Tag Archives: Catholic Hierarchy

God’s Tricksters, Prophetic Vision, and Justice in the Church.

August 3, 2009 Terence Leave a comment

I’ve been reading about Catholic Bishop, Patricia Fresen . That’s right: Catholic Bishop, Patricia Fresen.

Bishop Fresen is one of three consecrated Bishops in the Womenpriests movement. Now, I’ve been fascinated by Bishop Fresen since I first heard of her a couple of years ago, but all my natural instincts are in turmoil over this. On the one hand, part of me says this can’t be valid – the Catholic Church does not allow women priests, let alone bishops. On the other, another part of me says, right on! After all, she appears to have been legitimately and validly consecrated by a (male) Catholic bishop in good standing, witnessed by three other male bishops, and other women bishops – who had previously been consecrated themselves, in similar fashion.

women priests

The second feature that appeals to me, that warms the cockles of my heart, is that I share one part of Bishop Fresen’s path of resistance. She and I both spent the major part of our lives in the church in South Africa. As legally “white”, we were both beneficiaries of the apartheid structure. As Catholics, we both accepted the national church’s insistence that it was right and appropriate to stand up against injustice, and to resist, even to disobey, unjust laws. I myself attended several meeting of peace and justice commissions, where the regular slogan was “If you want peace, work for justice”, and quite deliberately ignored and contravened some significant pieces of legislation, opening myself to real risk of prosecution.

Bishop Fresen logically applied church teaching on justice to her own position:

“As she left childhood, she realized that this neat division into black and white was not the Will of God. It was unjust. Through her experience in her Dominican community, which had broken barriers of white and black among the sisters and in their schools, Patricia came to understand that there is a moral obligation to change unjust laws and that this is often done by refusal to obey those laws. Therefore, when she heard about the ordination of seven Catholic women on the Danube in 2002, she immediately recognized that their ordinations were moral resistance to the apartheid of sexism in the Catholic Church.”

I do not know enough about canon law on what constitutes a legitimate episcopal consecration, but I do know that this issue is not going away any time soon. In addition to the women already ordained, they are training more – as well as married and gay men.

[UPDATE: By sheer chance, I stumbled upon this story on Clerical Whispers from 2007, focusing on one of the American women ordained. Have a look here, at the original source, for a different perspective.

I am also struck by the action of the (male) bishop and his colleagues who had the courage to initiate the ordination of womenpriests, and then the consecration of three women bishops, to continue the work. I have been reading Virginia Mollenkott on “God’s Tricksters”, in “Take Back the Word” (ed Goss & Webb).

MollenkottMollenkott argues that for those compelled to read Scripture, and to follow authority from “low and outside” (which includes women, gay men, and especially lesbians), it is sometimes necessary to adopt a certain amount of deception and trickery. This sounds dishonest, but she quotes convincing Scriptural precedents for the strategy (Jeannine Grammik has proposed something similar, for subverting Vatican authority from the inside). I also like Mollenkott’s observations on assigned authority. She is not here speaking of the Catholic Church in particular, but if the cap fits…

“Those who find themselves disadvantaged, on the outside, in the margins as it were, make use of trickery and other forms of manipulative behaviour because they do not have assigned power….Assigned power is just that: assigned (usually by the elite in favour of the elite) but masquerading as divinely ordained, cosmically correct and unquestionably true.” (emphasis mine)

It seems to me that the unnamed male bishops have done just that – used their legitimate authority to ordain & consecrate women priests and bishops. But because the people chosen are women, and therefore not approved in the modern church (the evidence is that this was not also the case: women deacons, and possibly priests, were certainly ordained in the early church), the identity of the consecrating bishops must be kept secret for now.

At Bilgrimage, meanwhile, William Lindsay has been critically discussing the stance of Archbishop Rowan Williams on gay marriage, contrasting it with that of the British Quakers. He notes that what is required here is not endless debate, commissions, scholarship and clear majority support, but the adoption of a prophetic stance against injustice.

“To my mind, what British Friends have just decided to do, and the theological rationale they advance to justify their decision, strongly supports the argument I offered yesterday against the Archbishop of Canterbury’s understanding of how churches change their moral minds. When social attitudes begin to show churches that certain practices they have long taken for granted are no longer morally defensible, churches usually change their moral minds not because they have reached wide agreement about a new moral consensus, or as a result of ongoing study and discussion about the new consensus.

They change their moral minds because prophetic, cutting-edge groups within the churches and outside the churches needle the churches into rethinking their complicity in practices that can no longer be justified on theological, biblical, or moral grounds. “

This is precisely what I was taught by the Church in South Africa, what Bishop Fresen has followed in her calling to the priesthood, and what the Quakers have now done.

“Sex As God Intended” (Book Review)

February 9, 2009 Terence Leave a comment

John McNeill, Lethe Press 2008.

I have just two small niggles about this book, so let me get them out of the way now. First, I was initally disappointed to find that this is not all new wrting by McNeill. Only half the book is by McNeill, and the rest is a collection of celebratory articles, a “Festchrift”, by others. This Festschrift is welcome, but even his own writing is not all new. I have not read all the previous works, but even so I recognised large chunks of the material as not just a restatement, but verbatim reprints, of sections of “Taking a Chance of God.” So big chunks of this are not new material.

Also irritating was the poor editing. McNeill appears to have gone to a new publisher, who have clearly made good use of a spell-checker – but paid insufficient attention to grammar. There were many instances where the flow of the text was interrupted by obvious missing words, with important parts of speech simply not present, leading to incomplete sentences or clauses that just did not hang together.

Celebrating John McNeill

But these were irritations only. It does not matter that this is not all new writing by McNeill, and should not be treated as such. The Festchrift is the clue: this is not a continuation, but a celebration, of the earlier work. Just running down the contributors, all of whom have made major contributions of their own to the continuing struggle of LGBT Catholics, is testimony to the importances of McNeill’s work as theologian, as writer, and as therapist. (One of the contributions is titled “You saved My Life” this is intended to be taken quite literally). Amongst the contributors, I was already familiar with the work of Toby Johnson, Mark Jordan, Robert Goss, Sister Jeannine Gramick and Daniel Helminiak. The contributions of others has left me wanting to explore their work too.

So what is this life work of McNeill, and why should we celebrate it?

“The Church and The Homosexual”, published back in 1976, was groundbreaking. Many writers since have testified to the liberating impact it has had on their own lives, and it has become a staple in the exploding bibliographies on the subject ever since. It was originally published with the blessing and ‘imprimi potest’ of his Jesuit order, but soon attracted the displeasure of the Vatican. Ordered to refrain from publication and teaching on the subject, McNeill initially complied, and fell silent for some years. In conscience though, he felt compelled to continue to write and to speak out. Like so many others, he left the priesthood and embarked on a precarious career as writer and psychotherapist. Subsequent books included “Freedom, Glorious Freedom”, “Taking a Chance on God”, and “Both Feet Planted Firmly in Midair.”

“Sex as God Intended”

In the current book, McNeill examines systematically the treatment of sexuality, particularly in same sex relationships, and finds conclusions rather different to those usually used against us. As he and others have done before, he dismisses the old interpretation of the story of Sodom as a gross misinterpretation The sin of Sodom was not that of sexual relationships between men, but the failure to offer hospitality to guests – an important traditional obligation in a desert society. Where McNeill differs from so many other writers who have made the same point, is that he is not content to simply argue against the old ‘clobber texts’. Rather, he goes further, arguing for the positive place of sexuality in the Old Testament. Highlighting Genesis 2 (the older version) rather than the more usual creation story in Genesis 1, he shows how Eve was created because Adam needed a companion, not just a mother for his children. This balances the procreative nature of marriage, so beloved by our opponents, with that of love and companionship.

An important piece of new writing in the book is a celebration of the Song of Songs, as a scriptural basis for sex as play. He also presents evidence that this may have been written to celebrate love been men. The gender of the protagonists, though is ultimately not important. The passion and ardour expressed is sufficiently powerful that the Song can be read with any interpretation you choose – but impossible to come away with the idea that sex is only about procreation.

Similarly, in examining the New Testament, McNeill’s focus is on the positive messages for LGBT Christians, rather than a repetition of arguments against the clobber texts. He shows for instance, that in his family of choice, Jesus is associating with same sex groups rather than with ‘traditional’ family groups. His analysis of the healing of the (male) ‘servant’ of the Roman centurion shows how this servant was almost certainly a sexual partner, even lover, of the centruiion. He also draws attention to the special attentions paid to John the Evangelist as “the apostle whom Jesus loved.” It has often been noted how Jesus in the Gospels has absolutely nothing to say about homosexuality. John McNeill has shown clearly that in His actions, the Lord goes much further than words in acknowledging and accepting such relationships.

Joy and the Holy Spirit.

The joy of McNeill’s writing is always his emphasis on the positive. His recurring refrains are a quotation from St Irenaus “The glory of God is humans fully alive”, an insistence that healthy psychology and healthy theology go hand in hand (and healthy psychology requires in turn healthy sexuality), and a strong underpinning of Ignatian Spirituality, in which we find God in all things – even in persecution and exclusion by the church. You can take McNeill out of the Jesuits, but you cannot take the Jesuits out of McNeill, and I thank the Lord for that.

Central to this thinking is that the Holy Spirit is constantly at work in our lives and in the world. In a context where official teaching on sexuality out of Rome is so obviously misplaced and psychologically unhealthy, it is too easy too lose one’s spiritual bearings. McNeill reminds us that where Rome fails, the Holy Spirit is permanently at hand for guidance – we need only ask.

He goes further. In an important address to Dignity, reprinted in this book, he speculates on the active participation of the Holy Spirit in the church of today, directly intervening in a ‘Kairos Moment ‘ to restore a proper balance between what has been the unbridled power of the papacy and the rest of the Church. (I am delighted that I have secured permission from McNeill to post this address in full on this blog, here.) At the time of writing, it was prescient. Given the turmoil in the church in recent weeks, and the resistance of so many to the series of Vatican fiascoes, I suspect we may now be seeing signs of just this intervention. As evidence, just see how Benedict has been forced to react to outrage over the most recent disaster concerning the SSPX by completing a nearly complete turnaround. What at one time appeared to be a slap in the face for the spirit of Vatican II has now become a firm endorsement of it!

This book may not contain significant new writing by John McNeill, but no matter. If you have not yet had the benefit of enjoying his exuberance, this will be an excellent introduction. If you have read the earlier books, then you should still buy it, read it, and circulate it, to join the celebration.

John McNeill, thank you.

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