The Seedkeepers, February 2021, Book review by Susan Roll
John Wijngaards, What They Didn’t Teach You in Catholic College. Women in the priesthood and the mind of Christ. Lafayette, LS, USA: Acadian House, 2020. ISBN 13: 978-09995884-4-4. ISBN 10: 0-9995884-4-3. 213 pp. $16.95 US.
I daresay anyone who’s part of CNWE, whether a longtime member or a relative newcomer, needs no introduction to the Vatican’s chief arguments against opening all ordained ministries to women, or why each argument is in its own way problematic. We would also not be the slightest bit surprised to learn that there is no hard proof that Jesus ever intended to exclude women from leadership in the community gathered in his name.
Even knowing all this in your bones, you will find the latest book by theologian and life-long activist for the ordination of women, John Wijngaards, very much worth reading. The friendly approachability of the title is enough to tell you that you’re in for an intriguing conversation, not a scholarly discourse. The style is engaging and easy to read, the content toggling back and forth between the author’s refutations of the dominant official arguments against ordination, and interesting anecdotes from Wijngaards’ own life that shaped his awareness and activism. You’ll meet a fascinating individual who first came to see the incongruity and injustice of the Vatican’s teaching, not at university nor in the Western church, but while he served as a missioner in India in the 1960’s. The book includes an assortment of his lived experiences, stories, conversations and correspondence that colour his advocacy convincingly and vividly. For this reason Wijngaards deserves a place among the pioneers on the question of the ordination of women, and a good deal of credit for his faithful lifelong commitment to advocacy in the face of opposition.
If you read nothing else in the book, push yourself to read his disconcerting overview of the false assumptions of women’s innate inferiority that have shaped Church doctrine, beginning with Aristotle, through the early church fathers, up through the Middle Ages and Thomas Aquinas, and well into the 20th century with its prohibition on women touching any sacred vessel. This section does much to explain why narrow interpretations of scripture and tradition have been used to keep women in a secondary place, and why no appeals to women’s increasing leadership in secular society today or the Church’s obvious need for the sacramental ministry of women have budged the question.
Keeping in mind the fact that in 1976 the Pontifical Biblical Commission studied the question of whether Scripture alone could decide the question of women’s ordination one way or the other, and concluded that it cannot, take a look at the assumptions made too often that we today can decide what Jesus was thinking. The official arguments pick out justifications for a preexisting policy. Wijngaards’ arguments take a much broader, contextual perspective on Jesus in his own time. In the end, as he writes, “…the Spirit of Christ is speaking to us now – loudly and clearly.”
Still though, I have two reservations about the book. First, when a Church authority unilaterally enacts a rigid policy and then presents “reasons” why the policy must be followed without question, it’s a good guess that the real reasons lie under the surface. The point is clearly not what Jesus of Nazareth may or may not have said, or may or may not have done. The issue is rather the use of a skewed interpretation of the surviving written texts to justify a position arising from a much later form of church government shaped by imperial power. Something different, something not scriptural, is driving this primordial misogyny. Fear? Envy? A belief that “weak” women represent the evil negative identity that men must reject? Ancient blood taboos by which women’s bodies are thought to defile the sacred altar? This mystery might well prove impenetrable by theology – psychology or anthropology might give us a firmer footing.
My other concern is over the fact that Wijngaards includes in his Appendices an excursus designed to demonstrate the absolute reality of stereotypical male and female characteristics on biological grounds, citing a scattering of research studies. This is flat-out biological determinism, and it plays straight into the hands of those who would keep women confined to the home. Any rigid male/female split does not account for the rich variety of gender identities represented among the people of God, and the fluidity of these identities. Wijngaards seems to have intended to point out how much the Church is losing by arbitrarily suppressing the agency and the leadership of over half of its members, and that is true enough, but not by further marginalizing other persons.
Nonetheless, I recommend that you pour a cup of tea and relax over Wijngaards’ book. Let its common sense, scripture-shaped insight and lived wisdom strengthen your spirit and give you hope.