Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Community

03/28/2024

11/14/2023

Quote of the Week:

“I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.”

~James Baldwin

Prints: kellylatimoreicons.com

11/14/2023

Because consecrated men and women have already largely embraced synodality, their prophetic voices can teach the universal church to follow the path the Holy Spirit is leading us, Cardinal Robert McElroy said.

11/09/2023

The Rightful place of women in the church - Brendan Butler

Pope John Paul 2 used "complementarity" and Pope Francis uses another smokescreen that of the Petrine / Marian dichotomy to short circuit any further synodal discussion on women sharing in the ministerial priesthood and the maintenance of male supremacy in the Catholic Church.

Both subterfuges have no basis in Apostolic tradition - indeed both contradict how women lived out their baptismal priesthood in the early church.

Stephen Patterson, a leading Biblical scholar, in his book "The Forgotten Creed, Christianity's Original Struggle against Bigotry, Slavery and Sexism" states that 'even though many assume that the historic patriarchy of the Christian church, still prevalent today, goes back to its very beginnings there is a growing body of work to show that that is simply not so. There is a consensus among historians of Christian origins that women were, in fact, the leaders of of many of these early Christian communities".

One of the key pieces of evidence in this new consensus is Paul's Letter to the Romans, chapter 16.

Here Paul introduces us to Phoebe who is the 'Diakonos' of the church of Cenchreae, the port city of the Greek city of Corinth and who also is the 'Prostatis' of many people, including Paul himself.

The reason why these descriptions of Phoebe remain in the original Greek language is to show that these titles have been mis-translated first into Latin and then into English, the net effect of which totally diminishes Phoebe's real role in the Cenchreaen church. Whether this was intentional or the result of a latent misogynistic prejudice of clerical translators is an open question.

Even the Jerusalem bible mistranslates 'diakonos' as a 'deaconess' and 'prostatis' as a 'helper'.

However, the word diakonos used by Paul to describe Phoebe is a masculine noun, the plain sense being she is an official or 'minister' of her Church.

If she had been a deaconess , a woman whose role was limited mainly to spiritual care and not to a ministerial role, Paul would have used the Greek feminine version of the word - 'diaconissa'.

Equally the word 'prostasis' should typically be translated as one's patron who would offer social and financial support to one or many clients. Paul describes Phoebe as his patron and by extension patron of the Church at Conchreae. Eventually the patron- client relationship would provide the basic pattern of social hierarchy used by churches to organise themselves more formally. Bishops based themslves on Roman-style patronage of their churches .

So one may describe Phoebe as the original "proto -Bishop".

Was Phoebe a unique or rare example of female leadership in these early churches? Judging from the rest of Paul's letter she was certainly not. He goes on to mention many other important women. The first person he mentions is Prisca along with her male counterpart Aquila.

He also greets another couple 'Andronicus and Junia' who he describes as 'prominent figures among the apostles'.

That a woman could have been an apostle, let alone a prominent apostle was mind-blowing and moved translators to manufacture a masculine name 'Junias ' for her. Junias according to biblical scholars was not an actual name used in Paul's time. Even today in the Jerusalem Bible the name "Junias" is still used.!

What is even more important is that Paul states very definitely that both Junia and Andronicus were "in Christ" before him, meaning women were obviously involved in the leadership of the Jesus movement before Paul joined it.

Paul was surrounded by prominent women in these early Christian communities where - as he so often calls them "fellow workers in the Lord".

But what happened to all these women and where did they go and how did the church become the bastion of patriarchy that emerged and still remains?

It seems that a strong social conservative backlash quashed the social radicalism of the early church Creed where

"There is no Jew or Greek ,
There is no slave or free,
There is no male and female ;
For you are all one in Christ Jesus"
( Galatians 3 :26-28 ).

The so called Pastoral Epistles, falsely attributed to Paul, became the dominant ethos.
Instead a community where there was "no slave or free"
became a society accepting of slavery where It was now taught
"Let all who labour under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honour" (1 Tim 6:1)

Instead of a community where there was no distinction between men and women became repressive of women :
"Let a woman learn in silence with all submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first , the Eve; Adam was not deceived but the woman was and became a transgressor. However she will be saved by bearing children, if she continues in faith, love and holiness with modesty." (1 Tim2:11 )

Thus the church became a reflection of the world around it , a male-dominated slave dependent patriarchy.

Two thousand years later there is a glimmer of hope that once again equality will become a reality in the church where there is :
No Jew or Greek,
No slave or free,
There is no male and female.
For we all all one in Christ Jesus.

Brendan Butler

11/02/2023

POSTSCRIPT to the Synod from Mary McAleese following her speech in Rome on 14 October 2023 at Spirit Unbounded
(Photo: Susie Triffitt)

Not this century it seems! The publication of the report from the 2023 Synod on Synodality was accompanied by the unmistakable sound of multiple cans being kicked down road and sighs of weary disappointment from the People of God who had hoped against hope that this was at last a forum that might take their collective and consensual views seriously. Not a chance.

The balance of power within the Synod always lay with the bishops. The laity, including women were there in small numbers to make up the numbers and create an illusory pop-up-shop of going-nowhere circular dialogue. The well-sharpened scalpel of magisterially acceptable synthesis was taken to the editing process and in a “here is one we made earlier” moment, a magisterially-correct report rapidly appeared that could have been written by a junior curial official in twenty minutes two years ago before the whole Francis smoke and mirrors synodal circus started. Hence the total disappearance of the issue of LGBTIQ inclusion (game-set and match to the African bishops) and the reduction to bare minimalism of the “urgent” need for greater inclusion of women in decision making (game, set and match to Pope Francis). The latter had conveniently taken the issue of female ordination off the agenda in advance of the Synod (along with blessings for same-sex marriages) where everything was supposed to be on the agenda but obviously wasn’t. Ther Synod offered not a single idea of how to meaningfully include women except to tentatively suggest the two unpublished papal commissioned reports on women and deaconate be made available for the 2024 Synod. To say we cannot wait would be to stretch the truth into the stratosphere of the underwhelming.

The best contribution throughout the month came from Cardinal Schonborn who pointed out the obvious towards the end of the Synod, that the Pope alone has complete freedom to make the changes to the canon law, language, and teaching that People of God painstakingly expressed their views on during the two- year Synodal “listening” journey. Will he though? That is still the big roaring question to which the Synod 2023 report gave the tiniest squeak of an incoherent answer. It was never going to be enough to turn back the tide of distrust, discontent and now escalating doubt that the Latin Catholic Church is capable of being a Christ-centred egalitarian witness to the power of love in the world. As Christ’s homeland is pummelled by the politics of hate, his voice never more needed has never seemed more subdued, more silenced than in the Latin Catholic Church.

In the week that the Synod ended and its report was published, Irish television broadcast a programme on long-silenced Redemptorist priest Fr. Tony Flannery. Every single thing that provoked the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to revoke his priestly authority appeared among the firm views of the People of God in the syntheses that went from virtually every diocese to Rome. Tony’s views, while at odds with the magisterium, were revealed by the Synoidal process, to be in total agreement with the mainstream views of most Catholic Christians. Yet he still languishes in very painful exclusion and has come to the conclusion that despite brave unsuccessful efforts by himself and others to appeal his situation to a tone deaf, anti-due process institution (including the Pope), he would be a lot more spiritually content with a life in Christ lived entirely outside the Catholic Church. Dealing with its hypocrisies, its pettiness, its abuses, its oppressive unchristian bureaucracy, is just too wearying, too wasteful after all.

After Rome 2023, with nothing to look forward to from Rome 2024 and even less beyond that, a lot of the faithful who had been hanging on in dwindling hope of meaningful reform leading to equality and respect for the human rights of Church members, will likely agree with him. Some say why bother? Some say don’t give up. Some say to give up on the Church is not to give up on Christ. Some say to give up on the Church as a mature long-standing member is in fact to encounter Christ anew, in energising freedom for the first time.