Thoughts on women, feminism, the Church An article about women, feminism in the Church which takes off from

the Holy Father's presentation on Mary and Eve, and includes the thought of Rahner and Balthasar.
By Sr. Kathryn

Woman, patriararchy, male-domination, femininity and feminism--words that defy a contemplative gaze. Words that generate flashes of emotion and quick-fired responses. In the debate over the role of women in the Church (no doubt a simplistic lumping into one category of a number of gender related issues), language should not deceive us about the extent of the crisis of identity in which the Church is caught. It is vitally important that we reverently approach the still center that has always been one of wonder and profound questioning. Thus we destroy the impression that ecclesial debates reported and commented on by the news are solely defensive patriarchal or medieval absolutist postures by individuals in the Church's body versus those more politically astute. This article intends to briefly explore this center of awe and wonder. Such reflection anchors us in a transcendence stronger than the pull of personal agenda and opinion. Anchors are important, they provide stability in a storm. In this period of the Church's living history, reflection is deepening our understanding of what it is to be Church. We have become more aware of the potential we all have to distort our essential Marian image. In this mystery, woman assumes a pre-eminence and potency never so fully conscious in the Church before. Beginning with Vatican II, even before the prominence gained by the feminist movement in the 70's, the Church had already embodied in the feminine Marian whole, her own essential mystery. Because of the Woman--Mary--the Church is seen as a surrounding feminine presence, a maternal womb in whom we are being born in labor and in tears into eternal Love. At the Annunciation, the great event into which all of time and eternity is compressed and from which it explosively irradiates, there is the utterly glorious fact that at this crucial moment Mary became the human mother of a child who had no human father, nor could he have: "the perfection of the creature, as creature, is found in woman, not in man." (The Church and Woman, page 77) In Mary, the Church existed before even a single apostle had heard the Messiah's voice. Mary, Mother of the Living One and Mother of the Church, is often hailed as "blessed because she believed." On Calvary, she stood beneath the agonizing, twisting, bloodied body of her son whom she had been told was "the promised of ages, Emmanuel, God with us." Her heart was torn, her thoughts, perhaps, in chaos as she held fast to this promise in almost cruel faith. Her eyes, her intellect, her heart saw only it's shocking and

mysterious negation. She did not grasp for an explanation or control. In Handmaid of the Lord, von Balthasar writes of this Woman of the Annunciation and this Woman of Calvary: "She makes all the potentialities which constitute her nature accessible to his [God's] action, without her being able or wishing to overlook anything." (p 9) She let her dearest "promise," be taken from her, remaining ever the "handmaid." Mary's surrender destroyed the illusion of power embodied in another woman who had refused to be handmaid, and who instead had reached for control and clarity. In the primordial garden a Serpent's fateful words had rung out. "Eat of this tree and you will be gods," the devil had quietly urged, hiding the intensity of his excitement as the first woman toyed with the idea of "forbidden" knowledge and power. Eve grew suddenly suspicious that God might be witholding some tantalizing special something to which she might have a right. She grasped the tempting promise, only to rupture the fabric of God's eternal giftedness in self-giving love poured into creation. In Mary--the Woman--the Church learns that every act of grasping, control, pride, and ambition distorts the feminine Body which is the Church. These principles anchor our turbulent emotions when wrestling with what are perhaps inaccurately called "feminist" issues in the Church. There are women of our own century who symbolize in their own feminine self-donation the essential Marian image of the Church: among them Mother Teresa, the angel of Calcutta and visible sign of the healing Christ to people of every religion and no religion, and Mother Thecla, co-foundress of the Daughters of St. Paul and, in her life, always in the forefront of evangelization, communicating the word, the essence and the heart of the Church. Amidst the clamoring of labels, insults, speculation, politicizing, and arguments that burden the simplicity of faith today, they are women who embody Marian faith that is handmaid and womb. These women embody a Marian faith comfortable with a dark and unrationalized obscurity that demands the miraculous ability to pose publicly the question: "Why does the Church have to suit us?" Rather than remake the Church into our own beloved, subject to our control, so clear and defined and just the way we like it so that we no longer need faith, they and women like them believe. They represent the essential essence of the Church as feminine and receptive. Karl Rahner said once, "Are we not, all unawares, objectively risking a shameless individualism and selfishness when we seek to live in the Church in such a way as baldly to arrange it to our own taste?" (The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor, page 86). Perhaps our own "taste," tantalizing as the "fruit" for which we grasp may be, may tear apart the divine order of Love that flows through the Church, Bride of the Lamb. Mary is not simply a symbol of the Church. She cannot be reduced to an imaginative analogy. We existed in her before we were born. She concretely embodies who we are. She is first. She is primate. She is mother. She is queen even of the Twelve, of the apostles who were signs and instruments of the Eternal High Priest, whose hands were to hold the sacrifice offered by the Body. She is everything we hope to be--male and female, from the Pope to the homeless who crowd the vestibules of our Church hoping for a bit of warmth. Von Balthasar wrote: "Without Mariology Christianity is in danger of becoming

inhuman. The Church becomes functionalistic, without soul, a hectic enterprise without resting place, aliented by over-planning. Because in this male-masculine world one new ideology replaces another, everything becomes polemical, critical, bitter, humorless, and ultimately boring. People desert such a Church in droves." (in Klarstellungen. Zue Prufung der Geister, page 72) Before the Creator, all of us, male and female, are feminine--open, responsive, loved, dependent, the object of Spousal attention and faithfulness. In today's socio-historical climate, function and merit is giving way to the idea of fruit, of being born into a cosmic, transcendent, mystic otherness. Women are the womb from which new life is being nurtured for all...in the world and--dare we say it?-- potentially in the Church. 2,000 years ago one woman said Yes for us all, a Yes on God's terms. Do we pretend again to know better? The unwieldy size and life-span of the Church dwarfs any overzealous attempts toward lifting debates about the role of women to the realm of the Church's essential Marian image-- until I remember Mary, the Woman. The functionalism and speculations and arguments that surround the issues drift into embarrassed silence. Lowered eyes betray guilt. All too frequently, grasping has replaced surrender, control smothered the darkness of faith, ambition and power soured humility. Accusations that make us blush, yes, that grate against our souls. But they protect us from settling for polemics, a succession of ideologies that are unreflective of the Church's Marian song: "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my Spirit rejoices in God my Savior." (Lk. 1:46) Kathryn Hermes chaire@interramp.com

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~nmcenter/women-cp/art2.html