Institutionalization of the Charismatic Dimension

in the Early Christian Community?

Comments on a Workshop Paper presented by Rev. Herbert Schneider, S.J.

The comments on the workshop paper will focus on its thesis:

The charismatic endowment empowered women to participate
fully in community life, leadership, and mission, but as the
charismatic dimension was more and more institutionalized it
also disenfranchised women and relegated them to a
subordinate and limited participation in community life
structured along patriarchal lines. (p. 106)
This statement triggers several other key issues that need to be
further clarified. There are underlying questions to ask in order that
this thesis would lead to a conclusive resolution or, at least, point to a
methodical orientation. They may be the following:
1. What is charismatic endowment?
2. Is this charismatic endowment truly a norm to permit a
persons full participation in community life, leadership, and
mission?
3. Does valid demonstration of a charismatic endowment
automatically lead to an affirmation of a charismatic
dimension in a person?
4. Is institutionalization too radical a process that it caused
disenfranchisement in Christian community?
A question that would even be more relevant to our present-day would
be:
Do we have to de-institutionalize charisma to stop the
continued, oppressive, and systematic disenfranchisement of
women in the Roman Catholic Church?
At first sight, these questions appear to be tough nuts to crack. But
allowing a more pastoral-underside paradigm to influence this
critique, we can approximate the aforementioned questions as:
1. Is it possible for us to receive the Holy Spirit?

2. Is the reception of the Holy Spirit a sure basis of our full

participation in the life, mission and priesthood of Jesus?
3. Do we have to provide evidence of the Holy Spirits presence in
our lives so we can be allowed to hold any other duty in our
following of Jesus?
4. Is our emphasis on the formalities of the Holy Spirits presence
and manifestation in our lives stifling any other possible
expression of our following of Jesus?
On one hand, I would like to leave the rephrasing of the question on
the issue of the de-institutionalization of charisma to the hierarchys
prerogative, but on the other hand, it would be remiss on my part in
my attempt to be a disciple of Jesus, if I would not venture to unmask
the stirrings of his Holy Spirit in the life of the Universal Community
of disciples. The rearticulated question would be as follows:
Should we restore the unqualified understanding that the Holy
Spirits full and unmitigated presence is absolutely self-evident,
and always enormously palpable in all of Jesus followers?
If this question was put forth to us in our times along with the entire
generation of Jesus followers in the context of the Deutero-Pauline
and the Pastorals, and to all the other Christian communities of the
2nd and 3rd centuries CE, we might be bothered by the move to
restrict womens participation, leadership and mission in the Church
on the basis of derogatory comments of Marcus Minucius Felix in his
opus Octavius.
Why did Christians at that time listen to the depreciatory accusations
of pagan authors? Why were they swayed to box women up on the
argument that emancipated women of the upper classes were capable
of depravity, dissolute lifestyle? (As if men were not vulnerable to or
liable of debauchery.) Why did Christians undertake that rather nave
process of integrating their communities into the wider Greco-Roman
society?
Probing a little bit more, a hasty uncritical approach is detectable in
the eventual integration of Christian communities.
The superfluous, oblivious and reckless integration and overassimilation of Christian communities into the larger GrecoRoman society, resulting in the enforcement of patriarchalism, is

the proper premise that laid the groundwork for and the
imminent cause that led to the disenfranchisement of women,
their subsequent relegation to a subordinate role and their
practical exclusion from almost all levels of participation.
The objectification of charisma or the institutionalization of the
charismatic dimension or even the transposition of the charismatic
endowment into an institution is not the actual crucial central issue.
It is the inability of Christendom at that time to foresee the potentially
disastrous effects of appropriating an unmistakably tyrannical
framework such as patriarchalism that must be held as the critical
mass nullifying the importance of women in the light of Jesus
actuations, their equality with men and their esteemed value as Gods
innovative co-creators.
Objectifications, institutionalizations and transpositions are as but
natural to humanity (to both men and women) as the clockwork of
getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night. But asking a
person to wake up at midnight and work when that persons regular
working time is from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. is equivalent to patriarchalism.
Objectifications, institutionalizations and transpositions are
rudimentary to the survival of the Christian community the
prolongation of the life of the Church.
Patriarchalism does not add quality to the continued existence of the
Church in the human horizon. Patriarchalism, forced, enforced and
imposed on the universal community of Jesus followers, does not add
patina or meaningfulness. Patriarchy is only one dimension of growth
and has only a limited purpose. And once it has lost its
purposefulness, it should not take front and center in the drama of
discipleship. Patriarchalism, as evident in all other faiths, continues
to be the fuel that makes fundamentalism/integralism burn bright,
the driving force behind oppressive systems and the springboard for
the perpetuation of inequality-injustice in the Church.
With all due respect to Fr. Schneiders erudition, his biblicism,
and his extensive experience as leader of an elitist charismatic
covenant community, he has undoubtedly evaded the ideology
that is deceiving women and the Church at large. He has utterly
failed to pan the gold as he sifted through the monolithic armada of
scholars and their respective works. None of his citations targeted
patriarchy or if he encountered it, was simply turning a blind-eye as
he glossed the workshop paper. He has focused on a moot and flaccid

perception. Though his thesis may be a step towards the crossroads of

a revolution, in itself, it could never be considered revolutionary.
Blaming institutionalization of charisma can still be skewed towards
the upgrading and further sacralization of patriarchalism.
Given limited theological and scriptural training one may be coaxed
into believing Fr. Schneiders thesis. But I beg to disagree. With the
experience of excessive unbridled patriarchalism entrenched in the
Roman Catholic Church, more specifically within the community (in
which I was part of until 1999) where Fr. Schneider was senior head
coordinator, I cannot but testify to the fact that orthodoxy nowadays
is more of a preoccupation on doctrine as ideology rather than a
dimension of faith that promotes redemption-liberation.
Paolo Fernando C. Colabres
Maryhill School of Theology
Adult Theological Education Program
TH004 New Testament I
First Semester 2005-2006
August 2005