Is the Pope Catholic? A Woman Confronts Her Church.

Manning, Joanna, Is the Pope Catholic? A Woman Confronts Her Church, Malcolm Lester Books, Toronto, 1999, 247 pages, $21.95

I owe a friend for pointing out the upside down nature of the question that forms the title of Manning's book. It's by our alignment with the teachings of the Holy Father, she said, that we gauge the degree of our Catholicity--and not the other way around as this title suggests. So the question we need to ask ourselves as we read this book is this: Is Joanna Manning Catholic?

Her book is characterized by a spirit of adolescent rebellion and hubris, when, for example, she places herself in the vanguard of those only now bringing to light hidden truths in Christianity. There is literalist thinking, when she states that "no woman can live up to Mary's role of mother and remain a virgin". She uses dated information when she refers to natural family planning as the "rhythm method" (now out of date for over 30 years).

Manning also employs coarse and inflammatory language ("if the womb makes the woman, does the penis make the priest?"); half-truths ("the church excommunicates women who've had abortions"); twisted logic ("the exaltation of Mary devalues actual women in practice"); and jargon (armed with Bible and a newspaper, she hopes to instill a "critical conscientization" in her hapless students). There is all or nothing thinking (if women can't have everything that men have, they're "worth nothing"); and puffed up outrage ("One cannot help gasping at the sheer duplicity of a man {John Paul II} who tells women that they are equal to men, but in the same breath subverts this so-called equality by stating that women are still fundamentally different from men." So?).

In theology, Manning appears to have a streak of pantheism--she refers at one point to "looking at theology and spirituality from the perspective of the earth itself." Does the earth have a perspective? Cynically ascribing the worst motives possible, she suggests the Holy See's efforts at various UN conferences to solve problems in the light of reason and the Gospel are really attempts to delay consenus on global issues out of a cowering fear of feminism. Finally, she predicts the Church's future embarrassment over rejecting women's ordination. One could go on and on.

A former nun-to-be, a mother of two sons, a longtime teacher in Toronto Catholic schools, and now founder of a "Centre for Justice, Peace and Creation," Manning stubbornly remains in the Catholic Church in spite of her many captious objections to nearly everything the Church stands for. Why does she stay in the Church? Because, she says, Catholics who leave "are too easily written off as malcontents." Does she think she isn't already perceived as a malcontent?

Manning's two central premises are: first, that the Vatican's "misogynist" teachings are directly responsible for the widespread violence against women, and second, that the Holy Father's position on a male-only priesthood is a modern day heresy with parallels to Docetism.

To justify her contention that John Paul II is behind the violence against women, Manning slyly employs the technique of guilt by association, association in this case being the juxtaposition of two unrelated facts in the same sentence. "As the Pope taught in Mulieris Dignitatem (The dignity and Vocation of Women) a year before the Montreal Massacre occurred, and as Marc Lepine believed, women belong in the home and not in Engineering faculties." Presto. Manning creates the impression of cause and effect in the minds of some unwary readers. Do we know whether Lepine even owned a copy of Mulieris dignitatem, let alone read it?

Another proof of John Paul II's endorsement of violence against women, she says, is his elevation to sainthood of Elisabetta Canori Mora. According to The Globe and Mail's promotional piece by Kathleen Byrne, (disguised as a review), Elisabetta's canonization says it all. We need look no further for evidence of the Pope's hatred of women. The fact that the Pope simply honoured a woman's free choice and lauded her fidelity--not its unfortunate consequences--appears to be beyond Manning's and her reviewer's limited ability to differentiate.

Her attacks on the Pope are everywhere. She tells us that the Pope "proposes an anthropology of total difference in the nature of men and women" (p. 67) and that he teaches that there is "no such thing as a common human nature shared equally by both men and women" (p. 101). In reality, John Paul II explicitly states that "both man and woman are human beings to an equal degree" (Letter on Women). But with Manning, "equal but different" becomes "two separate human natures for men and women." This she then tosses aside, going to the opposite extreme, with reference to an obscure scientific study suggesting that a person's sexual identity is mutable.

As for the Pope's heresy, Manning identifies John Paul II with the second century Docetists, who argued that Jesus was a spirit having only the appearance of a body and therefore only seeming to suffer and die. The parallel, alleges Manning, consists in John Paul's teachings that ordained priests must bear a "natural resemblance" to Christ, which implies, says Manning, that since Jesus did not assume a female nature and women cannot be priests, they cannot be redeemed.

In the end Manning's religion boils down to a repudiation of the Pope's theology and his authority. That being the case, there are several churches out there where Manning might feel much more at home.

Kathline Nitsch of Toronto is a mother of three children.