The Thread of Patriarchy: Part III—Alternate Perspectives by Maree Sobolewski

The most persistent issue to emerge from the 2021–2024 Synod on Synodality was the role of women in the church. The Synod’s final document states this unambiguously: “Inequality between men and women is not part of God’s design. . . . We bear witness to the Gospel when we seek to live in relationships that respect the equal dignity and reciprocity between men and women. The widely expressed pain and suffering on the part of many women from every region and continent, both lay and consecrated, during the synodal process, reveal how often we fail to do so” (§50).

The issue of women’s ministry invites continued response from the hearts of the faithful as we enter the “implementation” phase of the synodal process. To this end, we are pleased to present a multipart essay by “committed Catholic” Maree Sobolewski of Australia. Maree originally wrote this essay to share with Synod delegates as they prepared for the second session in October. “The essay I have written is with a sincere heart,” she states by way of introduction. “I wrote it over a three-month period with much prayer and deliberation.” Part I of her essay is available here, and Part II is here—Ed.

Contemporary theologians using more updated approaches to theology have found there is no tangible evidence in either the Scriptures or tradition for excluding women from ordained ministry and decision-making roles in the church. It is hoped more attention will be given to these alternate views.

In 1965, Gertrud Heinzelmann helped inaugurate this modern debate when she questioned in Commonweal: “What would Christ do today if He were to found His Church? How would Paul argue, how would he dispose things if he had before him the independent career woman of today instead of a row of harem women with veiled faces whose education and personal rights had been suppressed in a way that we can scarcely appreciate in our time?”

Karl Rahner, one of the great church fathers of the 20th century (d. 1984), is regarded as one of the most prominent critics of the church’s exclusion of women from the priesthood. Commenting on Rahner’s 1981 book Concern for the Church, Alfred Lagan has written, “Rahner challenged the Vatican’s central argument against women’s ordination, namely, that because Christ and the Apostles did not ordain women, the Church is not authorised to ordain women.” Ragan continues:

Rahner insisted that we cannot draw any “definite and unambiguous” conclusions from Jesus’s choice of men for the college of the Twelve. It is one thing to say that only men were members of the college of Twelve, but it is quite another to say that, therefore, only men can serve as the “simple leader of the community and president of the eucharistic celebration in a particular congregation of a later period”. . . . Rahner argued that . . . it would have been sociologically unthinkable for women to have exercised pastoral leadership in first-century Jerusalem, but the reverse would be the case in the late 20th century.

Rahner held the position that we cannot simply assume that what happened in the early church is an absolute for all times—a divine law, so to speak. The refusal to allow women in ordained ministry, or in any leadership or decision-making position, is based on outdated assumptions from a culturally different era. Many of the theologians who rejected Pope John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and the subsequent Responsum would agree.

The theologian Elizabeth Johnson has taken aim at the tradition that only men can act as priests in consecrating the Eucharist because the sign needs to have a natural resemblance to Christ. Women, made equally in the image of God (Gen 1:27), do image Christ; as Johnson writes, “let it be plainly stated that women are icons of Christ, imago Christi, in every essential way. There is a natural resemblance of a common humanity and participation in divine grace.” It is not the male physicality of Jesus that is important. Further, God is Spirit, and we all have his indelible spirit.

Fr. Tomáš Halík, a theologian who has been involved with the Synod, has stated that the position of the church against women’s ordination to both the priesthood and the diaconate, is based “more [on] psychological reasons than theological reasons” and said that relying on the argument that “‘Jesus chose just men’ isn’t persuasive.” In an address to parish priests last year, he noted that “Jesus chose just the Jews” before asking rhetorically, “Do we have a right to ordain Italians, Americans and Japanese?” Halík also stated that regardless of the Synod’s outcome on the issue of women’s leadership, he believes it is “a sin against the Holy Spirit not to embrace the charism of women to proclaim the Gospel.”

Fr. Raymond E. Brown, a biblical scholar who died in 1998, believed that the “evangelists’ description of the [Last] Supper corresponds to issues they were dealing with; it is with great peril applied to later Church problems that never entered their minds.” In other words, Jesus did not raise the question of whether men should exclusively represent him in the eucharistic meal. As Avery Dulles (not himself a noted supporter of the ordination of women) once said: “No doctrinal decision of the past directly solves a question that was not asked at that time.”

It is not known who was really present at the Last Supper. It should always be remembered that what was written and included in the Bible was done so by men, with women on the whole left out of the storyline. It is possible that such a patriarchal mindset viewed it as irrelevant to mention the presence of women. It is also worth remembering that in the first century women often led house churches and “presided” at these simple “breaking-of-the-bread” gatherings. Priscilla, Lydia, and the mother of John Mark are a few examples. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul does not tell us who the “presiders” were at these ceremonies; it is possible that they were both men and women. The male-led sacramental liturgy for the Eucharist only evolved later.

The 1976 Papal Biblical Commission unanimously decided that Scripture alone supplies no basis for decreeing that women should not be ordained, stating, “It does not seem that the New Testament by itself alone will permit us to settle in a clear way and once and for all the problem of the possible accession of women to the presbyterate.” Twenty-one years later, the Catholic Theological Society of America upheld the view that “Since Jesus left the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to make many decisions on its own regarding the organization of its ministry, scholars judge it very doubtful that he intended to lay down such a particular prescription regarding the sex of future candidates for ordination. The majority of exegetes hold, instead, that Jesus’ choice of only men for the Twelve was determined by the nature of their symbolic role as ‘patriarchs’ of restored Israel.”

With the release of his apostolic letter Ad Theologiam Promovendam in 2023, Pope Francis encouraged theologians to go beyond the outmoded paradigm of “faith seeking understanding.” The pope has recognized some of the inadequacies and limitations of a purely dogmatic theology. Instead, he stresses, theology has to be anchored in the current experiences of humankind, to engage with contemporary knowledge from all schools of thought across all cultures and denominations, and to seek God’s revelation for our time in history. The Scriptures and tradition need to be enlightened by this approach.

Pope Francis has also asked theologians to “de-masculinize” the church—an invitation taken up by theologians such as Phyllis Zagano, who has offered very plausible, historical evidence for women deacons. Her extensive studies have found no precedent on which to base the exclusion of women from the diaconate in the Catholic Church.

Ironically, as illustrated above, there are theologians who have gone beyond the constraints of dogmatic theology and approached their work without the lens of patriarchy, only to be left as “voices crying out in the wilderness.” They have been speaking out for decades. It is hoped that their perspectives, and those of others to come, will now be better received. ♦

Maree Sobolewski is a committed Catholic from Australia. She holds a master of arts in theology and spirituality and is a team member of Catholic Church Reform International. She has worked as an educator, a retreat leader and seminar facilitator, and a school chaplain, and has served as a missionary in Tasmania and the Northwest Territories of Canada. Maree has been actively involved in her parish for most of her adult life. She has served as a board member, prayer group leader, and international event coordinator, among other roles.

Image: Detail from Russian icon of Sophia, the Holy Wisdom, 1812.