Breaking the Silence

In the 1837 folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Hans Christian Andersen leaves it to the voice of a small child to make the pertinent observation: “But he doesn’t have anything on!”

With his radical project of ecclesial synodality Pope Francis has gifted the Church with free and open speech. Time and again he has urged us to exercise parrhesia, to say what we honestly feel and think, always combined with a desire to listen with generosity and patience (hypomene) to those with whom we disagree. His synodal convenor, Cardinal Mario Grech, has urged us to break the silence. Francis does this always with a view  to renew and reform our church in order that it can engage more credibly in the mission of bringing hope to our wounded world and cosmos, rather than to become ensnared in self-referential debate.

In a piece in the Irish monthly The Furrow, I wrote about Pope Francis’ recent contribution to the debate about the ordination of women in America Magazine. You will recall Francis drew on the reflections of Hans Urs von Balthasar concerning the Petrine and Marian principles to show how it was theologically inappropriate, and indeed impossible, for women to aspire to priesthood (the diaconate was not directly addressed).

With my own background of doctoral studies in von Balthasar, I queried whether his genial intuition concerning the equality-in-difference between men and women could bear the weight of the kind of essentialist, ontological separation it acquires in his own theology, and in the papal application of it, concerning the ordination of women. I also acknowledged our debt to Pope Francis in speaking out in this kind of way, true to his own synodal instincts. Rather than staying silent, and clouding the justification for the continuing ban on female ordination in opaque mystification, he made an attempt to explain and to persuade.

However, it is unlikely that too many will in fact have been persuaded by von Balthasar’s rather arbitrary and idiosyncratic use of symbolic discourse around the issue of female ordination. His position is a much-critiqued, minority opinion among the wider theological community.

How to proceed, then, on this controverted issue? I draw on the stimulating contributions already published on this blog over the years, and, in particular, from the more recent contributions of Michelle Loris, Tina Beattie, and Myroslaw Tataryn. The deeply Trinitarian-based project of synodality has at its core the discernment of the “sense of faith of the faithful.” One obvious way of proceeding at this point is for us all—Pope, bishops, priests, the faithful—to invite those women who experience a vocational call to ordained ministry to tell their stories (in the way that abused people or people with various sexual orientations have been encouraged to do, to good effect).

Many such women will, understandably, be hesitant to come forward: in the past they have suffered great pain by being silenced in a pretty brutal way. But it is becoming more obvious that Pope Francis has significantly changed our ecclesial culture, that openness is prized, that peripheral voices are increasingly made to feel welcome. And, after all, it was not so much theological argument as the witness of experience that allowed that first Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) to move to a decision on the much more thorny issue of Gentile inclusion that faced the early church and threatened to divide and fragment it.

The other obvious way to proceed—as argued for many years by another contributor from this parish, Phyllis Zagano—is for some urgency to be shown around the introduction of the diaconate for women. This is clearly an issue around which the Document for the Continental Stage of the synod is open. I see it as both a need in itself and as a preparatory way to aid the Catholic imagination to become accustomed to the hopefully eventual priestly ordination of women.

Along the way all this will require theological revision (see the 2014 document of the International Theological Commission on the Sense of Faith in the Life of the Church, n 84). In the end it is not so much theories around complementarity (a version of which is to be found in von Balthasar’s Petrine and Marian principles) or representation (in persona Christi) that are crucial here, but rather the strong affirmation in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994) that the Church does not consider it has the authority to ordain women. This—and the claimed “definitive” status of this document—would require further theological scrutiny, not least in the context of the provisional judgment of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1976 that this was not a question that could be determined by Scripture alone.

I write in Eastertide, at a time when we hear of Peter and John running to the tomb, having listened to the women. So, by all means let us exercise prudence and discern wisely, but let us do so with urgency, always in the context of a resurrection people, open to the God of Surprises, who want to be part of a church which values the dignity of all its members. A credible church is important if the Christian witness of hope is to be understood in our needy world.

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Gerry O’Hanlon is an Irish Jesuit theologian and author.