Brian Hamilton-Vise

I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand. —James Baldwin

Gender Fluidity and the Vatican

A quick critique of the Vatican’s understanding of gender that I read in a friend’s undergraduate thesis has stuck with me: men are (to some degree) encouraged to emulate the ‘feminine’, insofar as the whole church is the Bride of Christ whose perfect form is Mary in contemplative openness, but women should not similarly emulate the ‘masculine’. There’s gender fluidity in one direction that’s forbidden in the other. I suppose the Vatican has a way around this, that men are ‘feminine’ with respect to God in a way that women aren’t ‘masculine’ with respect to men. But even that response seems to relativize something in gender that the Vatican wants to keep essential. Must they not at least say that women are naturally better at submissive openness to God than men, more suited for contemplation and obedience? (But then it should be the women who guide our churches!)

13 January 2007 | Comments (2)
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» On 18 January 2007, Spencer Daniel said: 
<p>I think that a gender essentialist in the Vatican could accept the implication that women are naturally better at submissive openness to God than men and yet still consistently reject the claim that women should be ordained (to what extent that is equivalent to &#8220;guiding the churches&#8221; is a different question, I think).  After all, ordination is a sacrament which makes Christ present by indellibly configuring the soul of the ordained to Christ.  In this way, the priest present in the community is in some way sacramental of Christ&#8217;s presence therein.  The gender requirement for the sacrament stems from the fact that one&#8217;s body (and therefore one&#8217;s sex) is essential to one&#8217;s presence.  Or at least, so might run the argument.  One might still wonder whether the maleness of Christ was so much more important than his Jewishness that we do not require our priests to be ethnically Jewish.</p>
» On 19 January 2007, Brian Hamilton said: 
<p>My last comment was tongue-in-cheek, since it clearly does not follow for the Vatican that women should be ordained or guide our churches. But if gender is essential in the particular way the Vatican says, why aren&#8217;t women said to be more capable of discipleship (that supremely submissive habit) and why aren&#8217;t men striving to imitate them? It looks to me like the Vatican&#8217;s in a bind here: either they deny women are more essentially contemplative or they encourage men to imitate the women in contemplation. If the former, their essentialism is inconsistent; if the latter, they&#8217;ve allowed fluidity in one direction and not the other. This doesn&#8217;t immediately interrupt the argument for male-only ordination, you&#8217;re right, but it seems a deep problem with their way of construing gender.</p>

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Brian Hamilton-Vise is a Ph.D. student in moral theology at the University of Notre Dame, where his research is in the history of Christian political and economic thought. His side interests are in the development of negative theology and in recent political theory. Email him at bdhamilton@gmail.com.

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