Dr. Mary T. Malone is the author of Women and Christianity: The First Thousand Years (Volume 1). She is a former professor of Theology at the Toronto School of Theology, and of Religious Studies at St.Jerome's University and the University of Waterloo. She now lives in Ireland.
Her most recent book Women and Christianity: From 1000 to The Reformation (Volume II) was released this May in North America. I met Malone while she was staying in Toronto to discuss her new book, and other issues connected to the Church and spirituality.
Gerry McCarthy: In your chapter on "Beguine Spirituality" you write: "It remains fascinating to the historian, how movements begun by women are co-opted by men and the women become, for history, part of the followers of the 'great man' while the truth is entirely the opposite." Reading the book I found this to be true. Why do you think there are so many blind-spots when it comes to understanding the history of Christianity?
Mary Malone: When I was teaching my students, I use to start off every class by talking about their effective historical consciousness. Everybody has a kind of potted version of how Christianity and Catholic Christianity got going. "Jesus came and he went around doing good. Then he chose twelve men. Then they ordained twelve men. There were a few little things here and there. But we all got the better of them, and the Holy Spirit moved the Church and all the Popes made the right decisions." That's how we've been formed: that we're progressing.
It seems to me what we've done is only looked at the holy history: God working in the Church. And it's boring, because God always wins so you don't really have to get emotionally involved in the story. Because if God is running the show, then he chooses (and it's always a 'he') the right Popes, Emperors, and it's all going to work out in the end. From the historian's point of view, what has been omitted is conflict. It's conflict which makes history interesting.
GM: There is a point in the book where you talk about the nuns who braved the horrors of the Black Plague by nursing the sick at the Hotel Dieu in Paris. Isn't this another part the history of Christianity that's forgotten?
MM: It seems to me that the pastoral work of the Church -the caring for the sick and the looking after the plague victims in hospitals-they (the institution) weren't interested in that. The pastoral dimension was not important, and it was women who were doing that. The history of hospitals, for example, goes back a long way. Most of the other stories of the plague are that people were boarded up in their homes, and the houses were set on fire. But there were women who risked their lives all during that time.
So there is that history of pastoral work, education, teaching women to read, and helping women read the Gospels in the vernacular eventually. Because these things were condemned -they were not on the institutional agenda-- they just disappeared from history. Certainly it disappeared from our consciousness. We say things like: "the disciples got into the boat with Jesus." Well, who's in the boat? Our consciousness has written "men only." But there were women followers of Jesus. So it's quite possible women were in the boat. This is what I mean when I talk about cleansing our images and consciousness.
It's difficult for me to force myself to cleanse my consciousness, because I was trained in the old way of doing history by some of the best historians around. But I want to see the Church through the eyes of women.
GM: In the chapter "Women on the Edge" you write: "Despite the violence of the time, the memory of church-sponsored violence continues to be profoundly offensive. The established fact that women were by and large the vast majority of the victims, raises many questions in light of the persistence, to this day, of many of the medieval canonical and theological limitations on a woman's ecclesial role." The Institutional Church isn't burning people at the stake today, but they often have unpleasant ways of dealing with dissent don't they?
MM: There's something in the Institutional Church that is so much engaged in self-preservation that it's going to destroy itself. The Church today is in one of those moments when it is so thoroughly engaged in preserving its reputation that it's destroying its reputation.
Margaret Porette said there are two Churches. The Church of reason and the Church of love. The Church of love is the big Church, and it's all those people who love and are trying to love. The Church of reason is this Church that lives on reason in preference to love. The debate in my book is between reason and love. For some reason, the Church keeps forgetting this. It doesn't see the person. I think of Bernard Haring, Hans Kung, and so many women. John Paul II -God Bless him-paints himself into so many impossible corners theologically when it comes to women. He's so keen on not allowing the ordination of women that he has elaborated the argumentation to the extent that he almost ends up saying women's role is to be not Christ-which is theologically crazy. But this is the context out of which they have acted.
Lately I've been realizing that there is absolutely no gender analysis in the current clergy sexual abuse scandal. They say celibacy is not the problem, but in a very deep way it is the clerical celibacy culture. There is something significantly different about clerical sexual abuse then there is about pedophiles elsewhere.
GM: But many people suggest the clerical sex abuse cases are not related to this clerical celibacy culture.
MM: That's right. A very good friend of mine, Michael Higgins, is President of St. Jerome's College. He's sort of "Mr. Catholic" at the moment. He's quoted all the time, and I tease him about this. But I had lunch with him the other day, and was telling him that his new book Power and Peril: The Catholic Church at the Crossroads is a man's book for a man's Church. I said: "I thought I had made you a better feminist while I was on the faculty of St.Jerome's." He said "damn it I did it again." He loves this big institutional thing so much that he gets lost and forgets. I also said to him, "Michael I read in a interview that you thought this (the clerical sex abuse scandal) has nothing to do with celibacy. I don't know how you can say that knowing what you do about clerical celibacy." Because the flip-side of celibacy is: women are a danger.
Celibacy isn't there for highfalutin theological reasons. The basic reason goes back to medieval times: they have to take men out of the community. Laity and clergy have to be separated the same way as the women and men. The whole initiative in the Church has to lie with clergy. That's what happened in Ireland when these four men and one woman who had been abused finally came out of the darkness and appeared on television. They must have done a lot of psychological and spiritual work with their lives, because they were so gracious and dignified. They took the initiative, and their power to evangelize the nation was so much greater than the Cardinal and the Bishops who were waffling and spinning. If there's one thing I've learned from this it's that you can't spin the Gospel. Either you have it or you don't. It's not subject to spin. It just doesn't work. But these people got it, and they took the initiative right away from the clergy and the Cardinal. They're not supposed to do that. They're supposed to wait to be lead.
So a lot of the violence has a lot to do with the whole dynamic of who takes the initiative. If the initiative is taking away then violence is used to get it back. Which is part of every history, and is certainly part of the history of my country. Maybe Canada is one of the few countries that has escaped this.
GM: In the chapter "Women in the Gregorian Reform: Marriage and Celibacy" we learn how marriage was denigrated by the Institutional Church of the time. It's shocking.
MM: Until the eleventh and twelfth century marriage was done according to community culture. The Church had very little influence. They had influence on the marriages of the nobility, because inheritance and succession was important. But for ordinary people, the Church wasn't involved all that much. So if you were Celtic or Germanic that was the sort of marriage form you entered. But when Gregory VII and his associates---Peter Damian, and the others- decided to reform the Church, they wanted to get the Church away from lay influence. Which meant getting the clergy out of the community. Which meant getting them out of marriage. That was the reasoning. This also had to do with sons inheriting Church property. So it was a control, and an intentional separation.
For a thousand years people had been use to married clergy. They like married clergy. They were part of the fabric of life. The Church was absolutely convinced that they wanted the clergy celibate. In order to do that, and get the communities to go along, they had to denigrate marriage. That meant demonizing women. It was about 150 years of consistent demonizing of marriage. One council didn't do it. Eventually the Pope had the lay people boycott married priests, and not to attend Masses celebrated by married priests. Bishops who complied were allowed to take their wives as slaves. The whole scenario is so extraordinary, and forgotten completely.
It took them up until 1549 to get marriage sorted out. But it wasn't from the perspective of married people. It was from the perspective of the Church controlling marriage. One of the big ways of doing this was the sacrament of penance. People resented that when the priest intruded himself into the married life of the couple, and deprived them of the kind of intimacy and privacy which is essential to married life. I don't think we've got over that. I don't think the Institutional Church has got over it either.
But it's still amazing to me that we don't have a married spiritual language. Some -like Marriage Encounter-are creating that. But there's no traditional marriage language in the Church. None. We don't know what it was like to be a married woman in the 4th or 5th century. We know what it was like to be a clergy man. But not a married woman or man. Our tradition is blank on that. I find that a huge emptiness.
GM: Pope John Paul II finally did say about 10 years ago that men and women are not hierarchically related.
MM: But he's also says something else too. He's saying women were not called to love Christ, but to receive Christ. The problem is that the whole of official Christian anthropology is based on the physical act of intercourse and the physical shape of the man's body. I can be funny about this when I'm talking, but the Church has always had a horror of women's orifices as they called them. The gaping openness. This goes back to the 4th century when they created, theologically, Mary as the perpetual virgin -intact never penetrated. The un-penetrated body of the virgin was the image of the Church now un-penetrated by heresy.
The penetration of a women's body has always been considered a sign that maybe the Church will be penetrated again by heresy. It's a very odd symbolic structure. The whole Christian anthropology is not formed on asking men who do they think they are, or asking women who do you they think you are and what's your relationship. It's drawing conclusions from previous decisions, and it can be quite ludicrous.
I have a close friend who is quite conservative. He's very much taken with this receptivity business. I said "It doesn't make sense." It allows men to be half human, because it deprives them. And it allows women to be half human, because it deprives them of initiative. The only way to have a decent marriage is to have two full human beings, not two half human beings.
The Church has a choice of seeing men and women as the same, which they did for a while. Or seeing men as superior and women as inferior, which they did for awhile. Then there is complimentarity, where we sort of balance our roles. Men do the masculine things and women do the feminine things. That can sound very nice, until you work it through. But the fourth option has never been an option for the Church. That option is mutuality. This is where men bring the fullness of their humanity and women bring the fullness of their humanity.
So even though John Paul II said that men and women weren't hierarchically related, he doesn't really believe that women are fully human. They're human in a feminine way, and femininity then goes back to square one again. How does he know what being feminine is? It's because he read Augustine, not because he talked to a woman.
GM: Rosemary Radford Reuther talks about mutuality, reciprocity and responsibility in Christian marriage doesn't she?
MM: Yes, the feminists brought that in. To me it's the only way to go. The miracle is that some women and men -in the Church and out of the Church-are actually living their marriages like that with no thanks to Christianity. They probably got it from psychology, common sense, and what worked in their parent's marriages. But mutuality has never been a model for Christian marriages. People have discovered it by trial and error in their own relationships.
GM: Is there any possibility the Institutional Church might at least say they'll review the issue of clerical celibacy and ordaining women to the ministerial priesthood. Is there a glimmer of hope?
MM: I do have a glimmer of hope, because if it doesn't, the Church is going to implode. It won't survive. It will have no attraction whatever for the next generation. The history so far is partial. Even looking at evangelization, and what I presume was the intention of Jesus for the Church-its inclusivity and inviting everybody in. Also taking into account the Church in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (the reality of globalization and acculturation)-and finally the male-female issue. If it doesn't happen, the Church won't survive.
It won't happen under the present Pope, and it probably won't happen under the next Pope. The Catholic Church is stuck with its tradition. Maybe two Popes from now it might happen, unless the Holy Spirit takes over -which is a big act of hope. The fact that the Church survived is a testimony to the Holy Spirit.
I have hope that it's going to happen. But my sense is that we have to deal with the humanity of women and men first. Somehow we have to sit down and include women and men in a discussion of what it means to be human and Christian.
At the moment, I don't know what you'd ordain women to. Because the priesthood is a male construct. It's been experienced, reflected on, and preached by men. Sometimes brilliantly and in holy ways. But it's a man's world. And it's been a man's vocation and mission.
The argumentation behind not ordaining women -which is very similar to the argumentation behind keeping clerical celibacy-- they have to be dealt with first.
Throughout history it's lay people that have initiated the changes. Without exception. It was lay people in the middle ages. That kind of renewal is very different from clerical reform. There's a huge difference between clerical reform of the Church and the lay renewal of the Church.
You probably saw a few years ago a story in Catholic New Times that I had left Christianity. They asked me that recently when I was Ottawa. In a sense you can't leave Christianity. Because it's the air we breathe and the culture we live in. But what I cannot do at the moment is pray with integrity, because the images of God that have been so ingrained us---I have to engage in the task of changing my consciousness and immersing myself in the mystics and in poetry. Eventually I'll get around to it again. Which is probably what prayer is anyway. The process is prayer as much as the end thought. I can't worship, because the Church has missed the boat so badly on most liturgical reform.
My aim is not to get women ordained. My aim is to have women and men somehow take control of their Church and bring the humanity of women and men back into it. How that eventually shakes down in ministry is for the future. The women mystics use to say "we'll make the path as we go." That's much more my model than saying "I'm aiming to have celibacy removed." Because if that's the aim, then we'll do all the wrong things.
GM: There are priests and religious in the Church that recognize what you're talking about?
MM: Yes, there are so many. At the moment, the initiative has been taken from them. Many of them are hanging their heads in shame, because what a few have done, is being applied to all. They need leadership as well.
What I said to a conference of nuns recently in Ireland is --all you have to do is be what you were called to be. You don't have to go out and start new ministries or get on the Internet. All of that is important, but it's secondary. What you have to decide is what are you called to be. And be it. For all to see. I wouldn't want to suggest, in any way, that the whole clerical ministry is destroyed. But there's a clerical culture that has to go. There are so many priestly priests that are really good. But they can't run away with the leadership on their own either. If they are priests in the midst of their people-they are fine. But they can't be ahead of them. We need a few bloody prophets is what we need!
Gerry McCarthy is Editor of The Social Edge.
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Dr. Mary T. Malone is the author of Women and Christianity: The First Thousand Years (Volume 1). She is a former professor of Theology at the Toronto School of Theology, and of Religious Studies at St.Jerome's University and the University of Waterloo. She now lives in Ireland.