The Silence We Keep: A Nun's View of the Catholic Priest Scandal (5 page)

Given the world in which Jesus lived, men were by law the only choice for everything in public and religious life. And by both religious and civil law, women were excluded from public and religious life. Because of the overwhelming biblical sentiment against women, the selection of men only by Jesus was a foregone conclusion. Nothing sexist or exclusive was intended: It was simply the law. No other credible choice could be made, especially because Jesus was fulfilling prophecy.
Woman
and
priesthood
were then just as cognitively dissonant to the literal-minded as they are now—and just as unlikely of happening. Understanding the fulfillment of prophecy as ordination to male priesthood remains one of the most misguided church teachings. And it is in such soulful violation of the Spirit of Christ that, according to Saint Paul, “There does not exist among you Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. All are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28.) That’s how the God of Christians envisions priesthood, “That all may be one.” All.

While very early in the public life of Jesus there was a distinct religious movement associated with him and his followers, nothing
about them claimed to become another church with another all-male priesthood. Quite the contrary. The vision Jesus consistently leaves in the Gospels is one of a church that includes everyone, and a priesthood that includes all who are called by the community to serve. The “unchurch” of Christ is what it looks like. It’s like no other church in his world or ours, and what theologians call a discipleship of equals, a religious community bound by one spirit with many different voices, many different charisms, many different gifts, all equally divine in the Christian community. In the church of Christ everyone is invited to the table, and the priesthood of Christ is a calling every baptized person receives. All of us are ordained to do something divine with our lives. It’s a vision of “church” and “priesthood” that remains largely unfulfilled more than two thousand years later.

Biblical theologians speak of Christianity’s earliest beginnings as the Jesus Movement. Not a new church with its own priesthood, but a traveling community of Jesus’ followers, distinguished in how they were governed: by love, by including everyone, and by a diversity of divine works shared equally by men and women. In the beginning, the Jesus Movement was seen as a religious-renewal movement within Judaism, aimed at correcting its abuses and relieving the oppression of the poor and the outcast. Maybe it was meant to be a divine renewal movement in all churches and priesthoods, aimed at correcting clerical abuses and aiding the poor and the outcast, once and for all. It was never intended to be a church, always a renewal movement within religion and priesthood. To me, the Jesus Movement became the most unchurch possible, and Jesus the most unpriestly priest. The visions Jesus reveals consistently of church and priesthood still seem unlike anything this world has ever believed in or seen. Thus we still don’t know how to make peace on earth.

Unlike any priesthood, then or now, the priesthood Jesus guarantees heaven only for society’s rejects, for three distinctly mentioned groups of outcasts: the sick and disabled, children and the desperately poor, and his favorite dinner guests—prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. Consistently, Jesus makes a public divine point of welcoming, touching, healing, and dining with those who are hated, persecuted, and condemned by everyone else. Those no one wants around the table, Jesus invites to be seated next to him. In the Jesus Movement, the last are always called to be first. The lowly are always raised up.

Not only do the last become the first in the Jesus Movement, but the leaders and presiders of the table community and the Eucharist become the ones who serve. And in every corner of every world, even now, who knows best how to serve but women? History has taught us that lesson for thousands of years. Women were servants extraordinaire, as well as constant companions and disciples of Christ. Because of how they were treated and touched by Jesus, theologians note that women and children were drawn in large numbers to the Jesus Movement. Wherever Jesus went, women and children followed. I see nothing in the Gospels that would lead anyone to believe that Jesus would exclude women from priesthood. In the Gospels, we repeatedly find evidence to the contrary. In story after story, Jesus breaks Jewish laws almost on purpose in order to make their divine point clear, in order to reveal the real intent of God. And in story after story, we find Jesus violating publicly (occasionally on purpose) society’s and Judaism’s most oppressive customs: breaking the Sabbath to heal the sick and feed the hungry, breaking nearly every law through the inclusive, even intimate, way he relates to women in public. It’s as though there’s some instant, intuitive, divine connection between Jesus and women. Nothing stops Jesus from seizing every opportunity to
heal women, to free them, to save them from being stoned to death, even inviting himself to dinner in their homes. From city to city Jesus seeks intentionally the hospitality of the women disciples, finding himself at home in the company of those who believed in him. Just one look was all it took for women and children to see clearly that Jesus was God. As story after story reveals, it’s the women whose lives were most miraculously changed and liberated by Jesus and his teachings. And it was the women who remained in touch with him, both before and after his death and resurrection.

The Gospel of Saint Mark (6:21—34) tells a powerful story of a woman with a hemorrhage, whom biblical society would have avoided like the plague and condemned as evil. After twelve years of expensive and unsuccessful medical treatments, she hears Jesus is in town and goes out to see him. The story says, “She came up behind him in the crowd and put her hand to his cloak. ‘If I just touch his clothing,’ she thought, ‘I shall get well.’” And she did. “Immediately her flow of blood dries up and the feeling that she was cured of her affliction ran through her whole body.” That’s a miracle. Healing powers are revealed as primary in the priesthood of Jesus. We also read that Jesus is so powerfully moved by her touch that he was “conscious at once that healing power had gone out from him.” Healers often speak of experiencing drastic drains of energy, much like that of a power surge. Jesus is described as feeling faint, “wheeling about in the crowd” and asking, “Who touched my clothing?” Somehow Jesus knows it’s a woman and he goes looking for her in the crowd. Terrified, the woman throws herself in front of Jesus and confesses that she did it. It was she who touched him. Jesus tells her, “It’s your faith that has cured you. Go in peace and be free of this illness.” The moral of the story, Mark tells us, is that “All who touched him got well” (6:56). And what touched Jesus most
powerfully was the extraordinarily moving faith of women; sometimes it even made him faint.

The New Testament is full of stories revealing how closely women were associated with Jesus, so close that women alone remained with him through his passion, death, and resurrection. The women did not run in fear for their lives and hide as the other apostles did, but stayed with Jesus publicly every step of the agonizing way to end at the foot of the cross. It was the women—Mary Magdalene, “the other Mary,” Joanna, and Salome—who cleansed, anointed, and prepared the body of Christ for burial, and the women who were at the tomb first on Easter morning. Some believe they never left, but every Gospel tells the same story. Among all the apostles, the women alone remained faithful to the end, and ever after.

While the other male apostles were still locked up in hiding, the women knew for sure that Jesus would rise on the third day because the women knew that Jesus was God. Mary Magdalene was the first person Jesus went to see at sunrise on Easter. While we’ve been taught to think of Mary Magdalene as the world’s most famous prostitute, nothing could be further from the truth. Biblical scholars found that Mary was an independently wealthy woman who supported financially the ministry of Jesus and was a close personal friend.
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It’s only through the sexist eyes of history that Mary Magdalene’s “many sins” were interpreted as sexual because she was beautiful, unmarried, and wealthy. In the eyes of the biblical world, what else could she be but a prostitute? In the eyes of Jesus, she was the one who loved him most.

Mary Magdalene was first among the apostles to receive a vision of the Risen Christ, the first “priest” of the early church. Not recognizing Jesus clearly at first, Mary Magdalene, Saint John’s gospel reveals, thought Jesus was the gardener, one who may have seen the body of Christ removed from the tomb and
knew where they may have taken him. With her vision clouded by grief, it wasn’t until Jesus calls her by name, “Mary!” that she knew instantly it was him. “Unable to cling to him as she wanted,” she runs instead to tell the other apostles that Jesus is risen, just as Jesus asks of all the women to whom he appears. Mary Magdalene was the first priest of the early church to proclaim the Risen Christ, and Mary his Mother was the first priest of all, the first to give us literally the Body and Blood of Christ.

At first, the apostles refused to believe Mary Magdalene or the other women. They probably couldn’t believe Jesus would appear to the women first. And they couldn’t believe Jesus would ask these now hysterical women to deliver the news to them, The (fearful and trembling) Twelve. It was not until the Risen Christ passed through the locked doors of their hiding place in the upper room and appeared before them that the apostles began to believe. And only after they literally put their fingers into Jesus’ wounds do they really believe without a doubt that he is risen and that he is God. This is the story’s way of telling us how the literal minds of the apostles refused to change. Even after the death and resurrection of Christ, they could not believe it. The apostles still could not see with the eyes of soul, the eyes of faith. All four Gospels end with the Risen Christ appearing first to the women, then to Peter, then to the other apostles. If the literal-minded want to be truly literal here, the Risen Christ clearly gives priority to Mary Magdalene and the other women in the “new priesthood.” The vision Jesus reveals is one in which priority is given equally to women and men. A vision of “church” and “priesthood” that is yet to be resurrected.

The Jesus Movement after Jesus is the real birth of Christianity. That’s when a religious community began to form around the
profound personal impact of the Resurrection and Pentecost experiences, both powerfully life-changing (and probably head-spinning) experiences. In the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, everyone felt the divine power of Christ alive within them, so extraordinarily so that they began to speak in tongues, in languages everyone could understand: “each of us hears them speaking in our own native tongue about the marvels God has accomplished” (Acts 2:11). Those gathered were empowered divinely to heal, prophesy, forgive sin, bind and cast out demons, to do everything Jesus did. And all were drawn together daily in community for the breaking of bread. The table community remained Christ’s “church” in the beginning, and all those gathered around the table remained his one, holy, apostolic “priesthood.”

The only Christian “churches” that we know existed in the first few centuries were “house churches.” Once again, the ancient religious tradition of gathering in the home for worship is by no means new to Christianity. This is not something the Jesus Movement or biblical theologians made up. The sacred ritual of a communion meal in the home of God’s people is as old as religion is, and perfect in form for the early Christian community. The earliest days of Christianity were, as you’d imagine, taken up entirely with spreading the news that Jesus is God. Traveling missionaries, sent out in pairs, depended completely on the hospitality and support provided by Christian house churches, private homes designated in cities and towns as sacred places of Christian worship, safe and hospitable houses along the way where disciples were welcome to join the table community and stay as long as necessary.

Well into the third century, all Christian communities most likely organized themselves into house churches. Not only did the homes of Christians serve as hospitality stations and prayer
communities for traveling missionaries, but some served as a kind of starter church in a new city or town. Houses were set up temporarily to provide space, support, and leadership for newly forming Christian communities. Paul’s “fellow workers” (Rom. 16:3), Prisca and Aquila, founded and supported a “church in their house” (1 Cor. 16:19) wherever they moved. Gathering together in one another’s houses for worship remained just as sacred to the early Christians as it did to Christ. The table community remained the church of Christianity in the beginning, and those gathered around the table remained Christianity’s priesthood.