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Australian Catholic Bishops Capitulate to Feminists
Social Justice Statement on women’s participation in the Church released with dubious importance attached to politically-correct conclusions.
By Michael Gilchrist
The failure in 1992 of the American bishops’ attempt to produce a pastoral letter on the role of women in the Catholic Church did not deter Australia’s bishops from embarking on a similar project in 1996. The US bishops, after four drafts and 13 years of consultations with 75,000 Catholic women, could not provide the needed majority, so the project was mercifully dropped.
In Australia, however, despite a similar polarization between orthodox and liberal Catholic women, the project has proceeded on schedule. Just over 12 months after the official launch of the 500-page report, Woman and Man: One in Christ Jesus on August 18, 1999 [see CWR, October 1999], responses to that report’s recommendations were set out in the Australian bishops’ annual Social Justice Statement, publicly released on September 13, 2000.
Explaining this move, the document’s authors declared, “It is particularly appropriate . . . for the Social Justice Sunday Statement for the Year of Jubilee to address issues concerning women in the Church, and to announce the actions that the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference has decided to undertake in response to the research report Woman and Man: One in Christ Jesus.”
Perhaps a consensus on such a divisive topic was easier to secure in the smaller Australian bishops’ conference, with opposition less easy to mount by those bishops with misgivings about the wisdom of the project. And perhaps Australia’s feminist elites are relatively better placed to exert influence than their US sisters. Indeed, much of the statement reads, in parts, as if written by the same feminist religious who instigated the project—as it may well have been. The bishops—notably those supporting the feminist agenda—have obligingly rubber-stamped the document.
The Social Justice Statement capped almost four years of ambitious, expensive research, which many Catholics have regarded as a needless waste of time and money, given other far greater priorities—notably those embodied in the Statement of Conclusions. This statement—agreed to by Australia’s bishops and the Holy See almost two years ago—constituted a clear blueprint for reform, if the Church in Australia was to survive far into the 21st century in any recognizably Catholic form. However, at that point, the women’s participation project was already well under way and no doubt had to be seen through, even if its agenda differed markedly from that of the Statement of Conclusions.
This project’s suspect pedigree was of particular concern, given that it was the brainchild of the Church’s feminist elites—principally from within the dissenting ranks of the Australian Conference of Leaders of Religious Institutes—who already possessed considerable power and influence. This was evidenced by the fact that they were able to talk the bishops into supporting such a dubious project in the first place. Their talk of “exclusion” and “sexism”, therefore, had a decidedly hollow ring.
In fact, many Australian Catholics wondered whether any specific cases of highly-qualified women barred from positions canonically open to them simply on the basis of their gender could be cited today.
Everywhere a Catholic looks, women are visibly exercising responsibilities at all levels of the Church’s life, barring the priesthood and hierarchy: editors of Catholic papers, directors of Catholic Education Offices, professors at seminaries and universities, facilitators of “renewal” programs — the list is almost endless. And the female presence continues to increase.
A revolution of rising expectations
If anything, it is men who find themselves increasingly marginalized: the more parishes became feminized—with around two-thirds of Mass attendees now women—the more men seemed to stay away. As altar girls materialize in greater numbers, so have altar boys vanished from many sanctuaries.
Of more urgency and relevance than any women’s document might be some affirmative action to bring back more males into the life of the Church and certain areas of decision-making, such as parish liturgies.
Meanwhile, much of the present Social Justice Statement—and its style of language—has an unmistakable feminist “newchurch” character.
Just as the Woman and Man report inflated the complaints of an unhappy, dissenting minority at the expense of a generally satisfied majority of orthodox Mass-goers, so does the Social Justice Statement in turn inflate its responses to match those inflated complaints. It might concede that not all Catholic women surveyed found barriers to their participation in the Church, but it fails to mention that it was a large majority who found no such barriers, according to the Catholic Church Life Survey—the one statistically valid part of the whole research project.
The bishops might make clear they do not support any calls for women priests or changes to Catholic moral teachings, but they seem at pains to set up a kind of equivalence between such outright dissent and the views of those supposedly out of tune with Vatican II:
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Bishops cannot and would not wish to change the teaching of the Church on any matter despite the difficulty some respondents have had with some elements of the Church’s teaching. Likewise they cannot reverse the changes in the Church asked of us by the Second Vatican Council or turn away from its path, to satisfy the concerns of others.
The role of mothers in the Church is accorded token acknowledgement—”We wish to draw attention to the significant role that mothers play in the life and mission of the Church and society, lest their participation be taken for granted or considered of less value than other forms of participation”—before the document proceeds with a lengthy series of policy decisions, most of them calculated to satisfy the concerns of the minority of feminists and dissenters, rather than those of the majority of mainstream orthodox Catholic women.
A “better balance” of men and women —and clergy, religious, and lay people—”in leadership, professional, advisory roles” is first called for. But what if men are already in a minority in some of these areas? Will that “balance” work in the opposite direction through affirmative action?
The document then commits the Church to fostering research in such areas as “contemporary ecclesiologies and their theological, catechetical and pastoral implications, especially for the participation of women in the church”—the term “contemporary ecclesiologies” usually covering assorted dubious interpretations of Catholic teaching.
Such “research” hardly needs further encouragement, given the present situation in some Australian theology institutes, colleges, and seminaries.
The same could be said of the call for research into “ministry in the Church and in particular the role of lay faithful and especially women in ecclesial ministries, from the scriptural, historical, theological, liturgical, sociological, and canonical perspectives.”
Dubious plans
The aspirations of those feminists who set the project in motion, are again endorsed with a commitment by the Bishops’ Committee for the Liturgy to look into “the possibility of providing at the national level guidelines and education, as well as appropriate resources, to provide rituals to be used in the absence of a priest in the prison and hospital apostolates”; the “provision of guidelines, materials and resources directed to integrating elements of indigenous [aboriginal] culture into the celebration of the liturgy”; “the drawing up of guidelines concerning the use of inclusive language in the liturgy, prayer, pastoral, and social life of the Church”; and “the establishment of guidelines to assist with the understanding and implementation of Canons 766 and 767 concerning lay preaching.”
Given that aborigines represent less than two percent of the national population (and less still of the Catholic population), and that “inculturation” has been frequently linked to liturgical abuses, the above encouragement is ill-advised, not to say irrelevant, as is the question of “inclusive language,” which has long been a bone of contention for the Holy See. Only three percent of those surveyed in the Catholic Church Life Survey considered inclusive language an “issue,” while the views of aboriginal women constituted but a minute part of the Woman and Man report.
Next there is a pledge to “draw up policies of care to respond to the pain of people and groups of people within the Church who are struggling with the implications of Church teaching” on the question of divorce and remarriage, and to provide “guidelines to assist in the pastoral care of those who are finding difficulty in understanding and accepting the Church’s teaching on the restriction of ordination to males” as well as “appropriate pastoral statements concerning Catholic teaching on such areas as sexuality, marriage, and family planning.”
That such initiatives are needed at all merely confirms the doctrinal weaknesses in the Church’s educational institutions, earlier noted in the Statement of Conclusions. And episcopal sympathy for the feelings of such dissenters rarely extends to orthodox Catholics when they express concern about public dissent, liturgical abuses, or defective catechetics in Catholic schools.
Administrative bodies and executive positions to be set up for implementing the plethora of policy decisions listed in the Social Justice Statement are then described in some detail, while the bulk of the document’s remaining recommendations maintain the feminist, politically-correct orientation. The Church’s already top-heavy bureaucracy is set to enlarge further.
Re-education of “clergy, religious, and lay people” so that they “exercise their ministries in a more collaborative way” is called for, while bishops are to “request each theological institute or faculty and adult education center in Australia to explore the theological and pastoral implications of the [Woman and Man] report, for example through public lectures, faculty seminars, and published papers.”
Increasing use of parish Pastoral Associates and the employment of more lay women in this capacity is also urged. And despite the already noted very small number of aboriginal Catholics, a good deal of space is allocated to recommendations for meeting their perceived needs, e.g., training priests to “develop further understanding, both through studies and experience, of Australian indigenous spirituality, culture, and history”; a call for “dioceses, parishes, and all Catholic organizations” to “recognize and promote equality and inclusivity for Australia’s indigenous peoples”; the need to ensure “that Australian indigenous women be included as part of decision-making, especially in judgments and decisions which affect them”; and to “investigate more employment opportunities for Australian indigenous women in a range of roles and tasks in the Church.”
Similar mention of “inclusivity” as regards other larger racial and ethnic groups in the Church—Vietnamese, Maltese, Poles, Italians, etc.—is nowhere to be seen in the document.
The statement concludes by exhorting bishops and other responsible people to ensure “that women’s needs in relation to participation in the Church be made a financial priority for the Church,” that “when pointing to the signs of the times they acknowledge positive developments in the role and status of women,” and that “greater attention be given to the education of clergy, religious, and laity towards attitudinal change in recognizing equal value, equal rights of women and men within the lay faithful of the Church.”
Perhaps, now that the Australian bishops have got this ill-conceived project out of the way, they may now devote more of their energies to the real issues affecting the local Church—as set out in the Statement of Conclusions. After almost two years, there has been little sign that more than a handful of Australia’s bishops are serious about implementing this document’s vastly more important agenda.
If a small fraction of the effort, paperwork, and expense that went into the women’s participation project is directed towards implementing the Statement of Conclusions, the Church in Australia may yet face the future with confidence.
Michael Gilchrist is the managing editor of the Australian Catholic magazine AD2000.
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