It was pretty clear that it was going to happen as soon as they elected the reactionary Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, Pope John Paul II's Grand Inquisitor, as Pope Benedict XVI, Many of us knew that all hope of enlightenment from the so-called Throne of St. Peter (a poor fisherman who became an itinerant preacher with a throne? But I digress) was lost at that point. Ratzinger had made a career of attacking the leading lights of Catholic theology. The wonderful Hans Kȕng is the best example from Ratzinger's days as a cardinal, but there are others. And it’s not that the Vatican has had much credibility with many of us for a long time. Vatican II gave hope, but the all-male, celibate (in theory at least) Catholic power structure began undoing those reforms as soon as they were enacted. John Paul II is much loved in Catholic circles; but let us not forget that Ratzinger worked for him, and he approved of Ratzinger’s reactionary doctrinal policing of the church. Yes, we saw it coming; and yes, the Vatican didn't have much credibility to lose; but now it has totally lost whatever shred of credibility it retained after decades in the heavy hands of Mr. Ratzinger.
The child abuse scandal in which Ratzinger and his ilk have put the power interests of the hierarchy above the safety and care of children should have made even Pope Ratzinger blush at having the temerity to issue moral proclamations, but it hasn’t. Now in a naked power play aimed at stilling the voice of independent thought in the Catholic Church, especially the voice of independent thinking women, the US bishops and the Vatican have lashed out at American Catholic women religious in general and at their leading theologians in particular. The all-male Catholic power structure has attacked the Leadership Council of Women Religious, an organization that represents most women religious (commonly known as nuns) in the United States generally and Elizabeth A. Johnson, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University and Margaret Farley, Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale University Divinity School in particular. Professors Johnson and Farley are two of the most widely read, most prominent, and most insightful theologians of all American Catholic women religious, and the Vatican and the US bishops have chosen them as their special targets.
What are the church hierarchy’s complaints against these brilliant, faithful women? One is that they pay too much attention to social justice and not enough attention to the Vatican’s reactionary teachings on the issues of abortion and gay marriage. I have not read Professor Farley’s book that has just come under attack, Just Love, A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. I have read that the church has attacked it for having the gall even to ask questions about the church’s obscurantist teachings about masturbation and homosexuality. In that attack the church is saying that a faithful Catholic can’t even ask questions about things that are simply everyday realities of human life. No church worthy of the name can prohibit its people from asking such questions. If the faith can’t relate in constructive and life-giving ways to undeniable human realities it deserves to die. A faith that does not permit free and open discussion of human realities, including the realities of human sexuality, cannot relate in those constructive and life-giving ways to those realities.
The attack on Professor Elizabeth Johnson hits closer to home with me. I was a student of hers briefly when she was a visiting professor at Seattle University in the summer of 1998. She read the manuscript of my book Liberating Christianity, encouraged me in having it published, and wrote a generous cover endorsement of it. I consider Beth Johnson’s book She Who Is, The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, to be one of the true classics of contemporary theology, and not only of contemporary Catholic theology. A recent attack on the central thesis of that book raises concerns for the Catholic hierarchy’s relationship to the entire theological enterprise.
The central thesis of She Who Is, or part of it, is that human language can never define God, can never capture the essence of God, which remains always ultimate mystery; but that the language we use about God matters. Johnson repeats throughout the book almost as a mantra the phrase “the God symbol functions.” This wonderful phrase points to the reality that our human language about God can only be symbolic, it cannot be literal. And it points to the fact that the symbolic language we use about God matters. If we think of God using only masculine symbols like Father and the pronoun He the male is elevated above the female. Men become more like God than women are. The result is the diminishing of women and the perpetuation of patriarchal domination.
In one attack on Johnson’s work the American bishops have said that Johnson’s thesis is that the names the Catholic Church uses for God “are metaphors that do not apply to the reality of God within the Catholic understanding” and that that thesis is false. There are at least two things wrong with that attack on sister Elizabeth. Johnson, as I understand her, does not claim that our language about God does “not apply to the reality of God.” Rather, her thesis (and mine) is that our metaphorical or symbolic language about God points to the reality of God or to our human experience of the reality of God without being able to capture or ultimately to define that reality. Our language about God applies to the reality of God as symbol, just not as fact. Our language about God applies to the reality of God as something that suggests, that directs our attention in a certain direction, that expresses an experience of God. It never captures the reality of God.
In She Who Is Beth Johnson expresses this truth at one point with the marvelous statement that human language about God is at best “legitimate and inadequate.”[1] It is legitimate because it is the best we can do when we speak about God, and as humans we must speak about God. It is inadequate because it can never capture the essence of God.
In their critique of Elizabeth Johnson’s work the American Catholic bishops seem to be calling that understand of the nature of human language about God, including the names used for God in the Catholic tradition, false. If they think that understanding is false they are guilty of idolatry. Any claim that human language captures the essence of God is idolatry because it reduces God to an element of created being, namely, human speech. Such a claim is idolatry because it claims to capture the infinite in something finite. For example, saying that God is Father without at the same time understanding that God is not Father in anything like our human understanding of father because God infinitely transcends our human understandings is to make the name Father for God into an idol. Any human statement about God that fails to recognize that, while it may in some significant way be true, it is also necessarily false is idolatry.
The bishop’s suggestion that Catholic names for God apply to the “reality” of God at least tends toward this idolatry. Clearly the male bishops don’t like Beth Johnson’s insistence that feminine metaphors are as appropriate for God as are male ones. So they claim that the Church’s traditionally exclusively male names for God apply to the reality of God, apparently in a way as to actually define God. They make that claim to exclude the use of nontraditional feminine images, like Mother. They are saying that in God’s essence God is masculine, and that is an idolatrous statement pure and simple.
This particular attack on Beth Johnson is especially worrisome. The bishops are arrogating to themselves the power to define what is appropriate theological inquiry and what is not. And they are doing it in a way that, if they succeed, will lock Catholic theology into an idolatry from which it will never recover. This attack on something as fundamental as the nature of human religious language must cause significant concern in all Catholic theologians. Since Vatican II Catholic theology has blossomed in new and exciting ways that have meaning for all Christians and even for all people of faith, not just for Roman Catholics. The bishops and the Vatican seem intent on crushing the blossoms of Catholic theology for the purpose of preserving their own power, the power of an all male hierarchy. In doing so they have lost all credibility. They have lost whatever moral authority they had left.
I say these things about the Catholic hierarchy with a heavy heart. I have written elsewhere in this blog about the many things I love about the Roman Catholic Church. I was trained for ministry at Seattle University primarily by Catholics. I learned from brilliant Catholic scholars and teachers. I studied with faithful Catholic men and women who were my classmates. I came highly to value the great spiritual traditions within the Catholic Church and the wonderful lay men and women, women and men religious, and priests who were my teachers. Yet I cannot remain silent in the face of these latest attacks by the Catholic hierarchy on people I know to be first rate scholars, highly effective teachers, and persons of great Christian faith. The attacks are too painful. The stakes are too high. I know that I cannot influence the Catholic hierarchy in any way, and they don’t care what I think. Still I must speak my mind, even if doing so makes no real difference in the world.
I don’t know what faithful Catholic theologians like Elizabeth Johnson will do in the face of this attack. It is not for me, a non-Catholic, to say that they should leave the Catholic Church, but I won’t be surprised if some of them do. If they leave, or if they stay with their voices muted, the loss will be not only the Catholic Church’s. It will be all of Christianity’s. The only ones to gain will be a male Catholic hierarchy devoid of all legitimacy, of all credibility.
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