthood is the main focus of my paper. Some of you might be
familiar with Janet Martin Soskice’s 1994 paper, Blood and Defilement, which
forms a subtext running through this paper. Soskice says that:
“it is not simply a matter of ‘equal treatment’
to ordain women in churches with a sacramental notion of priesthood. It
involves a major challenge to received symbolisms.” (4)
This paper seeks to reclaim some of Catholicism’s received
symbolisms that appear to have been returned to sender.
The title of my paper was chosen before the recent contoversy
surrounding Tissa Balasuriya’s book, Mary and Human Liberation. Balasuriya
has been requested to sign a Profession of Faith on pain of being stripped of
his status as a Catholic theologian by the Vatican. It seems that one of the
concerns of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith about this book is
its treatment of the priesthood with regard to Mary in particular and women in
general. Balasuriya says of Mary:
“ Should she not have been worthy to fulfil the
functions of thc Christian priesthood such as preside at the Eucharist and
share in the teaching of the doctrine of Jesus and administration of the
community’? If she was good enough for Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Cana, and Calvary,
was she not good enough for (presiding over) the breaking of bread and the
sharing of goods’? A well developed mariology can be one of the best supports
for the causes of equality of women and men in the Church at all levels.” (5)
The extent of the controversy provoked by Balasuriya would suggest
that the question of the Marian priesthood is both topical and sensitive.
The Virgin Priest is a relatively rare marian title, but the
question of Mary’s priesthood has had a long history which is of particular
relevance to the Church today. The first part of my paper constitutes a
critical engagement with Laurentin’s extended dissertation on the theology of
the Marian priesthood. (His earlier doctoral thesis explores the history of the
Marian priesthood since the time of the Church Fathers.) (6) Having considered
his theological interpretation, I explore a number of contemporary theories
that might suggest a different solution to that put forward by Laurentin.
In 1873, Pope Pius IX said of Mary, ‘She was so closely united to
the sacrifice of her divine Son, from the virginal conception of Jesus Christ
to his sorrowful Passion, that she was called by some Fathers of the Church the
Virgin Priest’. (7) In fact, no evidence of this titlc has heen found in
patristic texts, although Laurentin suggests its origins might be traced back
to some of the poetic allusions used by the Greek homilists. Laurentin
demonstrates with painstaking rigour in his historical thesis that the question
of the Marian priesthood — is Mary a priest and what form does her priesthood
take? — has been increasingly widespread and troubling in the Church’s
tradition. A priestly role is most commonly attributed to Mary in the Nativity,
in the Presentation at the Temple, and on Calvary. In a broader sense, to quote
Caroline Walker Bynum,
“Mary is priest because it is she who offers to
ordinary mortals the saving flesh of God, which comes most regularly and
predictably in the Mass.” (8)
The problem as Laurentin sees it lies in the persistence with
which this idea suggests itself to theologians and mystics alike, allied to a
profound reluctance to probe its theological implications. This means that
potentially fruitful explorations of what Mary’s priesthood might mean tend to
collapse into incoherence and irresolution.
Perhaps it is not surprising that after the growing popularity of
the title ‘Virgin Priest’, culminating in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, Rome should start to display signs of unease. In 1916 the
Holy Office decreed that pictures of Mary in priestly vestments were forbidden,
and in 1927 it curtailed discussion of the issue because ‘souls not enlightened
would not understand it properly’. (9) Discussion revived in the nineteen
forties among Spanish theologians, and as I mentioned, the Marian priesthood
was the subject of Laurentin’s doctorate in the nineteen fifties. It has
received sparse treatment since Vatican II, although some of the maternal
images associated with Mary’s priesthood have resurfaced in feminist theology
without reference to the historical tradition. (I shall return to this later.)
Laurentin asks if the Marian priesthood is an elucidation or a
perversion of Marian doctrine, and he proceeds to offer a carefully argued
defence of such a concept if it is understood, not in terms of the sacramental
priesthood, but in terms of the priesthood of all believers. He says that its
essential nature lies in two formulae: ‘1) Mary did not receive the sacrament
of orders because she was a woman. 2) She is superior to sacramental priests.’
(10)
Laurentin identifies ‘two antinomical tendencies’ between which
none of the authors he has studied seems able to decide clearly:
“the propensity to affirm the Marian priesthood
is a logical process. The censure is an intuitive process.
A thousand reasons lead towards affirming the priesthood of Mary, a sort of
diktat which does not give its reasons blocks the affirmation.” (11)
He describes this as ‘a spontaneous movement of recoil, like the
instinctive flight of an animal at the first encounter with an enemy of its
breed’. (12) What threat could be so powerful as to prompt this flight of the
intellect? The answer — Mary is a woman. This, says Laurentin, is a point on
which there is a mysterious silence, beyond the acknowledgement by some writers
that being female precludes her from the priesthood. (Mother Teresa of Calcutta
neatly turns this into a circular argument. When asked why women were not
admitted to the priesthood, she replied, ‘because Mary was not’ . )(13)
Having identified the fact that the reluctance to attribute
ordination to Mary is due to an unexamined instinct against women priests
running through almost the entire theological tradition, Laurentin sets out to
explain why this instinct is theologically sound. He writes:
“ In Christian doctrine, the symbol of man and
woman expresses the rapport between God and the redeemed creature. The man
represents God: initiative, authority, stability, creative power. The woman
represents humanity: power of welcome and receptivity where the all-powerful
initiative of God ripens and bears fruit.” (14)
He identifies one feature that is common to all the authors he has
studied. and that is that Mary’s motherhood is the essence of her priesthood.
All the priestly functions attributed to her are construed in maternal terms.
Mary is, he says, essentially mother, and ‘that which is priestly in her is an
aspect of her maternity’.(15) He therefore rejects the term ‘Virgin Priest’ in
favour of a more nuanced understanding of Mary’s maternal role. The conflation
of maternity with priesthood obscures the balance between the unique calling of
men to the sacramental priesthood, and the unique calling of women to
motherhood.
Although he was writing more than a decade before the Vatican II
document Lumen Gentium incorporated mariology into ecclesiology,
Laurentin sees the solution to the Marian priesthood as lying in the
rediscovery of the relationship between Mary and the Church which developed
during the patristic era and began to emerge again in the nineteen forties and
ftfties. A true understanding of Mary’s priesthood entails a reaffirmation of
the community of the Church as the priesthood of all believers.(16) Mary’s
priesthood is the supreme and pre-eminent example of the priesthood of all
believers, a sacrifice of praise that responds to but does not initiate the
sacrifice of Christ. But because she was present on Calvary, because by her
compassion she intimately participates in Christ’s Passion, her position is
higher than that of the sacramental priesthood. Mary is unique because she
‘possesses in herself, personally and in fullness, the priesthood which simple
Christians possess as a collective title, as members of the priestly body of
Christ which is the Church’. (17)
Laurentin’s argument is however deeply flawed. Even putting aside
the extrapolation of gender roles from a mistaken medieval notion of woman’s
biological passivity in the act of generation, scripturally the identification
of man with God and woman with creature seems impossible to justify. Genesis 1
tells us that God created humanity in God’s own image as male and female (cf.
Gen 1:27). Galatians tells us that in the baptismal community there is neither
man nor woman (cf. Gal 3:27-8), and even if we do not read that as obliterating
sexual difference, we must surely read it as equalising man and woman before
God. Indeed if we push the distinction between man/God and woman/creature too
far, we might ask how Christ or any man can possibly be fully human, just as we
might ask in what way woman can possibly be made in the image of God. Moreover,
Laurentin’s argument locks women into a position of biological predeterminism
from which men are excused. For instance, he says:
“If one can rigorously affirm that the
hierarchical priesthood is by nature manly, the femininity of the communal
priesthood calls for a more nuanced approach. While women are excluded from the
hierarchical priesthood, men enter into the ranks of the communal priesthood.”
(18)
Hans Urs von Balthasar uses very similar arguments.(19) Even the
instigators of the new orthodoxy indulge in gender-bending when it allows men
to move freely between the sexes, so long as women stay put. Is this kind of
male colonisation of femininity really what we understand by the Christian
dignity and freedom of both sexes?
In setting out to justify the instinct against women priests
running through the Catholic tradition, Laurentin proves himself prey to the
same instinct, which is put forward as an a priori fact that must then
be given theological justification. The taboo against women priests has
remained largely unexamined until our own age, when theologians have been
confronted with the task of justifying it. What is intriguing is the extent to
which the arguments change but the conclusion remains the same. In our own
time, when excuses based on women’s moral inferiority or creaturely dependence
are deemed unacceptable, we find the maleness of Jesus elevated to an
ontological status that by its very nature excludes women from participation in
the priesthood.
I now want to look more closely at the long tradition of seeing in
Mary’s maternity a form of priesthood. Because the tradition of the maternal
Marian priesthood has been repressed, its language and imagery are not well-known
today. However, the idea has not died in the Christian imagination. Consider,
for instance, this contemporary poem by Frances Croake Frank:
Did the woman say,
When she held him for the first time in the dark of a stable,
After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,
‘This is my body, this is my blood’?
Did the woman say,
When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a hilltop,
After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,
‘This is my body, this is my blood’?
Well that she said it to him then,
For dry old men,
brocaded robes belying barrenness
Ordain that she not say it for him now.” (20)
María Clara Bingemer movingly suggests a connection between
motherhood and the function of the priesthood in the context of life in Latin
America. She writes:
“It is women who possess in their bodiliness the
physical possibility of performing the divine eucharistic action. In the whole
process of gestation, childbirth, protection, and nourishing of a new life, we
have the sacrament of the Eucharist, the divine act, happening anew. . .
Breaking the bread and distributing it, having communion in the body and blood
of the Lord until he comes again, means for women today reproducing and
symbolising in the midst of the community the divine act of surrender and love,
so that the people may grow and the victory come, which is celebrated in the
feast of the true and final liberation.” (21)
So although Laurentin sees something fundamentally wrong in describing
motherhood in priestly language, it seems that the Catholic imagination is
repeatedly drawn to do just this. These maternal images often suggest a
different understanding of the Eucharist. The language of sacrifice is used in
a context that opens the imagination not primarily to the dead and bloodied man
on the cross and the violence that surrounds him, but to the mother’s love for
her child, a maternal sacrifice of love and care for the salvation of the
world. In exploring the implications of this, I ask how it might affect our
understanding of the Mass and the priesthood.
Implicit in this is another, potentially more troubling question:
why is it that educated men will fall over themselves in the rush to flee like
frightened animals from an idea which Laurentin admits seems like a logical
conclusion — that Mary is a priest? I think that fundamental to this is an
issue of blood, an issue for which we have still perhaps to receive a healing
touch. To begin to unpack this claim, I ask if the symbolism of blood, so
intimately associated with the Eucharist, might be profoundly affected by
sexual difference.
Consider Réné Girard’s description of the significance of blood:
“When men are enjoying peace and security, blood
is a rare sight. When violence is unloosed, however, blood appears everywhere —
on the ground, underfoot, forming great pools. Its very fluidity gives form to
the contagious nature of violence. Its presence proclaims murder and announces
new upheavals to come. Blood stains everything it touches the colour of
violence and death. Its very appearance seems, as the saying goes, to ‘cry out
for vengeance’.” (22)
This is an interpretation based on an exclusively male
relationship to blood, and it suggests a surprising degree of oblivion with regard
to the significance of blood for women. For a man, the sight of his own blood
must always be associated with trauma and violence. Men’s bodies do not bleed
unless they are wounded. But for a woman, the sight of her own blood is
routine, and the messages it gives are usually to do with fertility and birth.
In order to suggest ways in which the symbolism of blood pertains
to a feminine priesthood, I am going to appeal to certain insights offered by
Girard, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Soskice. Although I refer to
Kristeva and Irigaray’s psychoanalytic theories to do with the maternal body, I
am not suggesting that theology should submit to psychoanalysis nor am I
unquestioningly endorsing the psychoanalytic perspective. I do however think
that psychoanalysis can shed light on some of the dilemmas that arise with
regard to women and the priesthood.
Girard argues that sacrificial violence is the universal
foundation of every social order, in mythology and pagan religion and also in
the modern political order, with social equilibrium being maintained by a
vicious circle of cathartic acts of violence against randomly chosen victims
(scapegoats).(23) Only in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures does Girard see a
source of revelation capable of exposing and therefore subverting this order of
violence that has humanity in its grip. The role of religious sacrifice is to
channel and thereby contain violent forces which constantly threaten the social
order, and this means that blood, and in particular women’s blood, is seen as
having a defiling potency through its association with violence. Referring to
the near-universal taboos that surround menstruating women, Girard writes:
“The fact that the sexual organs of women
periodically emit a flow of blood has always made a great impression on men; it
seems to confirm an affinity between sexuality and those diverse forms of
violence that invariably lead to bloodshed.” (24)
He argues that not just in overtly violent sex acts, but in
childbirth and in the violence provoked by sexual infidelity, for instance,
there is an inherently violent aspect to sexuality:
“We are tempted to conclude that violence is
impure because of its relation to sexuality. Yet only the reverse proposition
can withstand close scrutiny. Sexuality is impure because it has to do with
violence.” (25)
In other words, he is suggesting that women’s blood is defiling
because its sexual associations imply violence.
Irigaray criticises Girard for perpetuating a masculine
understanding of religion that fails to examine the possibility of an
alternative religious order based on women’s values.(26) Citing the fertility
cults of the Greek goddesses, she suggests that women’s religion would be
founded not on sacrifice but on natural fecundity. Only the continued silencing
of women allows the Girardian emphasis on sacrifice over fertility to go
unchallenged.
I think Girard’s interpretation of the significance of women’s
blood bears out much of what Irigaray is saying. Surely, the blood of
menstruation and childbirth symbolises fertility and not sacrifice? My answer
to this is yes and no. While I think few women would agree wholeheartedly with
Girard’s description, nevertheless it is important to recognise that for women
as well as for men, fertile blood has the power to create feelings of fear and
shame and it does not represent an uncomplicated celebration of fecundity.
Fertility needs to be redeemed from its associations with violence. Irigaray
tends to put a romantic gloss on the fertility cults that ignores their darker
aspects. If women’s blood suggests the promise of new life, it also suggests
sexual oppression, the terror of childbirth, and the vulnerability of the
mother and her child. God tells Eve
“ I will multiply your pains in childbearing,
you shall give birth to your children in pain. Your yearning shall be for your
husband, yet he will lord it over you.” (Gen 3:16)
Christianity has emphasised (some might say destructively), the
problems that surround women’s sexuality in its association between Eve, women
and fallen nature, but it has also recognised that this curse is undone in
Mary. Gregory of Nyssa wrote, ‘The woman hath made an excuse for the woman. . .
The one through the wood brought in sin: the other through the wood brought in
against it a blessing.’ (27) Even Augustine, in typically condescending
fashion, sees sexual difference as significant for the understanding of
salvation:
“ It was necessary that the liberation of man
should be made manifest in both sexes. Therefore, since it was fitting that he
should take the human nature of man, the more honourable of the two sexes, it
remained for the deliverance of the female sex to be shown by the fact that
this man should be born of a woman.” (28)
I am suggesting that the undoing of Eve’s curse in Mary and the
deliverance of the female sex has not yet been fully recognised in all its
implications by the Catholic Church. There is a deeply buried connection
between Christianity’s rejection of pagan sacrifice and the exclusion of women
from the altar, based on a latent fear of the relationship between violence and
blood. If we would heed the injunction repeated so often in the New Testament —
‘Do not be afraid’ — this terror has to be confronted, not by adopting an
androgynous model of the priesthood which simply masks the problem, but by
daring to ask what it is about women’s bodies that makes them such a threat to
the male priesthood.
I am going to return to Laurentin now, because he refers briefly
to a factor which I think is of great significance. In his analysis of Mary in
the writings of the Fathers, he demonstrates how christological titles such as
king, prophet, victim and mediator had feminine equivalents in Mary, but
‘priest’ is conspicuously absent from this list. He suggests that the avoidance
of the word ‘priestess’ is associated with an instinctive reaction against the
pagan priestesses in the cults that surround the early Church, allied to Christianity’s
perpetuation of the exclusively male Jewish priesthood. (29)
If, as Girard suggests, women’s blood is closely associated with
violence in men’s minds, and if Christianity supremely rejects the sacrificial
violence of pagan religions, then it seems a small step for Christian men also
to reject women’s bodies, which not only have associations with paganism but
which also have a disturbing tendency to bleed. But Christianity represents the
ending of divisions between the Jewish and Gentile worlds and the breaking down
of the rituals and taboos that kept these worlds apart. Why, in this great act
of reconciliation, does the taboo against women priests persist? Moreover, if
Christianity is about the liberation of both men and women from the violent
shedding of sacrificial blood, why is this act of liberation achieved more
easily when dealing with the relatively bloodless male body, than when dealing
with bloody women?
Kriesteva offers a psychoanalytic insight which might shed light
on why there is a Judaeo-Christian taboo against the maternal priesthood.
Analysing taboos relating to childbirth in the Book of Leviticus, she argues
that at the base of all the Levitical codes of defilement is the fundamental
necessity for the people of Israel to separate themselves from the maternal
cults of paganism in order to become the people of God. The chaotic
fecundity of the maternal pagan cults is replaced with a logic of speech and
identity based on ever-more elaborate ritualistic distinctions and differences.
She says, ‘Far from being one of the semantic values of that tremendous
project of separation constituted by the biblical text, the taboo of the mother
seems to be its originating mytheme’. (30) Kristeva also argues that part of
this movement away from paganism by Israel was a rejection of sacrifice. The
sacred would no longer be sought through sacrificial rites but through
respecting laws based on social rituals associated with purity and impurity.
I realise that there is debate among biblical scholars as to how
Levitical codes and their relationship to the New Testament should be
interpreted, as there is regarding the role of sacrifice and the influence of
Canaanite cults on the religion of the Old Testament. I am not, therefore,
suggesting a rigid framework of interpretation, but something fairly allusive
which offers important insights if handled with care. (31) For instance, it
does seem that a longing for the maternal body finds expression in a number of
Old Testament writings that refer to Zion and Jerusalem in maternal language.
(cf. Isa 66:9-11) That this might primarily relate to the sense of alienation
created by exile from the land, need not preclude it from also suggesting a
growing separation from the maternal embodiment of pagan religion.
Kristeva argues that in Christ’s breaching of Levitical codes
associated with separation from the maternal flesh (variously symbolised by
taboos relating to blood, flesh, food and diseased or dead bodies), he achieves
within himself reconciliation between the maternal substance of paganism and
the linguistic order of Israel.(32) Christianity has, she says, failed to live
out this reconciliation. Christ alone achieves perfect heterogeneity between
the divine law of the Jewish world and the maternal flesh of the pagan world.
The rest of us live in a state of internal division and conflict owing to the
repression in Christian culture of the relationship to the mother’s body.
In fact, there have been moments in Christian history,
particularly in the Middle Ages, when a powerful maternal element has pervaded
the Church. In Soskice’s essay Blood and Defilement that I referred to
earlier, she demonstrates how there were associations in the medieval mind
between the imagery of the cross and the imagery of childbirth, with the Church
being pulled from the wound in Christ’s side. John’s Gospel describes blood and
water flowing from Christ’s side — fluids which occur together more commonly in
childbirth than in death. In some medieval paintings, these fluids flow either directly
into the mouths of the faithful, or into a chalice held by angels. Soskice
argues for a greater appreciation of the fluidity of Christian symbols of sex
and gender, pointing to ‘the symbolic identification . . . of the crucified
Christ with the human female body, both in giving birth and in feeding’.(33)
She suggests that the restoration of women’s embodiment is supremely achieved
on Calvary where Christ’s own body takes on womanly features and functions,
subverting Levitical taboos through the symbolic association between the fluids
of childbirth and the crucifixion. There is, she says, ‘abundant sense in
seeing Christ as our mother’.(34)
As I said at the beginning, Soskice’s paper has stimulated many of
the ideas that I explore in this paper. However, I think there is a problem in
suggesting that the end of taboos relating to women’s defilement is adequately
symbolised by the feminisation of Christ’s body on the cross and its
association with birth. If reconciliation with the maternal is symbolically
represented by the male Christ taking on womanly features, this seems to
perpetuate the denial of the mother’s body rather than reconcile us to it. I am
left wondering if this confirms Irigaray’s claim that the founding order of
western culture, including Christianity, is an act of ‘matricide’ which leads
to the obliteration of sexual difference.(35) It is a small step from seeing
Christ as mother to the virtual elimination of the woman’s body from the
symbols of salvation. The fact that ideas which seemed obvious to the medieval
Church have almost disappeared from Catholic consciousness today, would suggest
that focusing on the body of Christ alone might not keep alive the maternal
dimension of the crucifxion. Its sacrificial role begins to dominate, and the
imagery of blood and birth that came so naturally to embodied medievals seems
far more problematic in a culture that has effectively repressed its
relationship to the maternal body.
John’s Gospel, which describes the flow of blood and water from
Christ’s side, locates Mary at the foot of the cross as central to the drama of
the crucifixion. Several times during his public ministry Christ seems to
deprive Mary of her status as mother, calling her ‘woman’ instead and
identifying her with his other disciples (cf. Jn 2:4; Mk 3:31-5; Lk 11:27-8).
On Calvary, she remains ‘woman’ in relation to Christ but she is reinstated as
mother in relation to the beloved disciple. Jesus says, ‘Woman, this is your
son,’ and to the disciple, ‘This is your mother’. (Jn 19:26) Mary’s presence on
Calvary seems to carry more than one meaning, but what concerns me here is the
fact that the dying Christ restores Mary to the role of mother, in a way that
in the Catholic tradition has always symbolised the birth of the Church. Might
this be the moment of symbolic reconciliation between Jew and Gentile, between
the maternal pagan cults and the religion of Israel, between the Law of the
Father and the body of the mother which have up to this point developed in growing
isolation from one another? In the moment of dying, Christ bequeaths to the
beloved disciple his relationship to the maternal body, no longer represented
by the biological motherhood of Mary but made present through the symbolic
motherhood of the Church. If Irigaray is right, the significance of this act
has yet to be fully recognised and celebrated in Christian culture.
The maternal priesthood of Mary symbolises the rehabilitation of
the maternal flesh through the salvation of the pagan world. But only if we can
demonstrate that the connection between women’s blood and violence has been
broken, might we aspire to the religious celebration of fertility rather than
sacrifice that Irigaray envisions. Girard refers to ‘the bestial monstrosities
of mythological births’.(36) When we contemplate the tradition of Mary’s
maternal virginity, we see a rupture in the identification of the female body
with violent sexuality. Free from sexual domination and (according to
tradition) giving birth without pain Mary represents the breaking of the
connection between women’s blood, sex and violence. Of course, many see Mary’s
virginity as a denial of women’s sexuality, and I think it has functioned in
such a way. Nevertheless beneath such cultural distortions, there is a truth of
the utmost significance. Mary symbolises not the denial of woman’s sexuality
but its redemption.
The salvation of woman’s embodiment is made real by the
participation of Mary in the events of the cross reminding us that the blood of
the incarnation is shed for the world in birth as well as in death. The anguish
of mother and son on Calvary lays before us the terrible reality of sacrificial
violence, a reality that we confront nightly on our television screens, on our
city streets, and behind the closed doors of the family home. But the symbolism
of the cross also promises that in the moment of Christ’s death we are born
into a new maternal community, the Church, bound together not by sacrifice and
violence but by love, forgiveness and reconciliation. If we exclude Mary from
the cross, we risk forgetting its fertility and focusing only on its violence,
which might amount to the same thing as privileging the man’s religious
perspective over the woman’s, in Irigaray’s terms.
In an Angelus address, Pope John Paul II says that Mary is present
in the sacrifice of the Mass:
“Every Mass puts us into intimate communion with
her, the Mother, whose sacrifice ‘becomes present’ just as the sacrifice of her
Son ‘becomes present’ at the words of consecration of the bread and wine
pronounced by the priest.” (37)
This Marian dimension of the Eucharist is surely best represented
by the woman priest, supported by a theology which makes clear that women are
not simply being incorporated into the existing male understanding of the
priesthood? The Mass already symbolises fertility as well as death with the
maternal activity of nurturing the faithful. St Cyprian said of the Church, ‘of
her womb we are born, of her milk we are fed, of her Spirit our souls draw
their life-breath’. (38) Such maternal imagery makes the exclusion of women
from the priesthood indefensible on symbolic grounds. Is not a female priest
naturally more suited than a male priest to perform the function of feeding the
faithful with the body and blood of Christ, mediated to humankind through the
maternal body of Mary and the Church?
But I want to add a proviso. I am not advocating a reductive
biological understanding of the priesthood so that only women can represent the
priesthood of Mary, and only men can represent the priesthood of Christ. This
merely perpetuates our present problem of biological literalism. Even today the
Church is well able to understand sexual identities in analogous terms when it
comes to incorporating men into the so-called feminine, Marian Church. There is
a need for a conceptual shift from the present celebration of biological
motherhood in some Catholic quarters, to a celebration of the Church’s maternal
calling to protect and nurture the poor, the weak and those who are increasingly
uncared for in our world. This understanding would be far more in keeping with
the Church’s tradition than the present romanticisation of childbearing women.
Catholic Christianity offers a richly gendered symbolism which neither
obliterates sexual difference nor locks the believer into a rigidly
pre-determined biological destiny. There is a delicate balance between
over-privileging the significance of the sexed body and eradicating its
significance altogether.
Many see the Catholic Church’s refusal to consider the question of
women’s ordination as an almost insurmountable problem. I see it rather as an
opportunity and an incentive to develop a coherent theology of women’s
priesthood that would not simply absorb women into male hierarchies. The Church’s
own symbolism leads along the path of a maternal priesthood. What is it that
some men are really afraid of when they contemplate women priests? They have
yet to come up with a convincing argument that justifies their fear.
Note on the author.
Dr. Tina Beattie is at present a part-time lecturer at the Department of
Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Bristol, UK. She wrote:
·
Rediscovering Mary - Insights from the Gospels,
Burns & Oates, Tunbridge Wells 1995,
·
and God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate, ‘A Gynocentric
Refiguration of Marian Symbolism in Engagement with Luce Irigaray’, University
of Bristol 1999.
Footnotes
1. Quoted in René Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce,
Vol. 1, Essai sur le Développement d’une Idée Religieuse (Paris: Nouvelles
Éditions Latines, 1952), pp.429-30. Ellipses as given. All translations of
Laurentin’s work from the French are my own.
2. Quoted in Laurentin, Marie, L‘Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol.
l, p.423.
3. Laurentin, Marie, L ‘Église et Le Sacerdoce, Vol II, Étude
Théologique (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1953), p.SI.
4. Janel Martin Soskice. ‘Blood and Defilement’, p.5. (References
arc to an unpublished version of Soskice’s paper, given to the Society for the
Study of Theology Conference. Oxford. April 11-14, 1994. For published
versions, see Soskice, ‘Blood and Defilement’ in ET: Journal of the European
Society for Catholic Theology [Tübingen: Heft 2, 1994], abridged in Bulletin
of Harvard Divinity School, January 1995).
5. Tissa Balasuriya OMI, ‘Mary and Human Liberation’, Logos, Vol
. 29 Nos. 1 & 2, March/July 1990, p.99.
6. These two studies are published as Marie, L’Eglise et Le
Sacerdoce, Vols. 1 and 2, referred to above.
7. Quoted in Michael O’Carroll, Theotokos — A Theological
Encyclopedia af the Blessed Virgin Mary (Collegeville, Minnesota: The
Liturgical Press, 1982), p.293.
8. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption —Essays
on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books.
1992), p.l01.
9. Cf. O’Carroll, Theotokos, pp.293-4.
10. Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol . 2,
p.37.
11. Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol. l,
p.630. His italics.
2. Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol. l,
p.632.
13. Quoted in Helmut Moll,. ‘Faithful to her Lord’s Example’ in
Helmut Moll (cd.). The Church and Women — A Compendium (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1988), 161-76, p.l74.
14. Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol.1,
p.644.
15. Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol.II,
p.200.
16. Laurentin distinguishes between ‘le sacerdos’, which
refers to the priesthood of all believers, and ‘le prêtre’, which refers
to the ordained priesthood. Michael Richards makes this distinction in English
by using the word ‘priest’ for the universal priesthood, and ‘presbyter’ for
the ordained priesthood. Cf. Michael Richards, A People of Priests— The
Ministry of the Catholic Church (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995),
pp.6-7.
17. Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol. 2,
p.48.
18. Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol. 2,
p.75.
19. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘Women priests? A Marian Church in
a fatherless and motherless culture’ in Communio 22 (Spring, 1995), pp.l64-70.
20. Quoted in Susan A. Ross, ‘God’s Embodiment and Women’ in
Catherine Mowry LaCugna (ed.), Freeing Theology — The Essentials of Theology
in Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1993),
185-209, pp.185-6.
21. Maria Clara Bingemer Women in the Future of the Theology of
Liberation’ in Marc H. Ellis and Otto Maduro (eds.), The Future of
Liberation Theology—Essays in Honor of Gustavo Gutierrez (Maryknoll: Orbis
Books, 1989), 473-490, p.486.
22. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1979), p.34.
23. For a helpful summary of his theory, see Girard, ‘Generative
Scapegoating’ followed by discussion, in Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (ed.), Violent
Origins—Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing
and Cultural Formation (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
1987), pp.73-145.
24. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p.35.
25. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p.34.
26. Cf. Luce Irigaray, ‘Women, the Sacred, Money’ in Sexes and
Genealogies (New York: Cohumbia University Press, 1993), pp.73-88.
27. Quoted in Thomas Livius, The Blessed Virgin in the Fathers
of the First Six Centuries (London: Burns and Oates Ltd., 1893), p.48.
28. Quoted in Kari Elisabeth Borresen, Subordination and
Equivalence—The Nature and Role of Woman in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (Kampen:
Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1995). p.74.
29. Cf. Laurentin, Marie, L’Eglise et Le Sacerdoce, Vol. 1,
pp.91 -2.
30. Iulia Kristeva, ‘Semiotics of Biblical Abomination’ in Powers
of Horror—An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press,
1982), 90-112, pp.l05-6.
31. Questions also arise as to what extent the reputed violence of
pagan cults is more a product of Christian demonisation than a record of
historical reality. Tikva Frymer-Kensky offers a thoughtful analysis in her
book, In the Wake of the Goddess — Women, Culture and the Biblical
Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1992).
32. Cf. Kristeva, ‘Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi’ in Powers of
Horror, pp. 113-132.
33. Soskice, ‘Blood and Defilement’, p.9.
34. Soskice, ‘Blood and Defilement’, p.l2.
35. Cf. Irigaray, ‘Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother’
in Sexes and Genealogies, pp.7-21.
36. Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London:
the Athlone Press, 1987), p.222.
37. John Paul II, Angelus of 5 June, ‘At the root of the Eucharist
is the virginal and maternal life of Mary’ published in L’Osservatore Romano
(13 June 1983), p.1.
38. Quoted in Monica Migliorino Miller, Sexuality and Authority
in the Catholic Church (Scranton: University of Scranton Press; London and
Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1995). p.153.