ABSTRACT
There is no doubt that one of the voices of our age is concerned with issues of gender and authority particularly in the Catholic Church. In trying to understand the relationship between women and authority it is, perhaps, women’s exclusion from authority that needs to be analysed and explained. Fields as far apart as Marxism and feminist psychoanalytical theory indicate internalized codes of masculinity and femininity which form gender-based distinctions of responsibility in the ordering of society. It is this chapter’s intention to highlight some areas of language – particularly language for the Christian God – which may have some bearing on the influence of language with regard to gender distinctions between men and women. It will seek to suggest that this use of language has a direct effect on women’s failure to gain decision-making roles of authority in the Church. How we name God, the Trinity, Jesus and the Holy Spirit in scriptural exegesis, liturgy, prayer and sacramental life influences our concepts of the world around us and the men and women who make up the community of believers – the ‘entire People of God’. The Catholic Church has retreated into a theology of the ontology of sexual
difference between male and female in order to uphold its teaching on the exclusion of women from the priesthood so that the nature of sexual difference is something of essentialist importance, as seen in the effect of the influential theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar on the current papacy. In her latest work2 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza maintains that, for thousands of years, men and women were considered to be the same and have the same genitals (the woman’s being merely turned into her body). It was social rank and society that determined what it meant to be a man or woman – that is, determined gender. Males were the élite, property-owning heads of household and women were clearly inferior. The concept of two separate but stable sexes only emerged during the Enlightenment. Because claims for equality and freedom included those of women, new arguments had to be produced to justify male dominance in society, culture, economics and the Church. Numerous writings of the time emphasize women’s unsuitability to act in the public domain.
