Pontificator hits the nail right on the head

Vivificat! A Catholic Blog of News, Commentary, and Opinion ^ | 19 July 2005 | Teófilo

[Teófilo]

Michael Liccione at Pontifications has written a right-on-the-mark critique of Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB and hed continued agitation for the ordination of women. These are the two paragraphs that struck me most:

The case [against the ordination of women] has been laid out in such magisterial documents as Inter Insigniores and supported by others before and since. The great theologians of high scholasticism—Aquinas, Bonaventura, Durandus, Duns Scotus—each considered and rejected the idea of women’s ordination, as did the now-fashionable medieval feminist Hildegard of Bingen. St. Edith Stein, a sharp philosopher and Carmelite who had studied under Edmund Husserl and was murdered by the Nazis for also being Jewish, did an extensive study on the subject and concluded with the Church. Several prominent, contemporary female converts to Catholicism who had been Protestant pastors also concur. Indeed, women’s ordination has been rejected by the Church whenever it has come up for discussion, beginning with the Gnostic period. For the sheer breadth and depth of its defense of the Magisterium, I cannot highly enough recommend Manfred Hauke’s book Women in the Priesthood?, which has remained in print ever since its publication in the mid 1990s and covers all the theologically necessary ground. As Cardinal Dulles has explained, the arguments from Scripture, tradition, the analogy of faith, and the Magisterium, while none need be seen as dispositive when taken severally, converge collectively to make the Church’s position definitive as a matter of doctrine, not discipline. John Paul ruled accordingly. So why does Chittister seem to assume that none of the above is worth acknowledging, much less refuting? Why is she content to ride a rhetorical bandwagon rather than do the hard work of engaging the massive, convergent case against women’s ordination?

Simple: it’s dat ol’ hermeneutic of suspicion at work again. She assumes that this is all about human power, not divine authority. It’s about that feminist Beelzebub: The Patriarchy. All the theological justifications for the Church’s stand, in Chittister’s view and that of countless others, form only a pathetic, crumbling ideological mask over the desperate desire of men to hang on to one of the last bastions of their power over women. And if that’s all it is, we needn’t address the arguments of the opposition; we just need to expose its seamy underside.

Commentary. I have written about Ms. Chittister—Why refer to her as "sister"? Wouldn't that be condescending and exploitative?—before and not approvingly. I think she is doing a great disservice to the Church by importing her trite postmodern themes of persecution, repression, and oppression into the inner Church dialogue, with a view of forcing a radical rupture with the past and rebuilding the Church in terms of a merely human organization. Chittister doesn't care about the Church being an object of faith, since she prefers to see the Church as just a merely human construct built to guarantee male dominance and an arena for power struggles between patriarchal exploiters and repressed women.

Mr. Liccione's article at Pontifications exposes Ms. Chittister for what she is: a defeated activist desperately looking for relevance in a world that passed her by and dared not to ask her permission.

- Read Chittister: still playing the chit at Pontifications.

[Teófilo]

All typos, grammar, and such errors are all mea culpa.

[johnb2004]

I can think of few figures more absurd than this old lady. She really should give it up, obey and perhaps seek medication.