Deliver Us from Evil

“Holy Week 2004 should have been a wonderful experience,” one priest told me last week, “but our bishops came very close to ruining it for me. I mean, they’ve been earning a lot of bad press lately, but you’d think they might at least take Holy Week off.”

The priest was talking, of course, about the decision of some bishops to exclude women from the Holy Thursday foot-washing ritual. Boston’s Archbishop Sean O’Malley managed to make Bernard Law look liberal by reversing his predecessor’s practice of including women among those he washed. And Atlanta’s Archbishop John F. Donoghue went a step further, making his personal exclusion of women archdiocesan policy, by prohibiting all priests from including them. The bishops offered various rationales, ranging from the use of “viri” (“men”) in the liturgy’s instructions to the idea that Jesus’ foot-washing symbolized his founding of the priesthood—which, of course, cannot include women.

On Holy Saturday, the irony of the bishops’ action was a sharp as a slap in the face. Luke’s gospel narrates the classic drama of three women discovering the empty tomb. Realizing that Jesus lives, these women become the original witnesses to the Resurrection, the first to believe in it—the first Christians! This is no accident, since Jesus’ male followers (excepting John) had abandoned him in fear and shame, and remained in hiding even as the women stood vigil at the foot of the cross.

Not only that, but when the women race back to tell the other disciples, Luke tells us the men think the women are speaking “pure nonsense, and they did not believe them.”

On the face of it, the gospel account shows that Jesus’ chosen male leaders proved unreliable once Jesus was arrested, that the women among his followers demonstrated superior loyalty, that they overcame their fear and found the courage to announce the Good News of Christ’s rising—only to be dismissed by men who were clearly unprepared to take the word (the “idle tale”) of women seriously.

This irony was reinforced at the Easter Vigil in our local church community, which welcomed five new baptized and confirmed members—all women! The presider couldn’t resist comparing the prominence of feminine faith in both Gospel and Vigil with the bishops' preference for masculine feet. Needless to say, the preacher’s comparison did not flatter the bishops.

Several Atlanta priests simply cancelled the foot-washing rather than exclude women, and several Boston priests said they would have done the same thing if necessary. Archbishop Donoghue, who had applied the same policy years earlier as bishop of the diocese of Charlotte, told his priests to explain to people that the ritual is “A representation of Christ’s linkage of the institution of the Eucharist to the establishment of the ordained priesthood and the burden of service placed upon those who are called to the priesthood.”

This repeats and reinforces three old misconceptions: that service is only for the ordained, that discipleship is only for a small elite male-only class, and that the main sacrament of Christian vocation is Holy Orders rather than Baptism. These misconceptions are among the principal props that for centuries have supported clericalism, a model of Church governance that made Catholics dependents of the clergy much as children are dependents of their parents.

It was this same clericalism, of course, which created a “Father knows best” mentality that left so many real children vulnerable to sexual abuse by clergy. Clericalism also made it difficult or impossible to hold priests accountable for their abuse. And clericalism even made it possible for bishops to escape accountability when they failed us all by giving abusers access to more children.

Bible scholars debate whether the account of Jesus washing feet (traditionally called the mandatum) should be interpreted as a symbol of priestly ordination. But Archbishops Donoghue's interpretation, however dubious, proves one thing: clericalism may be obsolete, but it is not yet extinct.

The US bishops’ committee on the liturgy took a different view in 1987:

“The principal and traditional meaning of the Holy Thursday mandatum…is the biblical injunction of Christian charity: Christ’s disciples are to love one another…It has become customary in many places to invite both men and women to be participants in this rite in recognition of the service that should be given by all the faithful to the Church and to the world.”.”

Meanwhile, Luke’s gospel and our local Easter vigil reflected another reality: the long-standing importance of women in Catholic life. Over the last generation, for example, the growing priest shortage has coincided with a rise in lay leadership dominated by women. By now women make up nearly 80% of the parish staffs in the US.

Some bishops appear to understand that this is no time to emphasize the distinction between the ordained and the unordained. In such crisis it is more prudent and pastorally constructive to focus instead on the common call of Baptism, which unites us all in the body of Christ. This is the kind of leadership that may heal, rather than widen, the rift between people and hierarchy that is one consequence of the current crisis in American Catholicism.

In 529 AD, St. Benedict was preparing to create the first religious community of monks, thus abandoning the established tradition of living as a hermit. When challenged with the question, “Why is the hermit’s life not good enough for you?” he answered, “If I live alone, whose feet will I wash?” Fifteen centuries later his words find echo in the warning of an Atlanta woman alienated by her bishop’s exclusion: “A shepherd who cares only for the rams won’t have a flock for very long.”

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