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Gender and Sacrifice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Adrian Edwards C S Sp
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This is an attempt to see what some of the underlying assumptions in the current debates on the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic priesthood are. It seems to me that the debate is not getting anywhere because of the lack of common language of discussion. In such a quandary, the best thing to do would seem to be to look at the implicit assumptions of both sides. Perhaps we are really present at one of those night battles which both Newman and Matthew Arnold saw as characteristic of controversy in their own day, where neither side understands either the explicit arguments or the implicit assumptions of the other. If so, the best service an observer can do would be to see how these implicit assumptions plug into wider world-views.

One of the major arguments for the ordination of women is that the Church is inevitably affected by the social structures and cultural values of the age it is living in. Therefore the supposed argument from tradition lacks weight. There were not women priests for the same reason that there were not women lawyers or engineers. Objection to the ordination of women is just another case of the way in which religion of any sort seems to become a bulwark of extreme conservatism in social ideas, perhaps because of religion’s sociological role in stabilizing society and maintaining identities over time. Another form of this argument is that the Church cannot afford to continue neglecting the very great pool of ministerial talent that undoubtedly exists among women.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 67 , Issue 795 , September 1986 , pp. 372 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 My ideas about equality have been very much influenced by the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, who was stimulated by his encounter with the Hindu caste system to reflect at length on ideologies of equality and of hierarchy. See his Essais sur l'individualisme, Paris, Seuil, 1983.

2 See Ivan Illitch, Gender, London, Marion Boyars, 1983. for an ingeniously argued case that the incorporation of women in the labour market has not brought about their emancipation and that a society characterized by highly differentiated cultural and economic roles ascribed by gender would not necessarily be more unjust than present-day Western society, which professes to recognise simply the biological differences of the sexes.

3 An example of movements seeking for 'space' rathern than 'equality' would be contemporary North American Indian movements.

4 For a round-up of recent anthropological and theological views on sacrifice, see M. Fortes and M. Bourdillon (editors), Sacrifice, Cambridge University Press, 1980.

5 Islam, of course, is a fascinating example of a great religion which attaches very little importance to sacrifice, but sacrifice is significant in many forms of popular Islam.