John Allen's latest NCR column includes this interesting reflection on the role of women in the Church.
What will we see first: a woman president or women priests? That's an easy one. Since there's no doctrinal bar to a woman president, it's simply a question of a female candidate being able to get enough votes - and whatever eventually happens to Hillary Clinton in 2008, the evidence of this campaign would suggest we're probably not that far away. On women priests, however, there is a serious doctrinal obstacle. Without entering into the merits of that question, it seems clear that given today's strong pressure surrounding Catholic identity, women won't be ordained anytime soon.
What I suspect we will see throughout the 21st century, however, is a continuing effort to empower women in the church in all ways short of sacramental ordination. In the United States, 48.4 percent of all administrative positions in dioceses today are held by women, and at the most senior levels, 26.8 percent of executive positions are held by women. Perceptions of patriarchal bias aside, the Catholic church actually does better in this regard than many other institutions. A 2005 study of Fortune 500 companies found that women hold only 16.4 percent of corporate officer positions and just 6.4 percent of the top earner positions. Similarly, a 2007 study by the American Bar Association found that just 16 percent of the members of the top law firms' governing committees are women, and only 5 percent of managing partners are female. According to a 2004 report from the Department of Defense, women held just 12.7 of positions at the grade of major or above.
Even in the Vatican, there are signs of movement. No woman at all worked in the Roman Curia until 1952, when Pius XII created the Permanent Committee for International Congresses of the Lay Apostolate and appointed Australian lay woman Rosemary Goldie as its Executive Secretary. Things changed significantly over the following half-century. According to a 2005 report from the Catholic News Service, by the end of John Paul's pontificate women were 21 percent of Vatican personnel, even if they rarely broke through to the most senior levels.
Under John Paul II, two barriers for women in the Vatican where shattered. In 2004, he appointed Salesian Sr. Enrica Rosanna to the position of under-secretary in the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, the first time a woman had ever been named as to a superior-level position in the Vatican. Also in 2004, John Paul tapped Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon as the President of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, the first woman to head a pontifical academy. (Glendon is now the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.) None of this augurs a revolution, but it is an indication of things to come.
The rise of the Charismatic impulse will also push Catholicism in this direction, since it encourages spontaneous, non-institutional participation that's as open to women as it is to men. There's an implicit egalitarianism in the Pentecostal movement that has allowed women to assume new roles in surprising ways. One of the most powerful Pentecostal pastors of the 20th century, for example, was Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the Foursquare Church. "Sister Aimee" was, among other unusual accomplishments for her time, the first woman to own a radio station west of the Mississippi River. As Catholicism across much of the global South is progressively "Pentecostalized," we'll likely see more of this informal, charismatic leadership by women.
I'm not certain this is a complete answer to Richard's question, but the Boston Globe article about the Mukasy decision includes the following explanation from Dean John Garvey:
Garvey said the decision to deny Mukasey the Founder's Medal predated the controversy over his choice as commencement speaker and was not directed at the attorney general personally.
In an effort to depoliticize the selection process, the school will no longer award the medal to commencement speakers, he said.
"This is a policy decision that will make it easier for us to invite people of his prominence in the future," Garvey said.
He said that inviting high-profile figures with well-known public views will invariably spur debate and that divorcing their selection from the school's highest honor will allow greater latitude in attracting noteworthy speakers.
For an "Ecclesiology" class that I'm taking, we just read the first chapter of Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. While reading the following passage, I was unable to shake the memory of the opening plenary session I attended at the AALS meeting in New York in January. The day-long program was co-sponsored by the Sections on Women in Legal Education, Aging and the Law, Family and Juvenile Law, Law and Economics, Minority Groups, Poverty Law and Socio-Economics. It was billed as a "day-long program seeking to discuss and address issues of gender and class from multiple perspectives." At the time, I was struck by two things: (1) how many of the plenary panelists identified themselves as Marxists or influenced by Marxist thought; and (2) how the only references anyone made to religious perspectives on the topics of the day were casual, vaguely derisive and dismissive comments. In retrospect, that panel seems to me to have been a perfect illustration of Jenkins' observations about the blindness of large sectors of the academic world to the (growing, not diminishing) global vitality of religion. (In fairness, I only attended one of the rest of the day's panels; perhaps religious perspectives were addressed, for example, in the "Globalization" panel. My reaction was just to the opening plenary session.) Here's the Jenkins quote:
The theological coloring of the most successful new churches reminds us once more of the massive gap in most Western listings of the major trends of the past century, which rightly devoted much space to political movements like fascism and communism, but ignored vital religious currents like Pentecostalism. Yet today, Fascists or Nazis are not easy to find, and Communists may be becoming an endangered species, while Pentecostals are flourishing around the globe. Since there were only a handful of Pentecostals in 1900, and several hundred million today, is it not reasonable to identify this as perhaps the most successful social movement of the past century? According to current projections, the number of Pentecostal believers should surpass the one billion mark before 2050. In terms of the global religions, there will by that point be roughly as many Pentecostals as Hindus, and twice as many as there are Buddhists. And that is just taking one of the diverse currents of rising Christianity: there will be even more Catholics than Pentecostals.
Brian McCall, University of Oklahoma College of Law, wrote with his reaction to the recent article by Professors Peterson & Graves, "Usury Law and the Christian Right," the subject of a recent post. Brian has just written an article concluding that modern credit regulation could benefit from application of a scholastic theory of usury. Brian's comments:
I saw your post about the article of Professors Peterson and Graves on usury and the Religious Right. I have read their article which presents some excellent empirical research about the location of abusive pay day lenders. Their paper shows a correlation between concentrations of payday lenders and states with significant numbers of Christians committed to social issues informed by the Faith. The article implies the question, “why would states with large sections of the population seeking to conform secular law to biblical truth apparently not exhibit concern over usury?”
Coincidentally (or providentially) I have just submitted a draft article to various law reviews which may contain an answer to this question. For the past year I have been studying the philosophy of usury as it developed in the West from the biblical texts to modern rate regulation. The conclusion I reached was that a significant philosophical shift occurred in the sixteenth century that caused Christians to depart from the original theory. This new subjectivist approach only found offenses when a bad intention was present. Rate limitation was seen as a substitute for finding bad intention. This shift caused the original objectivist approach (some transactions are by their nature unjust and need to be prohibited regardless of intention) to usury regulation to fall out of fashion. My objective is to reintroduce the principles of the original scholastic theory into the modern credit regulation debates we are seeing almost daily in our newspapers. By returning to these principles we could redesign usury law to bring more coherence, consistency and fairness to our credit markets.
Two Penn State professors have been trying to figure out empirially exactly why the academy leans toward the left politically. They just released a paper, "Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don't Get Doctorates", in which they conclude that the values and interests of liberal students naturally incline them more towards careers as academics than those of conservative students. According to a Chronicle of Higher Ed article:
They found that in a variety of ways, conservative students were less interested than liberals in subject matter that often leads to doctoral degrees, and less interested in doing the kinds of things that professors spend their time doing.
For example, liberal students reported valuing intellectual freedom, creativity, and the chance to write original work and make a theoretical contribution to science. They outnumbered conservative students two to one in the humanities and social sciences — which are among the fields most likely to produce interest in doctoral study. Conservative students, however, put more value on personal achievement and orderliness, and on practical professions, like accounting and computer science, that could earn them lots of money.
The Woessners also found that conservative students put a higher priority than liberal ones on raising a family. That does not always fit well with a career in academe, where people often delay childbearing until after they earn tenure.
The research led the Woessners to conclude that if higher education wants to attract more conservatives to the professoriate, it should smooth the way financially, offering subsidized health insurance and housing for graduate students, and adopting family-friendly policies for professors.
By Christopher Lewis Peterson, University of Florida -- Levin College of Law & Steven M. Graves, California State University, Northridge
The culture war has become a national moniker describing a variety of policy debates between social conservatives and secular liberal Americans. Hotly contested battle grounds in this metaphorical war have included abortion policy, affirmative action, the right to bear arms, and gay marriage. Frequently these debates have divided secular Americans from people of faith. This article explores this cultural divide in the context of consumer financial services. In the past fifteen to twenty years America has witnessed a stunning transformation in financial services offered to lower and lower-middle classes. A new breed of fringe creditors charging prices far in excess of the old mafia loan sharking syndicates have spread throughout much of the country. The archetype of fringe creditors commonly referred to as payday lenders, charges average simple nominal annual interest rates of around 450 percent. This Article presents empirical research based on the largest, most comprehensive database of payday loan locations yet created. Payday lender locations are compared to an index measuring the political power of conservative Christian Americans in all fifty states. We conclude that there is a strong correlation between the density of payday lending industry and the political power of conservative Christians, suggesting that conservative Christians have become a prime demographic target of payday lenders. These findings are further discussed in light of Biblical injunctions against usury.
This story about the attention Minnesota's superdelegates are getting illustrates that the (hilarious) Borowitz satire Michael Perry posted isn't far from the truth.
. . . particularly if the allegations that the most recent Iraqi suicide bombers were two women with Down Syndrome turn out to be true....
Pope Is Praying for Mentally Handicapped
VATICAN CITY, FEB. 1, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Benedict's general prayer intention for February will focus on the well-being of the mentally handicapped.
The Apostleship of Prayer announced the general intention chosen by the Pope: "That the mentally handicapped may not be marginalized, but respected and lovingly helped to live in a way worthy of their physical and social condition."
For some reason, I get particular spiritual nourishment from insights that bring home the reality of Christ's humanity. (For example, during a particularly protracted toilet-training struggle with one of my children, it ocurred to me that Mary had to toilet train Jesus. This idea still bemuses and comforts me in all sorts of situations.)
I just came across this passage in an excellent Catholic critique of American secular culture, particularly the liberal feminist movement, Joyce Little's The Church and the Culture War: Secular Anarchy or Sacred Order. It struck me as not only a wonderful insight into Christ's humanity, but also a good reminder, in general:
Henri J. Nouwen in his book Out of Solitude quotes a professor at Notre Dame as saying, 'I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I slowly discovered that my interruptions were my work.' Those of us who pursue a career are all too prone to define for ourselves where the importance of our work lies. We are constantly tempted to dismiss the demands others make on us as a waste of time, their needs as far less significant than the projects to which we have committed ourselves. We can become quite convinced that we are doing what God wants us to do and that he himself would not wish to see that work disrupted by the paltry loose ends of other people's lives.
What we fail to understand is that if these interruptions are a waste of time, then Christ's life was a waste of time. For when we read the Gospels attentively, we discover that the story of his life is one long sequence of interruptions. The blind Bartimaeus interrupts his departure from Jericho, a woman interrupts his dinner in the home of Simon the leper, a centurion interrupts his entry into Capernaum, Jairus interrupts his meeting with the crowd, the woman with the hemorrhage interrupts his attempts to get to Jairus' daughter, his disciples interrupt virtually everything; even Mary interrupts his enjoyment of the wedding. The list could go on and on. One might even say that the crucifixion interrupts what could have been a splendid messianic career. Those were not interruptions, of course. They were precisely the people he came to help, the things he came to do. When so much of his work consisted of attending to those who interrupted him, why should we suppose our own lives to be any different?
If you want a taste of what's in the Defiant Birth book that was the subject of Rick's recent post, it includes a slightly edited version of this essay I wrote about my experiences with prenatal testing. With that self-interest disclosed, I have to say that the book is truly excellent. The introduction by the editor, Australian pro-life author and activist Melinda Tankard Reist, is a rich source of data and information about the eugenic trend of much of prenatal care. The essays in the collection consist of contributions from women all over the world, conveying how universal and widespread these eugenic attitudes are.
