WOC 2000 Plenary Talks

If Women Were Ordained Tomorrow, We Would
Still Be Between the Times
by Barbara Hilkert Andolsen

If women were ordained tomorrow, women priests would help lead God's pilgrim people living between the times. Women's ordination will not immediately usher in the basileia tou theou - the reign of God. When women have begun to be ordained, the reign of God will be then, as it is now, both "at hand" and "not yet."

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Christian theologians have argued about the imminence of the kingdom according to the preaching of Jesus. Some theologians have emphasized that Jesus proclaimed that the reign of God was already underway - signaled by Jesus' ministry, miracles and meals. In this brief talk, I want to emphasize the ways in which the reign of God has not been yet realized. Rather, the Spirit's Reign stands as the eschatological endpoint. It is a benchmark against which all periods in human history - including those eras in which women serve as Catholic priests - will be found wanting.

The Spirit's reign stands before us challenging us never to be satisfied with any achievement, including the achievement of women's ordination. As theologian Richard McBrien has commented: "[In human history] we can never say that this is the promised future. The Gospel message calls us always to overcome the limitations of the present." (1)

If women priests were ordained tomorrow, they would continue to struggle with racism in the life of society and of the church itself. Women priests would find themselves ministering to racially homogenous congregations. More than thirty years after the height of the civil rights movement, U.S. residential patterns are still marked by pervasive de facto racial segregation. Contemporary manifestations of discrimination - such as disparate treatment in the approval of mortgage loans - keep this residential segregation in place. The American Catholic church has a system of parishes whose membership is largely tied to residential patterns. As a result, few Roman Catholic parishes have a vibrant mixture of white and black Catholics involved in every aspect of parish life.

Even in this short talk, I must remind us briefly that overt racism in the Catholic church has resulted in a situation in which African Americans are less likely to be Roman Catholics. Prominent Catholics, including both men's and women's religious orders, owned slaves. After emancipation, in both North and South, black Catholics were often required to sit in the back pews or balconies in "white" churches. There are numerous accounts of black Catholics - including children receiving their First Holy Communion - who were required to approach the Lord's table last, after all the whites had received communion. African Americans were routinely steered to the one "black" church in an urban center. One legacy of this long history of racism is that, while blacks make up more than 12 percent of the population of the United States, they make up only 4 percent of the membership of the American Catholic church. As a result, if women priests were ordained tomorrow, most would be ministering, by default, in parishes with few African-American parishioners. Still, African-American Catholics number more than two million of our sisters and brothers in the faith. If women were ordained tomorrow, making full and respectful use of the talents of black Catholics would be an important task for these new, (probably) largely white, women priests.

Another challenging reality that would face women priests, if they were ordained tomorrow, is the phenomenal projected growth in the number and proportion of Hispanic members of the Catholic church in the United States. Figures on immigration and population growth have led the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' Department of Hispanic Affairs to conclude that "By the second decade of [the twenty-first] century, the Church in the United States will very likely be over 50 percent Hispanic." (2) It will be a major challenge to embrace diverse groups of Hispanic Catholics within a truly multi-cultural American Catholic church for the twenty-first century.

If women priests were ordained tomorrow, many of them would likely find themselves ministering in what the NCCB's Department of Hispanic Affairs has called "parallel parish settings." They explain that such settings "allow Hispanics to maintain their own identity and culture, but the administration and life of the parish are divided into separate, and at times, highly unequal spheres. Most Hispanics attend their own masses in Spanish, usually at non peak times, and not always in the main church . . . In addition, Hispanics rarely have the same level of representation on the parish pastoral council as non Hispanics." (3) Hispanic and non Hispanic women priests would be called to the difficult task of developing a multi-cultural, egalitarian church in the United States.

Women priests as moral leaders would face the daunting task of promoting economic justice in an increasingly complex social situation. The United States Catholic church is a community confronted by complicated social class differences that we rarely face squarely. American Catholics find themselves in an information economy that offers people sharply different life chances. Those who have substantial investments in stocks and other capital instruments and many well-educated workers are prospering. Middle-income families are struggling not to fall behind economically. The lowest paid workers welcome recent, modest increases in their paychecks, but still struggle to provide their families with the bare minimum for a decent life. The sharp and persistent economic inequalities among Catholics threaten to erode the moral bonds among us as members of the same church.

It is important honestly to acknowledge the overall strength of the U.S. economy. Throughout the last decade of the twentieth century, the United States has experienced a time of extraordinary economic prosperity. In 1986, when the United States Catholic bishops declared in their pastoral letter "Economic Justice for All" that "full employment is the foundation of a just economy," (4) their critics denounced the bishops as naive do-gooders. They charged that the bishops did not understand that unemployment could not be pushed below a 6 percent, so-called "natural rate" of unemployment without intolerable inflation. By the mid-1990s, the bishops had been vindicated. Unemployment rates have been below 6 percent for the last six years with low inflation. So far this year, the national unemployment rate has been hovering around 4 percent.

African-American and Hispanic rates of unemployment have also declined substantially. However, the African-American rate remains - as it has long been - twice the white rate. Hispanic unemployment rates, while lower than African-American rates, are persistently higher than white, non Hispanic rates.

Ours is, at present, an economic picture with many positive features. But our economy is terribly marred by deep and persistent economic inequalities. During the lengthy period of economic growth that the United States has experienced since 1991, the greatest economic gains have gone to stockholders. Wage gains for ordinary workers have come late in this most recent period of economic expansion, and wage gains for ordinary workers have been modest.

Importantly, for pastoral workers, including our hypothetical women priests, in many families, husbands and wives together have had to work longer hours in order to achieve this growth in family income. According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 1999, the husband and wife from a middle-class family with children worked a total "279 [more] hours" or "about seven additional weeks" a year on the job when compared to a similar couple in 1989. (5) An African-American, middle-income couple was working even harder to maintain its family's standard of living. In far too many cases, the long hours that people with full-time jobs are currently working pose a serious threat to health, family well-being, and the spiritual life.

It is especially disturbing that economic inequalities have remained at historically high levels consistently throughout the entire decade of the 1990s. In the quarter century that followed World War II, in periods of economic expansion, income inequalities declined as the income of ordinary workers grew substantially. Over the last two decades, workers, particularly lower-wage workers, have not gained much economic ground during economic "good times." Thus, income inequalities have remained severe even when the economy was at its best. The economic trends in the 1990s have been the following: 1) low-income workers made significant gains in the second half of the decade; 2) middle-income workers made more modest gains in the second half of the decade; 3) high-wage workers made the largest gains over the longest span of time in the 1990s.

Economic inequalities have remained serious because the workers with the highest incomes have seen their incomes rise far more consistently and more sharply than everybody else. Economic inequality has been growing among women in ways that feminists need to examine more closely. In this short talk, I can mention only a few key points. This is an economy which pays a strong premium for advanced education. It is primarily white, non Hispanic women who have been able to make strong economic advances in the information economy. The Hispanic community is facing a particularly serious problem in an information-based economy in which the well-paying jobs go to persons with the most education. The Hispanic community has an unusually large group of young people who never finish high school. For example: "the largest group of Hispanic origin women age 25 years and over who were labor force participants in 1999 were those with less than a high school diploma - nearly a third, 31 percent. This helps explain their low median weekly earnings and [why] . . . they are mostly employed in sales, [clerical], and service jobs." (6)

By the way, these same low high school completion rates make it more difficult for Hispanic women and men to meet the minimum educational requirements for some positions of church leadership, such as many chancery jobs. (7) It would also pose a barrier to recruiting many Hispanic women for the seminary, if women were being prepared for the priesthood. Educational inequalities are one important factor in the economic inequalities among women. However, better education for all young people is only a part of the solution. Continuing ethnic and racial discrimination is also part of the problem. U.S. Census data shows that African-American women with a college degree have a harder time parlaying their educational achievements into higher wages than do white, non Hispanic college-educated women. (8)

Disparate social opportunities have led to a situation in which white, non Hispanic women are much more likely to hold higher paying managerial and professional positions than are women of color. For the last twenty years, white, non-Hispanic women have been moving in significant numbers into managerial and [formerly male dominated] professional positions. By 1999, one in every three white, non-Hispanic women who worked for wages was in a managerial or professional job. But black and Hispanic women are not getting the same opportunities to obtain such well-paying jobs. Only one in four black female wage earners is classified as a managerial or professional worker. Fewer than one in five Hispanic women is a manager or professional. (9) On the flip side of the job picture, African-American and Hispanic women are more likely than white, non Hispanic women to hold low paying service jobs such as hotel maids, janitors, cashiers, or nursing home attendants.

Harvard economist Richard Freeman has warned affluent Americans about "the possibility that we are erecting for the foreseeable future a new pattern of inequality that bifurcates U.S. society between increasingly remote 'haves' and 'have-nots.' This is a phenomenon that [Freeman calls] an 'apartheid economy.'" In this "apartheid economy," those who are economically successful reside in affluent suburbs, "while those 'other' folk live somewhere else in the city, largely invisible to us" (10) If women were ordained tomorrow, white middle and upper-class women who became priests would face the difficult task of providing moral and spiritual leadership for Catholic congregations differentially located throughout this "apartheid economy." It will be hard for Catholic women - ordained or non ordained - to remain in solidarity with other women across lines of race and ethnicity and especially across class lines.

Women priests will need to develop themselves - and to help foster in the people of God -- a spirituality of solidarity and justice. I propose that the Eucharist should be central in this spirituality of solidarity and justice. (11) The Eucharist is a present foretaste of the abundant eschatological banquet that God has prepared for the human race - with the places of honor reserved for the poor and other social outcasts.

White, non Hispanic women priests will be stretched painfully when they struggle to embody a eucharistic-based ethic of solidarity and justice. A quote from theologian David Power will help me to tie this spirituality of solidarity and justice back to my opening remarks about the reign of God. Power has said "The church is called to serve the justice of God's rule. This is a justice always in the future, always in tension with the present realities, yet to be anticipated in some form of realization even now. The church as a community of believers is held back from serving [the reign of God] because of its own prejudices and discrimination. Often the believers find themselves caught in a web of injustice and strife that destroys the capacity for a full human life among the believers themselves or among fellow beings." (12)

If women priests were ordained tomorrow, among their most important tasks would be to help unravel at least some small portion of the web of injustice that holds the church back from being a more effective sign that the Spirit is at work, bringing about justice and wholeness for humanity.

Liturgical expert Robert Hovda declared: "No matter how much . . . progress we make, the reign of God [toward which the Eucharist points] will always stand in judgment over every new political and economic structure, as over the old -- criticizing, goading, inviting and inspiring." (13) The reign of God stands before us today goading us to work toward the ordination of women as a sign of the equal dignity of women - made in the image of God, called by Sophia-spirit to join our brothers as servants of the servants of God. The rule of God also prods us to realize our sinfulness as women and to surrender our arrogant illusions about ourselves as innately more caring. The reign of God stands as a sign of judgment today, as it will stand as a sign of judgment of every day in human history, until God catches up human struggles for justice into that divine justice that is Her kingdom come.

Today we are between the times. The ordination of women as a (renewed) moment in church history ought not be identified with the reign of God. Yet we women and men - all of us who together are the church - are called to be a sign that the Spirit's reign of surprising abundance and joy has been held out to us in Christ Jesus and stands before us as the Spirit's trustworthy future. As theologian Robert McAfee Brown says: "Our common task is to work - and wait for God to do something with our efforts that may surpass our wildest dreams." (14) It is sometimes hard these days to believe today that God will do something with our efforts in the Catholic church that will "surpass our wildest dreams." Still, our task is to work to approximate ever more closely a discipleship of equals in the church. Then, the Spirit will amaze us with what women and men - from every class, race and nation - working as full partners in the Catholic church can contribute to the unimaginably wonderful reign of God.

Copyright 2000, Barbara H. Andolsen All Rights Reserved

1. Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism [Study Edition]. Minneapolis, MN: 1981, p. 1121.
2. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Department of Hispanic Affairs, "Demographics," November 24, 1999. www.nccbuscc.org/hispanicaffairs/demo.htm. (October 27, 2000)
3. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishops' Committee on Hispanic Affairs, "Hispanic Ministry at the Turn of the New Millennium," November, 1999. www.nccbuscc.org/hispanicaffairs/study.htm (November 26, 2000)
4. "Economic Justice for All," paragraph 136. See also chapter 3, footnote 18.
5. Jared Bernstein and Lawrence Mishel, "Income Picture: Incomes Rise in 1999, but So Do Work Hours," September 26, 2000. www.epinet.org/webfeatures/econindicators/income.html. (October 27, 2000)
6. U. S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau, "Facts on Working Women: Women of Hispanic Origin in the Labor Force," Number 00-04, April, 2000. Available through their web site: www.dol.gov/dol/wb.
7. NCCB, Bishops' Committee on Hispanic Affairs, "Hispanic Ministry at the Turn of the New Millennium."
8. U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau, "Equal Pay: a Thirty-five Year Perspective," June 10, 1998, p. 31.
9. U. S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau, "Facts on Working Women: Women of Hispanic Origin in the Labor Force."
10. Richard Freeman, "Forum: Unequal Incomes," Harvard Magazine, January February 1998. www.harvard-magazine.com/issues/jf98/forum.html. (November 20, 2000).
11. I have discussed this point in greater detail in chapter 6 of my book The New Job Contract: Economic Justice in an Age of Insecurity. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 1998.
12. David Power, The Eucharistic Mystery: Revitalizing the Tradition. New York: Crossroad, 1993, p. 347.
13. Robert Hovda, Dry Bones: Living Worship Guides to Good Liturgy. Washington, D.C.: Liturgical Conference, 1973, p. 136.
14. Robert McAfee Brown, "Toward a Just and Compassionate Society: a Christian View,"Cross Currents, 45 (Summer 1995). EBSCOhost Full Text. 10/27/2000.