(This is a two parts article, you can read part 1 Here)
In the previous part of this article, I argued that excluding women from clerical status leaves them to be dominated by men who enjoy the authority associated with that status. In this context, the recent decision by the Study Commission on the Women’s Diaconate to not endorse a women’s diaconate brings us no closer towards addressing the issue.
So what responses to the problem are left to the Church?
One response would be to reconcile ourselves to this domination. If we take clerical authority as a given, we seem committed to this approach: the Church teaches that clerical authority can only be possessed by men, citing both metaphysical reasons, and divine institution. Under this view, the domination of women by men thus finds its foundation in God as Creator and founder of the Church.
However, this would (rightly) be unacceptable for many Catholics today. Indeed, even relatively antifeminist popes of our time like John Paul II, who was otherwise happy to baptise inequality of access to clerical status (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, §3), nevertheless emphasised the importance of securing “real equality in every area” for women (Letter to Women, §4).
The other approach, signalled by no less than the late Pope Francis, is to not take clerical authority as a given, but to seek a more radical reorganisation of authority that empowers women despite their exclusion from clerical status. But what would this actually have to look like? Three possible models occur to me:
The first is the inclusion model, which seeks to empower women within existing structures. This would require creating authority within the existing hierarchy of the Church that is genuinely parallel to male clerical authority. For genuine equality at the highest level, this would require women to be able to wield authority equal (if different) to that of bishops—including the Pope.
The second is the redistribution model, which seeks to make authority equally accessible to men and women without necessarily retaining existing structures. This would mean making all forms of authority available to all members of the Church regardless of their state, at least in principle—including those currently seen as specific and integral to certain forms of clerical status, such as teaching authority (Lumen Gentium, §25).
Finally, there is the most radical—and, if we are worried about domination as such, perhaps the most consistent consistent—model of all: abolition. This model involves abolishing all hierarchy in the Church, running it instead like an anarchist collective.
Any of these models would require a genuinely staggering revision of how we think about the role of clergy.
In short, if women cannot enjoy clerical authority, the Church is in a bind: it must either explicitly embrace the unacceptable, or it must undergo almost unthinkably radical structural transformation.
Maybe the pressure of this decision will drive the Church to discover the possibility of women clergy, if it indeed exists. Otherwise, I fear that it will be easier for the Church to accept that God wants men to dominate women than to imagine a genuinely egalitarian future. The combined weight of historical convention, tradition, cultural norms, material conditions, and vested interests all lean towards this option.
But we are also Christians: imagining possibilities at odds with the sinful world is kind of our whole deal—so perhaps can still be hope.