religious gender elitism

[sophiaserpentia]

About 100 men and women gathered outside Atlanta's Roman Catholic cathedral Thursday to protest the archbishop's exclusion of women from the Holy Thursday foot-washing ritual.

Contrary to the order from Archbishop John Donoghue, the protesters said the rite should include everyone. Donoghue did not address the protest during Mass Thursday night. He and his staff have refused to comment on the issue.

... In a letter last month to Atlanta priests, Donoghue said they should select 12 men from each parish to represent the apostles who had their feet washed by Jesus at the Last Supper.

from Faithful Decry Foot-Washing Ban of Women

It takes a special closed-ness of mind, and a special hatred of flesh, to think that the "fact" (disputed by some scholars and some non-canonical accounts) that Jesus' disciples were male sets a precedent that only people with penises deserve to participate in the remembrance of this event.

Jesus' message here was about humility, service, and compassion -- and this archbishop (and many before him) has turned it into something exclusionary.

Any mindset that reads the gospels and sees "people with penises" vs. "people without penises" instead of, just, people, is one that dehumanizes and closes the doors of the heart and soul.

Edit. It's difficult not to contrast the foot-washing scene in John, wherein Jesus washes the disciples' feet, with the foot-washing scene in Luke, where a woman (tradition says Mary Magdalene) washes Jesus' feet. If you restrict the remembrance of the scene in John to only male recipients, you are sending the subliminal message, intentionally or not, that it is fine for priests, who follow in the tradition of Jesus, to be served *by* women, but not to give service *to* women.

Comments

[novasoy.livejournal.com]

Some of us believe that poor, misunderstood, neglected Mary Magdalene, described in scripture as Apostle of Apostles, got more than her feet washed by Jesus. But then again, I am a no good dirty heretic that believes that the divine feminine is no less important than the divine masculine.

I am reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and it is set in a 14th century abbey full of monks. The shit they say about women is really overwhelming. Vessels of filth and impurity, agents of the devil, and so on. Dark ages indeed. Anyway, I had a point but I think I lost it.

[alobar.livejournal.com]

I have to (once again) wonder why anyone is still in the catholic church -- with the possible two exceptions of
a) heterosexual misogynist men, and
b) child molesting homosexual priests.

[qilora.livejournal.com]

just goes to show how clueless i am about the underlying-message to things...

i can remember reading about Mary doing this to Jesus, when i was still a young girl.. and i had this feeling of "see? you can say all you want about women, but if Jesus lets Mary (Magdalene) touch him like this, it just goes to show that he loves her"....

but the uneducated little person i was, i had always had sneaking suspicions (and outright fantasies) about Jesus and Mary Magdalene being secret lovers ;-)

Julia & Co.

[theodora.livejournal.com]

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[stacymckenna.livejournal.com]

THIS is why I'm glad I was raised in the Lutheran church - well, the ones I went to. My pastor in high school was female. My first pastor in LA is female. Our current interim pastor giving the regular a pastor during Lent is female. One of the other congregants, an ordained Lutheran pastor (converted from Judaism) is female. When I think about it, I've had just as many female pastors as male.

Now if we could just get the Lutheran Church at eliminate the "gay clergy must be celibate" conditional...

[ieremias.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, but when it comes down to it, they're fighting over who gets to wash feet. Dirty, smelly, poor people feet. I will never understand Christians.

[badsede.livejournal.com]

You, and the others looking in from the outside, are missing one very significant bit in all this. It is a discipline in the Church to pick 12 men to stand for the Apostles in this Rite. This is our discipline, this is our Rite, the meaning is ours and the liturgical unity is ours.

They are men only because they stand for the 12 apostles. That they are men is not the point. This is not a gender issue, and those who make it such have long since lost the meaning of the practice. That people are protesting this *is* a condemnation of that diocese, but not over gender. It is a condemnation that the diocese has failed to teach these people the meaning of what is going on.

It is not about men and women, it is not about the 12 men. It puts our priesthood in context. It defines their relation, in imitating the actions of Christ, they proclaim their servanthood.

What is at stake here is that the discipline is to select 12 men. Exceptions can be made, but discipline difines the norm, and it does this in part to foster liturgical unity. It is not that women are not worthy of standing in this role .. and those who truly understand Catholicism's Theology of the Body - and yes, the Church has a formal Theology of the Body - understand this with no problem. The problem is defying discipline, in putting our selves and out cultural gender issues before the liturgical unity of the Church. That is the problem here and one of the greatest problems that the Catholic Church faces in western culture. Western culture teaches us to put the individual above all others, Catholicsim teaches us to put the community before ourselves.

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

In SDA churches I attended with my foster mother, men and women would go into seperate rooms and wash each others feet so as to avoid any impure looking up of skirts and such :)
I always thought it was a nice thing.

I don't want to start another row within the fold, but...

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

You, and the others looking in from the outside, are missing one very significant bit in all this. It is a discipline in the Church to pick 12 men to stand for the Apostles in this Rite. This is our discipline, this is our Rite, the meaning is ours and the liturgical unity is ours.

This is the CATHOLIC Church we are talking about, not some cult, some breakaway "sect." To speak of the way the Catholic Church organizes and governs itself and enacts or performs what we call the "one, true faith" as being of nobody else's business but ours is a denial of what we claim to be. People like sopiaserpentia and ladybabalon have EVERY RIGHT to point out the obvious (see below).

They are men only because they stand for the 12 apostles. That they are men is not the point. This is not a gender issue, and those who make it such have long since lost the meaning of the practice. That people are protesting this *is* a condemnation of that diocese, but not over gender. It is a condemnation that the diocese has failed to teach these people the meaning of what is going on.

In some ways, I agree with this statement: the diocese has failed to teach the people of its parishes that men and women are equal sharers in the Kingdom. The diocese has failed to foster "community," but part of the way it has failed to foster community was to fail to show the people how to grasp and subdue and discipline the POWER that inheres, unfortunately, in EVERY human community, and then to USE it for the equal benefit and interest of ALL. The way that badsede speaks of the "diocese" (the ecclesiastical polity) "teaching" the "people" the way he does makes ME think that, at heart, he is still living, as are, unfortunately, the remnants of the Catholic faithful who still go to church (most don't) in the top-down phallocracy of the pre-Vatican II Church. Many of the Church's critics must understand that, in their hearts, most of the "faithful" (i.e."conservative" Catholics) justifying EVERYTHING the ossified, reactionary hierarchy is doing or saying nowadays, NEVER ACCEPTED THE DIRECTIONS VATICAN II THREATENED TO TAKE THE CHURCH IN. They've won, however; we "liberal" Catholics are thrown out, and rejected. I love that lonely old nun, though; she's a holy woman, who refuses to see her Church commandeered by the power-mad ecclesiastical bureaucrats of its hierarchy.