Duas cartas que recebemos do WOW, Women's Ordination
Worldwide
Feast of St. Augustine, 2017
Dear Pope
Francis,
I hope you
that are well and that your officials let you receive this letter. I pray for
you. Your obvious concern for the poor, for the environ-ment, and for reform in
our church is more than wonderful.
Enclosed
again are two letters about the ordination of women: the first is sent to each
member of the Council of Cardinals with whom you are soon meeting; the second
is a letter for background that I mailed to all the ordinaries of the United
States at the beginning of Lent in 2014.
When you
talked about the need for honest dialogue on the issues that we face as a
church, it was initially heartening. You kept insisting: “dialogue, dialogue,
dialogue.” In fact, you said: “dialogue fearlessly.”
Unfortunately,
however, there is not now, nor has there ever been, fearless dialogue—let alone
anything gender inclusive—on the ordination of women, even though this issue is
arguably the one most crucial.
In your
care for God’s people, can the collaboration between bishops and theologians at
Vatican II be a model? As our Supreme Bridge Builder can you empower an
up-to-date synodal dialogue now so tragically absent and so desperately needed?
How can our
church be whole if women are “not fully in the likeness of Jesus”? Not to
affirm the body-and-soul wholeness of women—leaving their integrity ignored,
disparaged, and denied—is a crushing injustice that stifles the Spirit and
gives a lie to the Good News.
Is it wrong
to hope that our ecclesial structures—crumbling in stone yet so powerfully
ensconced in patriarchal privilege—can come to embrace an intelligent view of
gender? Is it possible to see that integrity and mutuality are embodied by
grown women as well as grown men?
Pope
Francis, can the Vatican’s understanding of women finally take a centuries-leap
forward? Can justice and mercy actually wed?
Sincerely,
John J.
Shea, O.S.A.
Copy: Each
Member of the Council of Cardinals
Feast of
St. Augustine, 2017
Dear
Cardinal Parolin,
I am
writing again to you and to each of the members of the Council of Cardinals to
ask you to directly address in your September meeting the church’s ongoing
decision to see women as lacking the body-and- soul integrity to be ordained to
the priesthood. This is a critical issue of structural reform—ecclesia semper
reformanda. It radically warps our church’s identity and painfully cripples its
mission in the world.
Of all the
things that Pope Francis has said and done, the way he opened the Synod on the
Family in 2014 was perhaps the most extraor-dinary. He asked the bishops to
speak “freely,” “boldly,” and “without fear.” This exhortation is quite
shocking: he had to ask his fellow bish-ops—grown men and the church’s teachers—to
speak honestly to each other. Given a church so incredibly challenged by
dialogue, however, his exhortation was not only necessary but was, at lease at
the time, some small sign of hope.
If you
believe that the ordination of women to the priesthood is vital for the
integrity, the mutuality, the maturity, and the viability of our church, I ask
you to speak freely, boldly, and without fear.
If you know
from your own experience that any given woman is as religiously mature and able
to provide pastoral care as any given man, I ask you to speak freely, boldly,
and without fear.
If you find
there is nothing in Scripture or tradition that that pre-cludes the ordination
of women to the priesthood, I ask you to speak freely, boldly, and without
fear.
If seeing
women and men through a complementarity lens or in light of precious
patriarchal symbolism is not ad rem to women’s worthi-ness of ordination, I ask
you to speak freely, boldly, and without fear.
If you find
the 1994 letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: 1) was the fruit not of dialogue but
of doctrinal fiat; 2) was written directly in the face of—and arguably to cut
off—serious scriptural-theological dialogue actu-ally taking place; and 3) then
mandated that no dialogue—let alone any-thing fearless or gender-inclusive—is
allowed going forward, I ask you to speak freely, boldly, and without fear.
If you see
that the letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, is an historical in-terpretation of
ordination rather than one that is theological, I ask you to speak freely, boldly,
and without fear.
If the
theological explanation actually put forth by the Vatican in the 1970s and
1980s—that women cannot be ordained because they are “not fully in the likeness
of Jesus”—would be silly if it were it not so he-retical, I ask you to speak
freely, boldly, and without fear.
If seeing
women fully created in the image and likeness of God does not mean that they
are fully created in the image and likeness of Jesus—if such Trinitarian
theology is puzzling, incongruous, or totally bizarre—I ask you to speak
freely, boldly, and without fear.
If the
church’s current stance effectively undermines the Three-in-Oneness of our
God—if a huge patriarchal beam is stuck in the church’s eye, worshipping the
Father as genetically male, the Son as genetically male, and, of course, the
Holy Spirit as genetically male—I ask you to speak freely, boldly, and without
fear.
If you are
concerned about the adult faithful leaving the church in droves because women
are not worthy of priesthood—if you understand that “a patriarchal Jesus”
severs the roots of inclusion, respect, and trust in the church—I ask you to
speak freely, boldly, and without fear.
If it is
clear that the church’s opposition to the ordination of women is taken—inside
and outside the church—as affirming women’s inferiority and justifying domestic
violence, infanticide, trafficking, and many other atrocities, I ask you to
speak freely, boldly, and without fear.
If you want
bishops to work now in a synodal way with theologians and the faithful—under
the aegis of a genderless Spirit—to affirm the body-and-soul integrity of women
and to heal our stammering, stolid, and sexist church, I ask you to speak
freely, boldly, and without fear.
Cardinal
Parolin, how long will this temporizing go on? Is injustice to women to cripple
the Christian message forever? Like the reformation of inclusion in the infant
church, can you and the other bishops see, hear, and name what Pope Francis
cannot see, hear, and name? Will you speak freely? Will you dialogue boldly and
without fear?
Sincerely,
John J.
Shea, O.S.A.
Copy: Pope Francis
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