In the Paraclete I trust: women, the priesthood, & the patriarchy.

After discussions with angry women and after perusing the angry words of other women on the subject of the hierarchy and the possibility of ordaining women, I found myself wondering why the situation arouses so little ire in me. I have no desire to be a priest, it is true, but neither do I like to have my qualifications as a full-fledged human being called into question, nor do I like it when other women suffer such abasement. Yet I remain calm.

I understand the problem very well. Motherless from the age of nine, I grew up the daughter of one male chauvinist and the sister of another. It was recognized in the family that I was bright, a trait considered cute in a girl child. It was a quality I was expected to outgrow; I would settle for stenography, should I need at any point to cam some money; but, most important, I would smarten up enough to dumb down to get a husband. In the meantime, I was to practice serving that husband by serving my brother, and I was not to hold out for even the common courtesies of "please" and "thank you," for my brother's proper study was to learn to be a patriarch. He did.

But my father loved me, too, enough to wonder how wise it was to rear me in an ambience so unalleviatedly patriarchal. He had some doubts even about the wisdom of dumbing down, doubts nourished in his pragmatic mind by how little evidence I had given of being disposed to do so. Thus, when he learned of a girls' boarding school in a nearby town and discovered that the Benedictine nuns who ran it charged little and were ladies, he sent me there. What I found was a revelation. These women who took charge of me, these ladies, acted like gentlemen: They ran their own lives, cherished their own intelligence, and nurtured mine. No student was expected to dumb down, and those who seemed about to were mourned. How explain this paradox? How did such an institution occur not just within the context, but with the encouragement, of the patriarchal church?

The answer is that the hierarchy may be made up of patriarchs, but they are Christian patriarchs, and Christianity modifies patriarchy, when it is attended to, as it modifies every other human attitude, habit, or idea, a modification that takes place in the light of at least two aspects of the Christian Zeitgeist.

The first is the fact of Mary, a wholly feminine person without whom Christianity would not be. Compare her with the female avatars of the Greeks. Hera, wife and mother, is a shrew. Aphrodite is a pain in the neck, light-minded, frivolous, and a troublemaker. Artemis is aloof. Irene, it is true, makes peace when she can, but then there are Eris and Ate, too. The only goddess whom the Greeks both approved and esteemed is Athene, sprung full-blown from the head of Zeus, and Zeus' daughter all right--no touch of the feminine about her. Henry Higgins's paradigm is she, a woman just like a man. It might be argued that these versions of the goddess are the work of men, that women might view the goddesses differently. Indeed, I think they did, but then Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are men, too, and what they wrote exalts the feminine.

Mary fulfills the traditional roles of women. She is wife and mother, and she is a virgin. No Miltonic "he for God, and she for God in him" here. Her relationship to God is direct, unmediated, and acceded to with great-souled courage. When Mary says, "Be it done unto me according to thy word," she may be submitting herself to God, but she is putting herself in jeopardy in a patriarchal society whose ethos declared that women taken in adultery were to be stoned. A gutsy gal, indeed, for if she trusted in God, she had no really strong reason yet to trust in Joseph. And consider with Joseph her power. To her eternal glory, she said "yes" to God, but her "yes" earns that glory because she could have said "no," thereby compelling God himself to change his plans.

Then there is the nature of the marriage with Joseph. To outsiders it may have looked like any other Near Eastern marriage, but its dynamics were radically altered. Mary may have baked the bread and darned the cloaks while he planed and sawed, but her needs and the needs of her child determined the course of their lives. To his eternal glory, Joseph recognized that to be a patriarch need not mean to dominate but rather to protect, and to protect, furthermore, a woman who was in no way merely an extension of her husband, a possession to be cared for because she was his. She wasn't. She was God's, and the child to whom she was devoted and for whom she required Joseph's devotion was not his child. A patriarch who thinks at all objectively about all of that has to revise from the bottom up his socially acquired and approved idea of what it means to be a patriarch.

In Galatians 3 and 4, Saint Paul discusses another patriarchy-modifying consequence of Christ's entry into human history. I started thinking about the passages when I followed an exchange of letters in the Tablet (London) about the felicity, or lack thereof, of Paul's use of the word "son" in Galatians 4: "But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, |Abba, Father.' So that you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, an heir also through God." A gentleman, acting as lector in an English parish, wrote that the women in the congregation had need of consciousness-raising because they took no umbrage at Paul's sexist language. After trying to determine what other word Paul could have used to convey the whole of his message, I found myself entirely on the side of the women. To object to "son" is to undermine the gift of God Paul sought to clarify. No other term will do.

One must go back to Galatians 3 where Paul say's that for those who have been baptized into Christ "There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor freeman; there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ." He is talking about legal rights, particularly the right to inherit. In the ancient Middle East, Greeks had certain rights of citizenship not open to Jews, but Jews had rights as sons of Abraham not open to Greeks. In Christ, these distinctions are erased, as are the distinction between the freeman who can inherit and the slave who cannot, between the male who can and the female who cannot.

In the climactic sentence in which he expounds the richness of the Christian inheritance, could Paul have called us "sons and daughters" of God? That would be to reintroduce the difference. Middle Eastern patriarchs loved their daughters, as my father loved me, but at the time of Paul only sons could inherit. How about "children of God"? But children, simply because they are children, cannot exercise fullness of right, can inherit in form only. "Offspring"? But that is a term technical and cold, reminding us that one's heirs in law can be second cousins twice removed whom one does not know and cannot love. Only the son was a longed-for heir. He could, indeed, inherit and was, indeed, beloved. What Paul is doing is baptizing the concept of son. In no way does he diminish the role of the son. Instead he extends it to include all of us whom Christ has received in baptism--making all of us freedom "sons" who can inherit. What I experienced at Saint Scholastica's Academy in Canon City, Colorado, was Christian sonship in act. I entered the church.

That my school was not really an aberration, no matter how many Sister Ignatiuses elsewhere explained it all or inveighed against patent leather shoes, the history of the church demonstrates. Americans have always protected their innocence of history, and Catholics since Vatican 11, in being less prone than in the past to honor the saints, have tended to ignore that window of history, too. But even briefly opened it will show a long line of women--Saint Scholastica, herself, right up to Mother Seton, Mother Cabrini, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, and Mother Teresa--who in founding orders have not only worked out their own salvation but directed women, and men, too, to a new aspect of sanctity. There are other Teresas: Saint Teresa of Avila, a Doctor of the church, at whose feet sat Saint John of the Cross, and Saint Therese of Lisieux, whose little way is an approach to spirituality profoundly original, so apt in its insights that she may be declared a Doctor, too. And how about Saint Catherine of Siena, another Doctor, who, having cleared the nepotists and simonists out of Rome, rapped the knuckles of the pope in Avignon until he agreed to come back where he belonged?

Thus, I find myself in this matter echoing Julian of Norwich, another woman whose intelligence and spirituality the church nourished, as she carried Christ's message that "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." If it is God's will that women be priests, in the fullness of God's time, they will be, and they will be ordained under the aegis of the Roman hierarchy. Not because the hierarchy is made up of patriarchs, for patriarchs qua patriarchs are no more likely to rethink customs that put them in the catbird seat than are--well--matriarchs. But these men are Christians who in the light of the Holy Ghost meditate upon Mary and read Galatians. In the Paraclete I trust.

MARIAN BURKHART, a New Yorker, has taught college English and written often for Commonweal.