Review of What They Don’t Teach You in Catholic College by John Wijngaards
by Gloria Ulterino
Have you ever pondered the question: should women be ordained to the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church? Or perhaps: why on earth can’t women be ordained today in this church? This book’s author has lived these questions for years, with a passion. Beginning in 1965, as a young priest, Wijngaards would experience first-hand the devastating results of a lack of church leadership in southern India, where he served for nearly twenty years. While he admittedly honors the teaching authority of the church, he’s also compelled to point out its errors—such as its position on slavery over the centuries. (In fact, he devotes an entire chapter of this book to this issue, as an example of the church’s devastating error.)
In this readable book, Wijngaards draws upon personal experience, as well as theological scholarship, to plumb the depths of this question: can women be ordained priests in our beloved church? His resounding “Yes” emerges out of his efforts to probe the following: the mind of Jesus; the role of cultural prejudice against the full humanity of women throughout the Tradition; the hints of Jesus’ regard for women, as found in Scripture; the origins of sacramental love for all; the devotion over the centuries to Mary as Priest; the ordination of women to the diaconate during the first millennium; the sense of the faithful in helping form church teaching; the hardening of Vatican teaching in light of ecumenical ordination of women; and the persistently disastrous church error in its teaching on slavery. Is it not possible, he asks, for the church hierarchy to be just as wrong about ordaining women to the priesthood?
What do I most appreciate about this book?
- First of all, it has become the author’s passion to right this wrong in the Roman Catholic Church—the church of his youth, the church of his entire life, the church that must speak truth in our world.
- Second, he is like a sleuth, searching out any and every hint for the mind of Jesus. In this endeavor, of course, he points out the difference between the Jesus who walked the earth and the Christ of faith. While Jesus lived in this world, he was immersed in the culture of his day, a time in which it would have been unthinkable for him to ordain women. As he puts it, on page 45: “A society floats on its ‘social myth,’ that is, on the cultural framework by which it lays down its objectives and norms of behavior. It is that social myth that has in many regards dictated the fate of men and women.”
- And yet, the earthly Jesus held women in high regard. Here Wijngaards plumbs the depth of Luke’s Gospel and Acts of the Apostles, the only evangelist to have a Book Two of his Gospel. This becomes a perfect example of God’s Holy Spirit at work in the ongoing creation of our church. (I would only add that the author might also have been well-served to include a few of the strong women of John’s Gospel, as yet another example of the Spirit at work in the church.)
- Jesus’ vision (in chapter 7) of a new kind of priesthood: one based upon grace, one opposed to a “setting apart,” one based upon service (yes, even to the point of sacrifice) and inspiring preaching, one we humans continually struggle to claim for ourselves.
- The importance of and need for the sense of the faithful (in chapter 10) in determining our beliefs. This is clearly, in the author’s view, the way that the church has grown and developed; thus, it is also the pathway to ongoing Gospel growth and change.
As for the rest, I urge you and your friends to purchase and read this book, that it might become a source of enlightenment and courage for us all.
Gloria Ulterino
leader of the Women of the Well
storytelling group in Rochester, New York.
