Please enjoy a thought-provoking footnote from the eighth chapter of my new book The Jesuit Disruptor: “Ragging the Puck.”
The footnote comes from a discussion of the synodal document Enlarge the Space of Your Tent.
Almost all reports raise the issue of full and equal participation of women: ‘The growing recognition of the importance of women in the life of the Church opens up possibilities for greater, albeit limited, participation in Church structures and decision-making spheres’ (Brazil). However, the reports do not agree on a single or complete response to the question of the vocation, inclusion and flourishing of women in Church and society.
After careful listening, many reports ask that the Church continue its discernment in relation to a range of specific questions: the active role of women in the governing structures of Church bodies, the possibility for women with adequate training to preach in parish settings, and a female diaconate. Much greater diversity of opinion was expressed on the subject of priestly ordination for women, which some reports call for, while others consider a closed issue.” It remains a peculiarity of the discussion around women that in some fundamental way it is anomalous.
Why should gender be a determinate of full inclusion? Why do we have women in/and the church when men in/and the church is a given? The deeper cultural-historical-anthropological dimensions of this discussion have yet to be fully explored. The biblical appears to be consigned to the margins, the ontological and canonical enjoying privileged priority, the ecumenical sidelined.
There are many signs that Francis understands the stakes involved and that they are high: after all, in his position as Bishop of Rome, he exercises the Petrine ministry of unity. And he also understands that we live in a time when there has been a fundamental shift of consciousness, which his fellow Jesuit Bernard Lonergan identified as a shift form a classicist to a historicist consciousness, and that this shift is epoch shaking.
Time, prudence, trust, and meaningful encounter are the way forward if the very structures of the church are not to be permanently sundered. Hence, the need for synodality that embodies those very qualities and virtues.
Michael’s new book The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis (House of Anansi, Sept. 2024) can be purchased through Amazon Australia.
Dr. Michael W. Higgins has been involved with investigating and expanding the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, particularly in Canada, for over forty years. Dr. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto.
With thanks to Pontifex Minimus.
Pontifex Minimus is written on the ancestral territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation peoples, who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial.
