Sisters excluded

Would-be women priests are still knocking on closed church doors, writes Jill Rowbotham

February 02, 2006 MOST patrons lured to Cafe Bello in inner-city Brisbane by its advertised “Aussie cuisine, great atmosphere, live entertainment” are unaware of a very different kind of social intercourse being conducted. The cafe is the preferred watering hole of Yvonne McRostie, single mother of two and minister of the local Uniting Church.

McRostie, who has been ordained for five years, is responsible for the mainly elderly congregations of the Grove Uniting Church and its sister Kennedy Terrace Uniting Church. But her duties extend far beyond the churches’ doors: “As a mother I have involvement at the local school tuckshop, as well as teaching religious education at the school. And I meet people in Woolies and walking the streets and in Cafe Bello.”

Come Sundays, McRostie dons her robes and delivers the traditional sermon, which has been the right of women in the 1.2 million-strong Uniting Church since its inception in 1977. In 2005 women comprised a healthy 24.8per cent of the church’s 1415 ordained ministers, compared with 18.2 per cent in 1995.

But Uniting Church women who feel called to ministry are far luckier than their sisters in some other Christian denominations.

While Baptists, the Salvation Army and other Protestant churches ordain women, for Catholic women the right is still off limits despite falling numbers of young men entering the priesthood. In the Church of England in Britain, the mother church of the world’s 76 million Anglicans, women priests make up only about 16 per cent of full-time clergy. The church is also pushing towards the consecration of women bishops but there is significant dissent within church ranks. The international provinces – the national and regional units that comprise the global church – are still split. In Australia there are 360 women among a total of 3403 Anglican priests.

Secular Western society sorted out the legal rights of women decades ago, even if in practice men dominate spheres such as government and business. But the churches remain a world unto themselves, where arguments are based on interpretation of the Bible and in some cases on a religious attachment to tradition. But inside “the body of Christ” the battle is far from over.

Even in churches where the cause seems unlikely to be won, people are agitating for change. Marilyn Hatton, the co-convener of the Ordination of Catholic Women, a lobby group formed 12 years ago, says there is no scriptural basis for the exclusion of women and none in church law. “If women are baptised we should also be ordained, and we are all one in the eyes of Christ,” Hatton says.

Among the Catholic Church’s arguments is that there is no right to ordination in the Catholic Church, for men or for women; that the person who officiates at the eucharist is representing the priesthood of Christ and therefore must be male; and that Jesus chose men to be his apostles, not women.

“I always point to the fact that when God became incarnate, it was as man,” Sydney auxiliary bishop Julian Porteous says. “And I also say that Jesus did not feel constrained by cultural or religious laws of the day, so the choice of men as disciples was deliberate.”

Advocates for women’s ordination say that the all-male priesthood denies that women are also made in the image of God and that Jesus called women as well as men to be his disciples, notably Mary Magdalene, who was also the first to see the risen Christ.

There are also Catholic women who want to be priests. “One difficulty is that a number of the women who would aspire to ministry [and] who are working in the Catholic system feel very threatened and are often not prepared to talk about it,” Hatton says. Abroad, notably in France and in North America, some have been ordained or received priestly instruction outside the church.

OCW believes in remaining within the system and fighting to give the issue a profile among Australia’s five million Catholics, via its website and annual conference. Hatton acknowledges it’s a long battle, but argues it is important for future generations that the debate be kept alive. “I feel duty-bound to pursue my conscience on this issue,” she says.

Australia’s four-million-strong Anglican Church has been ordaining women since 1992, but there is division over the issue and a handful of the country’s 23 dioceses refuse to fall in line. Sydney is the largest objector. “We believe leadership of congregations should be in the hands of gifted males,” the Bishop of North Sydney, Glenn Davies, explains. “We believe the Bible teaches us that position and it’s not a position preferred for social or cultural reasons or even tradition.”

Part of the reasoning is that just as there is an ordered relationship between God the father, Jesus the son and the Holy Spirit, the correct order in the church (and in marriage) is that men are the leaders and women follow. Men are on their honour to take great and loving care of their wives.

Women are not excluded from all leadership roles in either the Catholic or Anglican church. Apart from nuns, there is a large number of women pastoral workers in Catholic parishes. Likewise among the Sydney Anglicans, there is no barrier to women training for the deaconate, a pastoral role below that of priest. Yesterday, however, at a dress rehearsal in Sydney for the annual ordination of deacons, all 46 graduates from the Moore Theological College were men. It begs the question why there are no women. The college’s principal, John Woodhouse, says “it is because so many other opportunities for women’s ministry are available; there are more women than ever before studying at Moore College and more than ever before going into a range of Christian ministries, of which deacon is only one”.

Leading Melbourne Anglican Muriel Porter, a laywoman, newspaper columnist, long-time advocate of women’s ordination and a critic of the Sydney diocese, is concerned there will be a lengthy delay in the Australian church giving the nod to women bishops. This is because the voting system of the church’s triennial parliament, or General Synod, requires a two-thirds agreement among lay representatives, clergy (priests and deacons) and diocesan bishops, and for the vote to be taken at each of two successive synods.

“We are going to get there but I hope it’s not too long-term because of the damage it does to the church and to women in our wider community,” Porter says.

“It’s like women getting the vote and those other things concerning women’s full humanity. The first time I attended a eucharist celebrated by a woman, I had the most extraordinary experience of feeling fully the child of God.” That was a meeting in a private home in the 1980s, presided over by an American woman priest. “If you only ever see men representing God in church people naturally assume they are the only ones favoured by God,” Porter says. “If you see women standing up there, women can believe they are fully the children of God.”

If Australian Anglicans approve women bishops, the smart money is on Archdeacon Heather Marten being the first to be appointed. Marten is the adminstrator of the Victorian diocese of Gippsland because its former bishop, Jeffrey Driver, who became the Archbishop of Adelaide last year, has not yet been replaced.

Marten was ordained a priest in Melbourne in 1992 after having been a deacon since 1986. After years in city parishes, she moved back to her home area of Gippsland in 2004.

On the prospect of becoming a bishop, she says anyone invited to do so would have to consider it very carefully. “One thing the last few months have taught me is that is it a huge job, a massive role,” she says. “Potentially there are enormous opportunities but there are also opportunities for disaster.

“The other thing that I have touched very slightly – and I have heard bishops speak of this in past – is that it’s a lonely role. There is a kind of aloneness about what happens – the travelling, that there is no base community one belongs to – and I think that’s an aspect one would have to consider.”

She is agnostic on the intriguing question of whether women minister differently from men. “I think everyone is different and brings their own particular qualities,” she says. “I think the jury is still out on that one, frankly.”

McRostie believes women have a different approach to “telling the Christian story”. “Women even have a different approach to reading the Christian scriptures,” she says. “Through a woman’s eyes I can visualise the reality of why Jesus came, which was to break down the imbalances in society.” She cites one of the biblical texts used to argue for the ordination of women: “There is no longer Jew nor Gentile, there is no longer slave or free, there is no more male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

“That’s an amazing world view and the reason why I continue in ministry despite a very small percentage of people still not accepting my position in the church.

“Women don’t get mentioned much in the Bible but when they do, they are strong, bold and adventurous women who bring about change in very creative ways,” McRostie says. “Maybe that is why we need to be in ministry, to continue to model those women.”

Jill Rowbotham is The Australian’s religious affairs writer

From http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,18009170%255E28737,00.html