A Letter to an Eastern Catholic Friend

Dear B:

Sorry for the delay in responding to your e-mail, but things have been interesting around here. One thing of interest is that Beth was scheduled for further reconstructive surgery in later June. That has been bumped up to this Thursday. In consequence, it looks as though we will have to skip going to Disneyland with you on Friday. Sorry. I've looked at the ticket situation for Disneyland, though, and have found that the ticket discount for Southern California residents ended on 4/27, and would only have been about $10 dollars per ticket. Ah, well.

On the other hand, it looks as though Beth will have recovered enough from this surgery so that she should be able either to see you at St. Andrew's on Sunday, or later Sunday afternoon and evening for dinner at my mother's house. You and your family are of course invited. My mother sends her greetings: she rather likes youze guyz.

As regards your RC theology internet class, and the subject of the ordination of women, we tend to get a fair amount of that nonsense, especially from our relatively close contact with RC priests, and Loyola Marymount University. The latter's poor excuse for a theology department is why I am looking at St. Stephen's Program and St. Serge Seminary for distance learning.

One of the things that one should realize is that the feminist impetus, which is the driving force for the ordination of women, is neither based upon a concern for scripture nor tradition: rather, it is founded upon the classic liberal ideal of "empowerment" for those who had been formerly "oppressed" or "subjugated" by retrograde ways of thinking, mainly of "patriarchal" society. For those who hold the feminist view, tradition and adherence to scripture, especially as they relate to the presbyterate and the episcopate, are part and parcel of that "retrograde", "patriarchal" way of thinking, which in more these more enlightened times should be put away by the intelligent and the mature.

The feminist view is greatly assisted by the fact that in the Latin West, the priesthood and the sacraments have until quite recently been looked upon as "powers" or a "club" reserved for men only, to which considerable political, intellectual, and "spiritual" privilege have been attached. Put a bit more crassly, in the West, the clergy are paid to be good, while the laity are good for nothing. I dare say that if I were a woman, and if I were confronted with an ethos like that, I would be all in favor of dismantling the lot of it.

I think the thing to point out to the feminists of either sex among the Latins is that the East has a rather different ethos, or way of doing things. In our little village, the church property is generally owned and run by the people of the community, rather than the hierarchy; the priest and the deacon are guys who have a job like us, and are people with whom we work and live, and their wives have as an important a role in the community as they do. The bishop is as often as not a monastic, devoted (as were the Apostles) to the teaching of the Gospel and the divine services. Our real intellectual and spirtual elite are the monastics, who quite often are laypeople who are devoted to the spiritual life, and who may be either male or female. And female monastics, from St. Catherine to Cassiani to Mary of Egypt, have been as important to our spiritual life as have the men folk.

Finally, we do not consider the priest or the deacon to be "invested" with a "power" to make or "confect" the sacraments; instead, by the laying on of hands by the Bishop, he has become an icon of Christ, and it is Christ in him who anoints the sick, who hears confessions and absolves sins, and who accomplishes the Paschal sacrifice by which bread and wine become His sacred body and blood, and our spiritual nourishment. More particularly, rather than being the guys who run the show (as was the case until recently in the West), the priest and deacon are the primary (but not the only) actors in the great drama of the Divine Liturgy: they are icons of Christ the Teacher and Christ the Servant. We choose men to serve those roles because Christ was a man, and for much the same reason that we choose men to play the roles of Gandalf, or Aragorn, or Hamlet, or Kent in King Lear. While I suppose that a director might decide to miscast women for those roles, the resulting mess would be a bad play. And our Church, in her wisdom, has decided that those roles in the Divine Liturgy are to be served only by men. No problem, though: there is plenty enough for the rest of us to do in that Liturgy, and, by the grace of God, in the Kingdom of Heaven as well.

I hope this is of some help to you.

Bernie