Last March 29, the evening of Good Friday, Sister Teresita Weind presided over the services at Saint Catherine-Saint Lucy Catholic Church in Oak Park. She wore a long red cassock with a corded belt around her waist and a pendant around her neck. To her right and left and slightly to her rear, also garbed in vestments, stood the pastor of the parish and another priest who lives at the rectory. It was Weind (rhymes with “pinned”) who led the special prayers that are said only on this day of the year–for the needs of all people, for the rulers of the world, for the unity of the church. It was Weind who lifted up the large cross, sang solemnly three times “Behold the wood of the cross,” and urged people to come forward and kiss it. And it was she who later led the congregation in the “Our Father” and held the communion host, inviting the faithful to receive.
Weind’s Good Friday activities also marked a turning point for Donna, a mother of five and a parishioner in her mid-40s who asked not to be identified by her real name. “When I attend the Mass of the Pre-Sanctified [the former name for the Good Friday service], I think I have the right to have a priest celebrating it,” she said. “I don’t have any personal animosity toward Sister Teresita, but a lot of things have been going on here that aren’t right and aren’t approved.”
Women must cover their heads because they are not the image of God….They must do this because sin came into the world through them. Their heads must be covered in church in order to honor the bishop. In like manner they have no authority to speak because the bishop is the embodiment of Christ. –Officially approved church homily, 16th century
Over the centuries Hebrew prophets, Jewish scholars, and Christian theologians have echoed that message, at least in theory. Yet it took more than 1,800 years for the idea to hit home that slavery was incompatible with the message. And only in this century did freedom from oppression begin to be widely seen as having something to do with women.
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The reason, says Ruether, is that women “did not control the prophetic tradition,” which was controlled by men who were shaped by the deeply rooted patriarchal system. Thus, she points out, even women who were central to the biblical story, such as Miriam in the Exodus or Mary Magdalene in the Gospels, have been degraded or explained away by the male-dominated tradition. “The key to the erasure of women in religious history, as in all patriarchal history, is not that they were inactive, but that they haven’t been able to shape the tradition by which the story of what they have done is remembered and carried on.” In her books she traces the triumph of the patriarchy over numberless incipient struggles for women’ equality throughout church history.
No one in authority, from the pope on down, would today defend the misogynist views of Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas, or any of the other sexist spokesmen of antiquity. Yet when Pope Paul VI compelled in 1976 to state his position on the ordination of women, his implied rationale was not inconsistent with these earlier views. “This is an unbroken tradition,” his official declaration stated: Because Jesus did not call women to be his apostles, the church cannot. It added, “as representative of the Head of the Church [Jesus], the bridegroom, the priest, must be male. There must be a natural resemblance between the priest and Christ. For Christ himself was and remains a male.”
