DISCIPLES in Action – Recaps and Addresses

WOMEN AS DISCIPLES THROUGHOUT CHRISTIAN HISTORY
Edward J. Greenan offers a medievalist’s perspective

I guess I’m an unlikely partner for this topic, but I was honored by Gaile’s asking. I seek to understand women as disciples from a medieval historian’s viewpoint. While researching, it became evident that men, as Christian, should be fully invested in such discipleship since it is not a question of roles but of equal sharing, not a question of “nice to do” but of justice.

Certainly it would be foolish to seek to capture 1500 years of Christianity in 15 minutes. What I would like to do is frame those years around two subtle reversals which petrified clerical attitudes: 1) the shift from “praxis” to “doxa” and 2) the indifference to female spirituality.

Recent critical historical research and literary analysis have opened new understandings of the world cultures and peoples. However, sources for the situation of women in first century Christianity are truly scarce. When we look for sources regarding women in the Christianity of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries, it becomes every more difficult. We certainly have clear indications of the radical equality of all in the words and actions of Jesus and Paul.

In his Letter to the Corinthians (11:11-12), Paul says, “Not that, in the Lord’s service, man has his place apart from woman, or woman hers apart from man; if woman takes her origin from man, man equally comes to birth through woman. And indeed all things have their origin in God.” Paul is standing the Genesis story on its head, a Biblical story that has been used to point to the inferior status of woman. Equality, not complementarity, is the point at issue here.

The Gospels, supported by the tradition of Paul’s letters, speak to a radical equality before the Creator: man and woman, slave and free, poor and rich. The four surviving canonical Gospels present to us dozens, if not hundreds, of the world’s less powerful following Jesus, many of them women. They supported Jesus and saw to his needs; and yet they are mentioned mostly in passing. Not because they were less important, but rather because this was the accepted social norm of the times. The women mentioned by name must have been major players in his ministry: Mary, his mother, Mary Magdalene, Salome, Mary of Cleophas. In some early writings the Magdalene is called “Apostola apostolorum”

During the middle and later half of the first century, Paul praises women who took a major role in the home gatherings of the early Judeo-Christians and Hellenic Christians. Both Jewish and Greek women were attracted by a message that valued them as equals with men. Many of these well-to-do women made their homes available for worship and often played a leading role in the prayer service.

In the Pauline communities there is little question that it was a community of brothers and sisters, as Paul writes in Galatians:
“There is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ.”
At the end of the Letter to the Romans, ten of the 29 prominent people addressed are female: Phoebe, Prisca, Mary, Junia, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis, Julia, Olympias, and the mother of Rufus. The active women prophets are so numerous in Paul’s letters and in Acts that we can assuredly state that women were the most prominent missionaries and leaders in earliest Christianity.

While there are numerous statements by many of the church fathers “about women”, there are very few testimonies from women themselves. Only four, Perpetua, Proba, Egeria and Eudokia, have produced writings that have survived. There are undocumented stories about virgins and martyrs, mostly of popular, local origin. We really know very little about the women named in our earliest writings.

However, in the second and third centuries, as the apologists sought to present their beliefs to the challenges of pagan scholars, the core emphasis on “praxis” began to shift to “doxa".  Preparation in philosophy and formal education was almost an exclusive male province. Leadership began to slip away from women. The new emphasis on beliefs and teachings brought with it subtle new challenges. Most of the philosophical training was Plotinus’ version of Platonism with a preference for the spirit over matter. Thus, men trained in the Platonic dualism and gradually influenced also by Manicheism and Gnosticism, showed a marked hostility to the world, matter and the body. Such disdain was translated into a devaluing of women that has continued to this day.

The other challenge was the development of a more mechanistic spirituality. Emphasis was on what one believed rather than what one did. This was a more male-centered approach than the caring and good works of the first century in which women and men had an equal share.

Distilling several centuries of social development into a few paragraphs is always dangerous. But there can be no denial that the Christianization of Hellenism became the Hellenization of Christianity. Likewise, the cultures and mores of the African, Mediterranean, and Germanic tribes brought additions and subtractions to the original message. But the sadness in the heart of this history was the fact that
the radical equality in the message of Jesus as regards women never had a chance.

In his new biography on “Augustine”, James O’Donnell states.” For the organizational idea of Christianity, the idea that Jesus left behind a community that has self-reproduced, grown, diversified, but remained in some fundamental aspects the same ------ that idea is a theological proposition, not a historical one, and can be reconciled with history only with the greatest difficulty.” (p. 192)

The very brief summary in the first half of this presentation is an attempt to outline Mr. O’Donnell’s statement. Christianity has cheated itself from experiencing the full reality of the Gospel message in many ways, but most of all in the marginalizing of women and women’s contribution to spirituality.

Documentation of women in the Dark Ages (late 5th through 10th centuries) is truly sparse. With the destruction of the Roman schools and governmental system, education and record-keeping almost disappeared. However, with the growth of feudalism we begin to see noble women taking on leadership roles.

The early and high Middle Ages, from the 11th to the 14th centuries, show us a number of great ruling ladies, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Empress Matilda, Blanche of Castile and Christine de Pisan. Such women held firm control in the absence of their husbands or even in their own right. The growth of the vernacular languages owed much to feminine influence, and this growth downplayed the importance of the Latin and church scholarship.

Within the religious world, the Church still had not succeeded in fostering the spiritual energies of women. Hildegard of Bingen, appreciating the seriousness of the situation, encouraged women to act where men had failed and encouraged female leadership. Unfortunately the hierarchy continued to mistrust women who were spiritually “restless,” suspecting them of heresy. The Dominican, Meister Eckhart, and his followers, introduced mysticism into the monasteries and convents of Germany. As this form of religious experience spread throughout Europe, it offered a form of spiritual expression challenging to the nuns and acceptable to the Church. However, it proved to be a passing phase.  The plight of religious women slipped back into a less than satisfying spiritual life, governed by a thoroughly masculine-focused theology and a morality made by men for men.

There were exceptional women who stood out in the high and late Middle Ages: Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), Hildegard of Bingen, Birgitta of Sweden(1302-1373), Julian of Norwich(1342-c.1416) Teresa of Avila, and Clare of Assisi(1194-1253). But they were exceptions; religious women were only rarely active in church politics and theology. Any interest in spiritual development for women in society was almost non-existent.

In the late Middle Ages women became major factors in the economic and social life of society. In the towns and on the farms women were essential to agricultural and industrial growth. The clerics, however, continued to portray women as “sin” without qualification. They fell back upon the tradition of Augustine and the early fathers, especially St. Jerome: “woman is the gate of the devil, the path of wickedness, …in a word a perilous object.”  This lost opportunity to resolve woman’s place in society continued to mortgage the future of Christianity and civilization as well.

An equal place for women in the Christian community is a matter of justice. Justice delayed is justice denied. We have waited almost two millennia and must not wait any longer. Promises from the hierarchy will trail off into another millennium. In practice they appear to be regressing. Richard McBrien points out in his book, “Lives of the Saints”, that the women traditionally mentioned in the Mass canon, Felicity, Perpetua, Gather, Lucy, Agnes and Anastasia, are now bracketed and therefore optional. Given the practice of most presides using the 1st Eucharistic Prayer, the names of women have effectively been obliterated from the central prayer of the Mass.

The theologian, Elizabeth Johnson, has argued that “women’s history of holiness has been largely crafted from the collective memory of the church” and that “even when they are remembered, exemplary women’s lives are interpreted as models of virtue that support the male-dominated status quo and cast women into submission.”

Meaningful action, openness and tolerance should be our demands to bring a new age of spirituality into flower. The recognition of women as equal partners with men in the mission of Jesus Christ will resound far beyond the walls of Christianity. Continued submission to an outdated patriarchal system in this decade will be our generation’s shame.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY   

Cahill, Thomas,   “Desire of the Everlasting Hills”, 1999. Doubleday,
    New York, NY.
Crossan, John Dominic,  “The Birth of Christianity”. 1996. Harper
    SanFrancisco, San Francisco, CA.
Hart, C. and Bishop, J., “Hildegard of Bingen: Scrivas”. 1990
 (English Translation), Paulist Press,  New York, NY.   
Heer, Friedrich, “The Medieval World, 1961. New American Library
    (A Mentor Book), New York, NY.
Kung, Hans,  “Great Christian Thinkers”, 1994. The Continuum Publishing
    Company,  New York, NY.
__________,  “ Christianity.” 1995 (English edition). The Continuum
    Publishing Company, New York, NY.
__________,  “The Catholic Church—A short history.” 2001. The Modern
    Library, New York, NY.
McBrien, Richard P., “Lives of the Saints”, 2001. HarperSanFrancisco,
    San Francisco, CA.
O’Donnell, James, “Augustine: A New Biography”, 2005. HarperCollins,
    Publisher,  New York, NY.
Swan, Laura, “The Forgotten Desert Mothers”, 2001. The Paulist Press,
    Mahwah, NJ

NATIONAL Representative Council Meeting October 2007 in Providence RI
The following recap was prepared by the VOTF National Representative Council Steering Committee and submitted by Steering Committee member Sheila Peiffer

Twenty-five of the twenty-six members of the National Representative Council participated in their semi-annual meeting in Providence, Rhode Island during the weekend of October 19-21. The meeting was held on Friday before the National VOTF Convention began and on Sunday morning following the close of the convention program on Saturday night.

The Council had a full agenda to squeeze into an abbreviated meeting time.  First on the agenda was a report from the newly constituted “Roles and Authority Committee”; this committee consists of members from each of the governing bodies of VOTF, coming together to discuss methods of collaboration and communication.  The representatives from the Council are Bill Culleton, Kris Ward and Ed Wilson.  Elia Marnik and Bill Casey represent the BOT and Mary Pat Fox and Gaile Pohlhaus are participating for the officers.  The report indicated that the committee is proceeding by identifying expectations and beginning the process of clarifying how policy is made and approved.  More reports will be forthcoming soon from this very important committee.

Next, the Council moved into discussion of the National/Local Resolution which addresses the balance of authority between local affiliates and the National VOTF office when locally significant events occur. This resolution has been under consideration since the beginning of the year.  The Council has discussed it online and at the Spring meeting, sought input from active affiliates around the country and, most recently, referred the resolution to its Affiliate Development Committee according to the Council’s Operating Procedures.  The Committee decided that the resolution needs substantial amendment in order to form a policy for VOTF.  It sent an interim report indicating the principles upon which National should act in relation to matters of both National and local concern.  After extensive comment, the Council voted at this meeting, 21-2, not to take a vote on the proposal yet, leaving the matter in the Committee’s hands for further development.

Next, Dan Bartley presented a proposal from the Membership Growth Committee to begin “Stage One” in the process of sponsoring a Lay Synod or Council, where VOTF will reach out to the broad Catholic community to establish a Council Planning Committee to determine the broad parameters for, and the feasibility of, calling a Council.  The NRC voted unanimously to support establishing an exploratory committee to formulate a draft outline and investigate some of the foundational challenges surrounding this issue.  Anyone interested in serving on this Stage One Committee can contact Dan at Dan@odyne.com.

The new VOTF Executive Director, Donna Doucette, presented a report on her first few weeks on the job.  She has initiated a series of conference calls with affiliate leaders all around the country and is compiling and acting on the information gathered.  Working Group leaders are also being consulted.  Michael Rafferty, the part-time Development Director, assisted in giving the financial picture of VOTF, which is improving.  The Development Committee has been concentrating on soliciting major gifts and also has experimented with some new direct mail lists.  The Leadership Giving Program, whereby all VOTF leaders are being asked to make a personally meaningful donation to the organization, has been unanimously endorsed.
 
The last issue of the day on Friday was a proposal to have VOTF call for a church-wide discussion of the role of women in the church.  Members debated whether or not the resolution should be sent out to the membership for comment.  The vote was 16-8 in favor of submitting this resolution to the membership for comment, after further consultation as appropriate with the Officers and the BOT.

On the final morning of the NRC meeting, the Council heard reports from many aspects of VOTF.  Bill Casey, the Chair of the BOT, described the upcoming election procedure.  Susan Vogt summarized the results of the Diocesan Surveys on Finance, Governance and Child Protection that were sponsored by the Convocation Implementation Team.  Thirty-four diocesan reports were received and the team is hoping to add more in an ongoing attempt to monitor openness and accountability around the country.  Ron DuBois and Dan Bartley, the two NRC representatives on the Board of Trustees, talked about the work of the Board, particularly in its Committee constituency.  John Ryan, Chair of the National Working Group to Support Priests of Integrity:  Goal 2 reported on the ongoing implementation of the Working Group’s resolution to call for an examination of the priesthood and the role that celibacy plays.  Jane Merchant presented a template for a more effective method of communicating the identity of VOTF.  She is hoping to encourage a more consistent and clear image for the organization.
 
The Council closed by evaluating this meeting, beginning the plans for the next meeting in Philadelphia on April 25-27, 2008, and joining together in prayer.