The women in my life: an intuition about the celibate male priesthood.

Caution to the reader: This is not going to be an argument either for or against the ordination of women, nor, for that matter, the ordination of men. But something came to me, as follows.

I don't know exactly when it came. What I do know is this: it had not yet come to me on Tuesday, May 12, and it was quietly sitting in a shadowy corner of my mind in the late afternoon of Wednesday, May 13. It obviously had not been a case of breaking and entering; when I noticed it, it felt more like a drop of water falling on a sponge, or a quiet guest having come in through the back door, for a visit.

What I got to entertain was an intuition, and an unlikely one to boot. It was not a "concept" I had "developed." So I knew I was not master of the situation. Yet I must entertain it, for all it said was: "Think again." So here I go - thinking, not taking sides.

In the early seventies, I had finally gotten over my worst fears of women. In all probability, I had developed those fears at least partly under the influence of notable absences. Thus, not until I began my university education in Amsterdam in 1954, at the age of twenty-four, with six years of pre-Vatican but exciting Jesuitry under my belt, did I have a woman teacher. One. And she has remained the only one - a fact most Americans find nearly impossible to imagine. She taught me first- and second-year English: grammar, syntax, pronunciation, phonetics, idiom, and conversation. Previous to that, all my professors in classics, art history, and the various philosophical disciplines had been Jesuit priests. Before I entered the order, all my gymnasium teachers (several of whom had doctorates and two of whom became university professors of distinction) had been men; even my grade-school teachers had been men; I was educated by Immaculate Conception brothers, laymen, and Jesuit priests. Intellectually as well as factually, I was educated in a male world. The only women in the classroom I can recall befell us in grade school: the nurse who paid her annual visit to check us for eyesight and our heads for lice, and the school physician who discovered I had an inguinal hernia when I was eleven, just young enough to be an acceptable surgery patient at the Children's Hospital in The Hague, where the wards were mixed.

By contrast, the women in my life till I was forty were numerous; the problem was that almost all of them (a clutch of aunts and cousins were the exception) were distant. They were the young university women who walked into and out of the corners of my eyes, discouraged by my black suit and Roman collar. Long before that, there had been the countless girls who became the objects of my teen-age attention; three or four got to feel not just my interest but also my hands - a dangerous thing to do except under cover of darkness, for the Jesuits had a way of letting on that you were either a student at Aloysius College or seen in female company. (Once, when I was seventeen, the assistant principal summoned me, inquiring darkly about the young woman with the New Look flowery below-the-knee dress in whose company I "had been seen" at a piano recital in Diligentia Hall.) With the wisdom of age, I now realize that at home, for about six years, I had a strained relationship with my sister, five years younger than myself - something that upset my father. Last but far from least, there was my mother: intense, unconventional, with seven years of education, strong views on most things, a lifelong appetite for reading, and a fierce love of the church.

Not until I was nearly forty did I actually get to meet women, most of them undergraduates. For years, the encounters were clumsy and often laden with ambiguity. But I did learn, especially from mature women who were both affectionate and unafraid. Yet not until I was fifty-seven did I meet a woman colleague without fear (expectation?) of sexual, or at least erotic, involvement. Now, at the age of sixty-eight, I have five very close women friends (yes, K., G., J., M., W., I mean you, of course) who have come to "love me well" (as W. likes to put it) and whom I, too, have come to "love well." By "well," I mean "spirit, soul, and body, blamelessly" (1 Thess. 5:23). What a splendid handful. Praise be to God for integrated love. I am making this confession as an adult and as an intensely happy man of God.

But what is equally striking is that I now have literally dozens of women friends, including married women, who would make terrific, competent, loving priests. (Actually, some of them clearly want to be priests.) They are about as numerous as the dozens of men I know and love, married and unmarried, who are making/could make/would make/will make competent, mature, loving priests. All of them are (that is, they are becoming, some faster than others) humane lovers - loyal and deep, in God, in Christ, in the Spirit. A deep (if sometimes painful) satisfaction, this.

Now wait a minute, where did all this stuff come from? I started this piece with a reference to women's ordination and instead I am confessing to my personal history with women (albeit without the less virtuous details, most of which have been graciously turned, over time, into sources of wisdom and emblems of God's creative mercy). I do know the answer to that question: wherever sexual differentiation and attraction arise, life turns stressful. Such elemental facts will raise the most fundamental human issues: issues of faith, hope, love, and theology. No wonder the final editor of Genesis puts sexual differentiation cheek by jowl with God: "And God created man in his own image; in God's image he created him; man and woman he created them" (Gen. 1:27). An all-male priesthood is such a stressful situation, and the all-male celibate priesthood of which I have been part for thirty-five years even more. So it is not all that surprising that I just found myself jumping straight from women's ordination to the story of my growth toward maturity in regard to women.

Let me get back to the credentials, though. As early as August 1974, I got involved in the discussion of the ordination of eleven women by retired Episcopal Bishop Edward R. Welles. That September I read a paper at the annual meeting of the North American Academy of Ecumenists, in which I disagreed, reluctantly, with Bishop Arthur Vogel, at whose urging the Episcopal bishops had declared the ordination of the "Philadelphia Eleven" null and void. The late George Cornell of Associated Press had kindly helped me prepare a statement for the press to make sure that my views would be reported correctly. I had no taste for a public fight, for the entertainment of the American public-at-large, between the Episcopal bishop of Kansas City, Missouri, and a Dutch-born Jesuit. But here I was, in the thick of it: fairly soon my paper appeared in a theological journal, followed by a piece in a Swiss opinion journal run by Jesuits and an essay in a collection on women's ordination put together by two Episcopalians. In one of these pieces, I warned, ominously, that "both women and men could lose their integrity by seeking ordination."

Theologically, where do I stand on the issue? In 1969, the Dutch Jesuit Haye van der Meer argued in his doctoral dissertation (published in 1973 as Women Priests in the Catholic Church?) that the current theological arguments fail to clinch the case against the ordination of women. Haye has long recanted this position. I still hold to it. In spite of this, I have never seen fit to join other theologians in positively supporting, let alone advocating, the ordination of women. Still, I have assured one Anglican bishop who voted in favor of women's ordination at Lambeth that I could see the force of his arguments. Finally, I did decide that the issue as raised in the U.S. Catholic church today distracted from even more central matters of faith; accordingly, up to now I have respected, if with some inner reluctance, Pope John Paul II's urgent call for a moratorium.

Then, last May, I got this visit from an unexpected "guest." What is it? What does it mean?

This is what came to me: sacraments are both real and provisional. We profess "one baptism for the forgiveness of sins," but that eschatological affirmation must remind us that baptism in water, while really making us children of God only puts us on the way to the eschaton. We really receive the gift of the Spirit, but as a pledge, not a consummation. The Lord Jesus is "truly, really, and substantially" present in the Eucharist; yet he is present as the Absent One, calling us to growth in unity in love by the giving of our lives, feeding us as we travel, for the time being; besides, only select elements of the cosmos itself - bread and wine, "the work of human hands" - are transformed, as Irenaeus wrote eighteen hundred years ago. So Mass is neither kingdom come nor the new heaven and the new earth in full actuality. We really receive God's forgiveness in the sacrament of penance, yet we know from experience that we will have reason to return, often with better grounds for compunction as our consciences get more refined; thus we learn how to join Jesus in willingly taking responsibility for the sins of others. Those among us who are married genuinely embody the mutual love of Christ and the church, but married people are reminded every day that promises are not predictions; Christian marriage is a school of perfect love, not an achieved state of eschatological perfection. And just what does the anointing of the sick symbolize and embody? Return to health? Readiness for the last breath? Assurance of God's mercy in front of the dark portal of death? In the world of sacramentality it's all very real, but also very provisional. "Sacraments are for the interim, like the church itself," my teacher Pieter Smulders used to repeat back in the sixties. While indelibly marked by God's image, God's people travel precariously, supported by holy signs and symbols, en route to that holiest moment: the vision of God face-to-face.

So why should we expect the sacrament of orders to be different? Paul writes to the Galatians, who could use a good dose of eschatological freedom: "All of you who have been plunged into Christ have been invested with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor freeborn. There are no male and female. For you are all one person in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:27-28). Now if this were actually accomplished, that would be kingdom come. But the fact is: while truly, really, and substantially saved from the powers that be, from prejudice racial and cultural, and from the stress of sexual differentiation and attraction, the church is church: sacrament of the kingdom, not kingdom come. My unexpected visitor's question was: "Could it be that the sacrament of orders is lopsided precisely because it is a sacrament?"

Not long ago I heard Sarah Coakley, of Harvard Divinity School, say: "The question is, how is the love we know from sexual differentiation and attraction related to the love of God?" Yes, if there were nothing more to eros than sociopolitical influence, equality before the law, human justice, and ethical resolve, where would human intimacy's transparency toward the God of love be? Surely the dramatic relationships involved in human love cannot be this pedestrian? Why otherwise keep the Song of Songs in the canon of Scripture? Would we not be entertaining an illusion if we believed that the joys and the vicissitudes of incarnate love are a matter of this life alone, and have nothing to do with the God of love?

But why ordain men and not women? Now here the theological ice is getting considerably thinner. Walter Ong's book Fighting for Life (1981) occurs to me. He explains that even before they are born, men have a far more precarious physiological and emotional balance than women do; they are born "agonistic," not consensual or convivial. Also, from my friend and colleague Jim Walter, a capable bioethicist, I have learned the following: Upon fertilization, the nucleus of the fertilized ovum already contains the pre-embryo's own distinctive genetic code, but the fertilized ovum's effective life is still dominated by the massive presence of the ovum's extranuclear materials, which are maternal and hence female. Only after about two weeks does a critical move occur: the pre-embryo's own genetic code gets the better of the maternal materials and begins to direct the embryo's development, including (depending on the presence or absence of the Y-chromosome) its development as male or female. Sexual differentiation, in other words, does not occur until the ovum's influence ceases to be dominant; all of us, whether male or female, begin our lives in a female mode. Accordingly, being born male means: having faced a critical modification in the pre-embryonic phase of life. That is practically the opposite of what Aristotle and Aquinas taught, that is, that women are men who have suffered a developmental mishap. Could it be that they could think this way because they were shaped by a "patriarchal" world, in which men are forever ready to defend themselves (and women and children, of course) by force, and to take after women and dominate them at least partly to reassure and gratify their nervous selves? Who knows?

In any case, the Catholic church has thus far considered only men valid subjects of the sacrament of orders, and Pope John Paul II has insisted that there is more than custom here. Paul VI once wrote that theologians must try to find arguments in support of magisterial teaching, and I have no reason to assume he implied that in so doing we had to trade in intellectual integrity for toadyism. In other words, in the matter of ordination, I must try to interpret the arrangement we have before proposing the inclusion of women in the ministry.

So here I go. Factually, the sacrament of orders is traditionally limited to men. If I am to make theological sense of this, I find myself appealing to the "already" and the "not yet" typical in the sacramental order as a whole. Obviously, this is no argument either for or against the ordination of women (or, for that matter, of men). It is an acceptance of the proposition that if orders is sacramental, there is an a priori plausibility of its bearing marks of provisionality. In Christ, men and women are really one, but for the time being the struggles and incoherences that come with sexual differentiation are still with us, as Saint Paul well saw (witness more than one passage in the first letter to the Corinthians).

Two final questions have occurred to me. The first is historical. The eminent medievalist Sir Richard Southern, in The Making of the Middle Ages and Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, is only one of many historians who have shown that as early as the sixth and seventh centuries, bishops and abbots were becoming part of the emergent administrative structure of the West; in due course, they became "peers" - peers, that is, of the barons and counts and viscounts and dukes and kings, just as the pope came to be regarded as the peer of the emperor (often to the disquiet of both). Needless to say, both the practice of the "spiritual sword" being wielded by the secular arm and the theories to justify the practice helped obscure the fact that the sacrament of orders was sacramental and not executive, let alone definitive. Small wonder the sacrament of orders became widely as well as dangerously associated with masculinity understood as power (a development unknown in the Oriental churches forced to live under Muslim domination). No wonder either that within a few hundred years, legions of disenchanted Christians in the West, including the Franciscan spirituales and the women who became known, in the late thirteenth century, as beguines, began to find the church unspiritual and the clergy secular and domineering. It is fair to suggest that preoccupation with power and jurisdiction has bedeviled the ordained ministry to this day. Accordingly, everything should be attempted to turn this around (but discerningly please, not with a vengeance).

So this is what I make of what came to me, like a thief in the night. End of confession. That is to say, an end, sort of.

Any conclusions? First off, Viagra is one of the last things we need on the way to mature masculinity. What we do need is Jesus' style of masculinity, and his theme was service, not male dominance or performance. Obviously, too, he was neither afraid of women nor embarrassed by their affection. Unconventional as he was, he was regularly seen in the company of women; he (along with his male disciples) even accepted the care of women "who used to put themselves at their service, out of their own means" (Luke 8:3). To the consternation of his uncomprehending disciples (who by then should have known better), he even allowed one such woman to embarrass him with far too expensive a gift, in far too maudlin a mood, a mere three days before his arrest and execution. Now she may well have been a woman of poor taste (and who knows, she may have had a bit of a past as well), but she loved; so, like Jesus himself, she sensed that he was a dead man, as good as buried. And Jesus made this scene of fond abandon part of the gospel, "in memory of her" (Mark 14:3-9; see Luke 7:36-50).

Could it be that part of the sacramental structure of orders is: for men to portray Jesus Christ by learning to understand and even practice the Christian things that women are congenitally made (as well as socially conditioned, often inexcusably) to understand and practice: emptying themselves and caring and surviving and giving life and letting themselves be sucked dry, with a toughness that is not male, either congenitally or by dint of social pressure? And, of course, by helping demonstrate that the idea of the kingdom is not for women to be nice, but to take their rightful place in the body of Christ and in the ministries that support it? That ordination must teach us male priests how to grow in patience, gentle firmness, endurance, and kindness, so as to anticipate, in imperfect but symbolic deed and in facing frequent but temporary distress, the things that truly are the last things? That this must happen by us men priests learning how to love men, women, and children, as well as the aged and the marginal of every stripe; and to love them "well"? And even as they count on the Holy Spirit they have received, can they count on us, too, who by virtue of imposition of hands are authorized, by that same Spirit, to exercise oversight, not as if we were being forced to do it, but willingly, God's way, and not out of a vulgar appetite for gain, but eagerly, not as lords over our charges, but as examples to the flock (see 1 Peter 5:2-3)? Could ordained ministry mean this: men encouraged and indeed ordained to live and act with inner freedom and authority, not like unbridled (if often well-intentioned) males, but in the Spirit, spending themselves by helping a whole community pray, care, and teach, in persona Christi?

Frans Jozef van Beeck, S.J. is senior professor of theology at Loyola University (Chicago), and author of the multivolume systemic theology, God Encountered (Liturgical Press).