Sir, - It would be very easy to laugh at the purported ordination of Sinead O'Connor. Emily Pankhurst and bra-burning, lesbian, separatist feminists have been labelled crazy, the antithesis of "real" women or simply publicity seekers. Conventional wisdom held the actions of these women to be "outrageous", a judgement frequently passed on Jesus of Nazareth by his contemporaries. However, it might also be possible to argue that they ploughed furrows in patriarchal soil within which others could sow and from which still others could reap. It might behove us to pause and see who will have the last laugh.
There seems little doubt that if we confine ourselves to an analysis of this event in terms of church law there are serious questions concerning what is "valid" and what is "licit" about the status of both the actor, Bishop Cox, and the acted upon, Sinead O'Connor. States and churches have laws to manifest coherent and predictable structural organisation for the welfare of citizens and followers respectively. But the purpose of laws is to serve people, not vice versa, and an over-emphasis on law can preclude the implementation of justice. A single focus on church law in this case might result in our being legally right while simultaneously missing the point.
The point is that at some time, and maybe in the not-too-distant future, a woman is going to be validly and licitly ordained within the Roman Catholic Church. In the not-too-distant past, whatever unusual acts might have been performed by even "a big joke" of a male bishop, it would have been unthinkable to ordain a woman. Times change, human understandings shift and tradition must be vital if it is to be truly valuable. If it remains static it will be broken, rather than reformed in ways that have allowed the present Pope to reinstate Galileo or to teach that woman are no longer to be presumed naturally inferior to men, at least in some respects.
Father Vincent Twomey (The Irish Times, April 27th) would presumably not consider the ordination of women to be a good thing, but in support of his legal argumentation in the case at hand, he has raised some "tricky theological and canonical issues" himself. He writes: "Central to the question of validity [of the conferring of orders] is to do as Christ intended." He bases this assertion on his understanding of sacramental theology, a theology that has extracted symbolic actions from the official record of the life of Jesus and encoded some of them into immutable laws.
Mixing law and symbols is a very tricky business indeed. It might lead us to conclude that the 12 male disciples, symbolically representing the 12 tribes of Israel, are to be the only legal recipients of the sacrament of Holy Orders, if we did not also know that Jesus commissioned others to evangelise and minister, or if we did not also know that he had female as well as male disciples. Father Twomey relies solely on an interpretation of systematic theology made outside the context of scriptural theology. There is a substantial body of scriptural theology that maintains that there is no text in the New Testament that confers ordination as understood by the later church on anybody, men or women.
What any of us might want the Christ of faith to have intended is not necessarily what the Jesus of history intended. He might not have intended that Michael Cox would one day ordain Sinead O'Connor; but on the other hand he might have wished that, through the sacrament of baptism, each Christian be equal, not only in soul but also in body. If the church were ever to hold this belief, the present "antics", on whatever side of the divide, would never be necessary. - Yours, etc., Gail Grossman Freyne,
Charleville Road, Rathmines, Dublin 6.