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The Ordination of Women in the Catholic Church: Unmasking a Cuckoo's Egg Tradition, John Wijngaards, DLT, 2001, £10.95.
The cuckoo's egg of the subtitle is the Roman concept of women's inferiority deposited in the Christian nest, which threw out the teaching that women are equal. On researching their exclusion from the ministerial priesthood, John Wijngaards found the reasons given to be unconvincing and reeking of misogyny.
He lists the teachings of the Church Fathers stating that women were deficient human beings, liable to go, and to lead others, astray because of their lack of understanding; divinely ordained to be subject to men, impure because of menstruation and sharing the guilt of Eve for the Fall. Such things are no longer said openly, but there persists among some clerics a tendency to downplay or ignore our common humanity and see us as mysterious aliens, safe only when pigeonholed as virgins or mothers. These roles are sold to us as superior to the apostolic-petrine one of authority.
Thomas Aquinas stated that theology based on symbolism does not prove anything, but the spousal imagery of Christ and his Church has been used to maintain that a woman cannot be his icon at the altar. (Tina Beattie finds that von Balthasar's description of the eucharist sounds like a cosmic male orgasm!) Wijngaards points out that the presider does not function in persona Christi but represents the people: "we offer approve our offering" - (if images matter so much, a woman would be more appropriate!) The words of consecration are actually part of a third-person narrative, not the presider's own.
Wijngaards lists evidence of women priests in the first millennium, and also of women deacons - not deacons' wives, whose ordination ritual contained the same sacramental elements as the men's rite. He cites the volte-face on slavery, accepted by the Church until the mid-nineteenth century, as an example of how teaching can be changed. This occurs in accordance with the development of human understanding, but I am amazed at the examples he gives of Rome setting the seal of authenticity on the sensus fidelium; the unedifying process of promulgating papal infallibility has been well documented, and the immaculate conception derives from an outmoded understanding of original sin.
Finally Wijngaards likens the Vatican's choice to lose the eucharist as the focus of the faith rather than to go against the tradition of a male celibate priesthood to the catastrophic decision of the German generals at Stalingrad to allow their troops to be decimated rather than to disobey Hitler's orders.
An index would have been helpful, not only to reviewers, but to all who could make use of this meticulously researched and cogently argued account.
Josephine Way
Further information on the book:
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