John J. Shea, OSA: Letter to Cardinal Dolan, Season of Lent 2021

Season of Lent, 2021           

Dear Cardinal Dolan,

Salubrious Lent! I hope you are well. Nine years ago, I believe, I began writing to each one of the U.S. ordinaries about women’s body-and-soul status that is seen as an impediment to priestly ordination.

John J. Shea, OSA

Last year, I recounted an incident that, as you might expect, has stayed with me. In 1991, I was invited to India to speak at a conference honor­ing the life and work of Father D. S. Amalor­pavadass. After the con­ference, I offered a workshop on “Listening Skills in Pastoral Counsel­ling.” As I was describ­ing these skills, a priest from a neigh­boring country said: “Can I ask you a prac­tical question?” I said: “Of course.”

Mothers killing their baby girls was his most pressing pastoral problem. Families were too poor to provide a dowry, and it was too difficult to keep them. Later, reflecting on the horror of mothers killing their own daughters, I kept asking myself: “How can the church respond to this?” Then it came to me: “How can the church talk about the dignity and worth of women when it too sees women as inferior to men and as “‘not fully in the likeness of Jesus’?”

While happily teaching that women are not fully in the likeness of Jesus, you and your dutiful priests and silo theologians remain com­pletely silent on women’s ontological-theological status in the church.

• This silence begs the question: “What is it in the likeness of Jesus that women lack?” Do you and your confreres think that Jesus—leavening the culture with amazing respect and care for women and men alike—concurs with your obvious hierarchal honoring of the sexes based on gonadal difference”? In imaging Jesus as priest, prophet, and ruler, are you content to ape the culture, to embrace doctrinally Freud’s notion that “biology is destiny”?

• This silence leaves women unrecog­nized, un­called, voiceless, misbegotten males, a sub-human or extra-human species.

• This silence makes it impos­sible for the church here and around the world to adequately pro­vide pastoral care and Eucharist.

• This silence writes off an ever-growing con­gregation—women and men alike—for whom the church is a sexist, sclerotic, deaf-dumb-and-blind, hope­lessly archaic, dehu­man­­­­izing institution—the binary opposite of caring, trustworthy, and prophetic.

If the U.S. bishops have had a challenging time speaking about women intelligently, is it time to allow women to speak for themselves? With serious inquiry, listening, and in­formed discus­sion—position, power, and privilege discounted enough—might a picture of women’s integral body-and-soul develop­ment emerge—a non-Freudian, non-sexist, present-day picture any normal person would easily recognize?

In a dialogue on women’s integrity are there ex­periences you can speak to that others would benefit from hearing? Is there wisdom you have gleaned over the years about the meaning of the Incar­nation and the giving of pastoral care? Can women not bring enduring qual­ities to every kind of ministry? Have you the courage to discuss with each other whether there is something essential to Jesus’ likeness that women lack?

Can you embrace a better theology than the literal, anthropomor­phic, “finger and thumb” thinking that so cripples and confounds us? Can a deeper, meta­phorical, and Trinitarian theology be had? If it is not in maleness that Jesus images the Father—if neither Father nor Spirit is biologically male—what do you believe the imaging is about?

In pastoral care, two things are realized as we grow older: one, the whole of lived experience; the other, a voice that takes responsi­bility for that experience. Must promising to uphold the church’s teach­ing mean—iron­ically and impossibly—forfeiting the wisdom that makes teaching and pastoral care possible? Might not the many voices at bishop-sponsored synods in Australia and Germany model a helpful way forward?

If “not fully in the likeness of Jesus”—mindlessly repeated for millennia—is a definition of “the big lie,” will you finally call this lie out? With real leadership, will you affirm that women fully image Father, Son, and Spirit? Will you declare that women will never again—in body or in soul—be denigrated in the church? At long, long, long last will you put an end to our church’s obscene, execrable ecclesiology of misogyny?

Our church suffers a profound, patri­archal, self-inflicted, justice-dissing, festering wound. As a pastoral and teach­ing bishop, will you take—quam primum—the healing of this wound upon yourself?

Sincerely,

John J. Shea, O.S.A.