What I’d like to offer you is a reflection on some of the issues involved in the important topic of women in Christianity—a topic which I am convinced is a call of the Spirit to each one of us, an invitation to be part of the evolution of the human consciousness. I will give the historical background of the issue of women in Christianity, particularly the roots of sexual inequality in the Church, and how this has played itself out in the life of the Church. I will also be drawing on the almost hidden tradition of great women whose lives have continued to call us to be all that we can be for the sake of the Kingdom of God. I would like to end with some suggestions on how to respond to the Spirit’s call to transform the Church into an open Church of wholeness, mutuality, and inclusiveness.

John XXIII, in his landmark encyclical Pacem in Terris in 1963, pointed to signs of the times in the contemporary world. He singled out three social movements taking place worldwide: the working class movement, movement of nations towards independence, and the women’s movement. As members of a post-Vatican II Church we are very familiar with the term "signs of the times." They are cultural, societal processes, issues that demand our attention as Church. They sometimes emerge gently, almost imperceptibly. Quite often they are labor pains of a new world that is coming into being, shocking us out of our comfort and sensibilities, shaking institutions and bursting our old paradigms. And quite often, too, our initial reaction is to resist, to deny, to protest, to look the other way because they demand not only attention but also a rearrangement of our lives. We would rather ignore them in the hope that they would go away. We sometimes behave like the proverbial ostrich or we would like to call upon the magician who can make the Statue of Liberty "disappear."

But these signs of the times are cries that emerge from the bowels of humanity and will not go away. They will call out insistently until we accept them and acknowledge them as the groaning of the Spirit and, therefore, holding promise for new life if we respond or threat to our own diminution and that of the human species if we don’t.

The women’s movement has held out such a promise of new life. Societies that have admitted women into their inner circles willy-nilly have acquired an equilibrium, a wholeness that has added to its health and sanity. Perhaps, on a personal and episodal level, many of us have met men and women who have been transformed both psychologically and spiritually by admitting into their lives and persons the changes in relationships in gender, and they have emerged as "beautiful persons." They have been liberated from a fixation put into place by our cultures centuries ago. Erving Goffman, a noted sociologist, disagrees with Marx that "religion is the opiate of the masses" (Goffman 1987:63). He said that, prior to religion, there is a more primeval cultural conditioning of humans even before they are born. And that is gender: a social arrangement whereby persons are neatly categorized according to the sex they are born with and are forever boxed in according to that categorization. And we hardly question the contents of the boxes we were put into by our families, our schools, our church, our government. They have been so much part of our environment that we take them as natural.

The promise of the women’s movement to all men and women is that you can be free of the box! It tells you "Be all you can be!" With all your resources and gifts, your limitations and fragility, you can shape yourself and your world, not according to pre-set limitations imposed by conventional gender arrangements. Be shaped by the continuing calls of life which draw out all the resources within you which you did not know were there.

The women’s movement in secular society has spilled over into the Church. Naturally! We live and move and have our being in the world. Like any institution, the Church interacts with its environment and absorbs insights from society. And like any institution, it can only remain vital if it evolves in its interaction with the world like a living organism, rather than an unchanging, unchangeable institution. The world, with all its ambiguities and its disasters and pains, is dynamic; its very chaos holds the raw material for renewal of all institutions, including the Catholic Church.

John XXIII had that intuition—that by opening out to the world, by letting the wind come in, the world would set into motion a dynamism of renewal of the Church. He understood God’s presence in the depth of society.

The question is whether the Church has accepted the intuitions of the women’s movement and has allowed itself to be transformed by these intuitions. Perhaps, on the ground, on the level of many individuals, the answer is yes, as we do observe people around us becoming more open, welcoming, and inclusive. But on the level of the institution, the answer is: not yet. I hope it is coming. Given the history of the Church, it is not surprising. The response of the Church all along the centuries to the different signs of the times it encountered has been the same: you always have persons whose refinement of spirit has made them sensitive to the stirrings in their environment, but the institution often proved impermeable until either a cataclysm or a groundswell forced it to move or to change. When I look at the history of the Church’s response to these initiatives, to these signs of the times, I say "Sayang! (What a pity!) Que pena! Quel dommage!" Opportunities missed! Opportunities to be instruments of the Spirit for the birthing of the Kingdom in the world! Opportunities to become a healthier institution. I don’t need to go over these lost opportunities, but just to mention the outstanding ones: the spirituality movements in the middle ages, the Protestant Reformation, the age of science and learning in the 16^th-17^th centuries, the democracy movement, and the Industrial Revolution of the 19^th century. These movements pried societies open, creating possible entry points for Christian witness and "inculturation." Unfortunately, the hierarchical Church reacted with fear, domination, and exclusion—cutting away the very elements that could have catalyzed greater health and vitality for itself.

The Church today is in crisis. The most obvious is the huge number of sexual scandals in many parts of the world. But personally, I feel that we cannot resolve the problems of the Church unless we look at the Church wholesale, unless we dare to explore these problematic areas in a deep and thorough manner with all the resources we have now, resources of the human sciences, resources of theological and scriptural studies, resources of the spirit. These problems are of one piece. Problems of sexual abuse are intertwined, not just with psychology and moral theology, but with Church structure and power relationships, with scripture and hermeneutics, with Church history and interpretation of tradition, in short with how the Church understands itself. Do we dare to honestly look into all?

It is a normal reaction for people to feel threatened, personally and institutionally, by a major challenge that looms as a threat of a loss of a cherished, solid tradition, every stone of which was seen as founded firmly on God’s fiat. To be afraid of women’s voices in the Church is to miss an opportunity for reexamination that could lead to a fresh breath of the Spirit circulating new life in the body of the Church, whereas the Church stands to gain if it welcomes this challenge with respect for well-intentioned persons whose greatest concern is the well-being of the Church. It is not a win-lose situation, but a win-win situation.

Like other challenges coming from an evolving consciousness that spells real progress of the human spirit, feminism asks us whether we are clinging fiercely to images of the divine that are inadequate but that fill up our need for security to the point of idolatry. If our tradition is healthy and alive, we must welcome calls for new understanding and clarity regarding our faith from bearers of truth, no matter from what sector, and not strangle the truth with our self-protective defense mechanisms. We need to be reminded that there has always been an apophatic tradition in Christianity, particularly in mysticism, which underscores the foundational reality in theology that all our language of God is inadequate and that this God is personally encountered as Mystery, not as Doctrine, and that God’s word, faithful and constant, continually recreates the realities in which we encounter this Mystery.

Understandably, the issue in the Church of the awakening of women to their dignity could be perceived as something of a Pandora’s box because of all the intertwined issues. The issues that are related to the women’s issue go right to the heart of interpretation of scripture and of doctrine (like the image of God), of morality (like notions of sin), of Church structure (the nature of Church), of canon law (justice in the Church), of pastoral practice (partnership in ministry), etc. It is so huge a challenge for the Church that, in some sense, I can understand why Church authorities prefer to be silent about it and to arbitrarily impose silence on its members.

It could also be the challenge for the Church to become more like Jesus, its lord and master. The women’s issue is a litmus test of the authenticity of the Church’s desire to be like Jesus: humble, open, caring, secure in the love of Abba.

If the Church does not look at this issue, the problem will remain and fester like an abscess and the Church will become even more dysfunctional. It is a problem that will refuse to go away because it strikes at the very identity of women, who make up more than half of the Church. This identity is not to be thought of only in terms of roles and functions in the context of the Roman Catholic community, but, more important her identity before her God. No amount of beautiful rhetoric on the dignity of women can replace the actual re-valuation of women as made in the image of God—and of Christ—and working out the implications of being the image of God or Christ in Church practice. This is the core of the issue: do women have the image of Christ just as men do? The Church has said in no uncertain terms that women do not have the fullness of the image of Christ as men do.

That statement might come as a shock to both men and women today. To women, especially, it is an outrage, an affront to their dignity as persons. But it is this that lies at the heart of the refusal of the Church to admit women into sacramental ministry. The Vatican’s declaration Inter Insigniores, which forbids priesthood to women, ties the image of Christ to what it says is "natural resemblance," the physical sexual similarity of the minister to Jesus the man.

For many exegetes and theologians that argument cannot stand close scrutiny. It is the residue of a long history of exclusion of women from ministry, but of a history which does not jibe with the openness and inclusiveness of Jesus. It goes back to the earliest professional theologians of Christianity, the Fathers of the Church.

The Fathers of the Church were brilliant men of immense importance for the development and formulation of Church doctrine. It was through their efforts that Christianity developed into a distinct faith with its own doctrine and organization. The Fathers shaped the attitudes of the medieval and modern Church on the "nature" and "role" of women. In other words, they are responsible for the theological construction of woman. This is found scattered in their writings. To put them in the most charitable light, they were ambivalent.

They recognized that women could have spiritual gifts, and encouraged them to practice continence as virgins or widows. They praised virgins to the high heavens. But this mystique of virginity they created was one side of the coin; the other was the denigration of women and body and sexuality. They saw women as weak in mind and body, sexually provocative, and thus, easily inclined to sin and heresy, and potentially a danger to devout Christian men. They were, therefore, to be excluded from public teaching and all forms of public religious leadership. This is a big shift from the earliest stage of Christianity, the Jesus movement, characterized by equality among the disciples.

Ignatius of Antioch (d.110 CE) was one of the first to contribute towards the construction of the mythology of Eve, the first woman (and every woman is Eve!), created inferior and subject to man and misled by the devil, and he warned the Church against being deceived by his heresy (Ephesians ch.17, Trallians, ch. 10).

Tertullian (155-245) wrote several books on women, one of which contains the locus classicus of Christian misogyny:

Tertullian was soon followed by other theological giants with their elaborations of this mythology, which found its full flowering in the 4^th century with John Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine.

John Chrysostom, the golden-tongued orator, wrote lengthily of women:

Augustine, the man whose genius towered over all others in his impact on Western Christianity, is already known to most of us for his negative views on sexuality and on women. He had utterly no doubts regarding women’s inferiority even on the metaphysical level:

The Didascalia Apostolorum, a collection of Church laws from mid-third century North Syria, laid down rules regarding the participation of women in Church, and effectively took women out of any meaningful role, aside from the subsidiary roles prescribed for them as widows and deaconesses at the service of other women. It was only one of the first of many decrees that took Church ministry away from women.

These quotations show that the Fathers viewed scripture through their own cultural biases, and found support for their views from passages of Scripture which subordinated or excluded women, in particular, passages from Pauline or deutero-Pauline letters like Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Corinthians, and 1 Timothy, which in turn read Genesis from biased cultural perspectives. Many of these passages, familiar to us from the Church’s official liturgy, have become the foundation stones of Christianity’s discrimination against women.

Their exegesis was reinforced by a suspect philology. For example, Ambrose wrote that mulier (woman) derived from mollities mentis (softness of mind), vir (man) from animi virtus (strength of soul).¹

The fear of sexuality emerged alongside the rise of the mystique of virginity as its shadow side. The Fathers needed to cultivate a negative attitude to the body and sexuality if they wanted to be celibate, and this meant, psychologically, developing the fear and hatred of women as a defense.

If one were to cluster the writings of the Church Fathers on the inferiority of women, they would focus on two points: 1) women as the gateway of the devil, janua diaboli, with its classic formulation by Tertullian; and 2) women not being imago dei, not being the image of God.

There are underlying assumptions embedded in these patristic texts, which form part of the foundations upon which the tradition regarding sex and gender is built. The Church Fathers had previous assumptions about the body derived from a Greek biological model which perceived women as inferior by nature, the result of less perfect formation and ordering of bodily matter in the womb.

The ancient biological paradigm comes from a synthesis of medicine and philosophy and culture which held sway in the Western world for nearly 2000 years. Our own historical period has been marked by such rapid scientific and technological progress, and many changes of intellectual paradigms that we find it difficult to comprehend the power of such stable belief systems, until we look at the persistence of perceptions of woman as subordinate.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE), like his contemporaries, concluded from his observations of the males of each species of the animal world that since males were stronger, larger, and faster that this was the will of nature.

This biological inferiority was translated into a philosophy of the natural ordering of society according to hierarchy:

Plato’s text on woman’s physiology gives us a clue to the fear of women among Christian celibate males:

Like Aristotle, Plato transposed a perceived inferiority on the plane of biology to the plane of society, thus giving it an intellectual, philosophical basis:

These texts offer significant insights into the mind-set not only of the ancients, but also of medieval and early modern theologians since these cultural assumptions became embedded in the foundational doctrinal texts of Christianity, thus becoming the theological basis of the "truth" about women down the centuries. What was perceived as the natural order of creation in philosophic texts gained the force of divine law in the Christian exegesis of Genesis, where the "natural order" expresses God’s will and right order as manifested in "form." You can see this in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas and spiritual writers. These are, however, only the rationalized articulation of myths and folklore that identified women with darkness and chaos and pollution and evil. Christianity, instead of dis-identifying women with evil, as Jesus had done, entrenched this belief in sophisticated theologies of original sin and mind and body and sexuality.

The consequences for women were tragic: exclusion, lack of education, state of perpetual subordination and oppression, and at the height of the fear and hatred of women, the logical conclusion of this misogyny: the execution of hundreds of thousands of women accused of being witches. The witch hunt of the 15^th and 16^th centuries brought to the fore the repressed sexual fears of the clergy projected on women as their scapegoat. The manuals for witch hunt codify many of these fears such as accusing witches of making men’s genitals disappear, making them impotent, causing miscarriage in others, and so on. Contemporary psychologists would immediately recognize in these beliefs the destructive neurotic pattern of the shadow side of the Church.

The only avenue of salvation for women was order: the ordered spheres of marriage or of the cloister, preferably the latter. By giving up sexual activity, woman became "man" whereby she became rational and spiritual. Even then, she had to be put away both for her own sake and for the sake of others. A 12^th century reform document by the Cistercian Idung of Prufening summarizes the reasons for female claustration:

Such is the theological "tradition" that has defined women in Christianity—a tradition with false assumptions based on erroneous biology and anthropology. A tradition that declared women inferior by nature. It is ridiculous "theology," unjust and uncritical, and praxis that appeals uncritically to such traditions that define woman’s nature, her means of fulfillment and her capacity for ministry, apriori and in abstraction partakes of the injustice of such theology.

Today Catholic teaching has affirmed the basic equality of all peoples. Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes says:

John Paul II’s apostolic letter, Mulieris dignitatem, states: "Both man and woman are human beings to an equal degree, both are created in God’s image." Admittedly, this is a big shift from the traditional teaching which linked women with evil, but the Church stops short of practicing and living out this equality of women as image of God, as evidenced by the "stained-glass ceiling" in the church. Church teaching still carries an ambiguity coming from dualistic anthropology with its two versions of human nature: the masculine oriented to the public or sociological life and leadership, and the feminine geared to the domestic, private sphere.

The signal Vatican declaration Inter Insigniores prohibiting ordination of women speaks about sex as an important determinant of one’s capacity to image Christ in sacramental and public Church life. It bears with it a physicalistic understanding of the image of Christ—an implicit assumption of the superiority of one sex. But to be formed according to the image of Christ does not mean being sexually similar to Jesus. From the time of Erasmus, who spoke of Christiformitas in the 16^th century till today, with Leonardo Boff’s "christic structure," we know that being like Jesus refers to the coherence of a person’s life with the compassion, self-giving, and freedom of Jesus and his total dedication to the Kingdom of God.

All this shows that without being aware of it, the Church has been deprived. Both men and women have lost out. We are deprived and we don’t know it. We are unbalanced. Something is missing in the Church, a wholeness that comes from the God who created all of us and is in all of us and who cries in us for fullness of life.

We have been blinded by our gender categories from recognizing this yearning of the Spirit to transform the Church, the Body of God, for whom sex and gender are earthly and temporal. But like the blind man on the way to being cured by Jesus, who saw only the shapes of people, we can begin to glimpse, to imagine what a "wholer," saner Church could be if space were given to women. Let us just look at society around us, at the achievements of women in all the areas of our national public life, at the unquantifiable contribution of women because of their intrinsic closeness to life, as nurturer of bodies, healer of psyches, and guide to the spirit. Scientific studies attest to women’s capacities in spheres of life beyond the private and the domestic. Two examples come to mind: first, a cross-cultural survey that shows women make better managers and bosses because of their capacity for understanding of the other, of relating in a human way, and of working in a collaborative manner which draws out people’s gifts rather than competing for one-upmanship. Second, scientific studies of the human brain have pointed to women’s mental ability not only to analyze and abstract but to perceive things more holistically than the male brain, thus providing dimensions of a situation not as easily accessible to male-only groups.

By this, I am not implying that women are superior to men. I simply want to alert us to the hidden potential, the hidden riches that the Church should tap into. New life, new vitality will surge into the lifestream of the Church if women’s initiative and creativity, dedication, and energy are allowed to flow into its veins. I am convinced that it was precisely all of these qualities of women which led to their being silenced and excluded in the early Church. Organizations do not make rules and directives unless governance assesses that there is a situation that warrants them. Like most new religious movements that attract women because of the space they create for women’s initiatives, earliest Christianity, spurred by the new ethos of equality of Jesus, must have witnessed the enthusiasm and creativity of women who, like water, sought their own level and preached and taught and presided in house churches. Until the men felt their space encroached upon and their authoritative voice diminished by women and thus, ruled henceforth that women should shut up and listen and obey.

Church history has therefore been full of voices of men and of the silence of women. Scholars are now trying to retrieve their voices, reading the subtexts of women’s lives in the texts written by men. They are combing not only documents but all sorts of inscriptions and memorabilia that could lead to clues about women’s presence and activities because recorded history, as we know, was written by educated males. But even what we have today is already changing historiography. We can no longer conclude with certainty that women were not priests, or deacons or bishops because there are epigraphic evidences that some of them were priests or deacons or bishops. Beyond that, we have also recovered writings by women, particularly mystics and spiritual leaders that were either ignored or forgotten in the past centuries.

These writings were often wrested from women mystics by either followers or spiritual directors who recognized the authenticity of their experience of God. The intensity of those experiences, like that of Old Testament religious leaders and prophets—such as Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea—was so compelling that these women mystics had to declare God’s word in spite of themselves and against all odds. They were not "feminists" advancing women’s position and agenda; they were full-bodied women drawn into partnership with the Spirit into doing God’s work of transformation. Utter conviction flowing from an intense ego-shattering experience led to transcendence of conventional gender stereotypes in order to proclaim the truth they had grasped. They were aware of their personal weaknesses and of the misogynist ideology in the Church, but they were compelled to be true to their deepest selves and to their God.

Julian of Norwich, a 14^th century mystic whose Showings has proven most relevant to contemporary Christians, wrote:

The great Teresa of Avila, universally acknowledged as one of the greatest mystics of all time, complained to God:

Mysticism was the only channel for women’s voices, and even that, at great cost to the women who had to pass through the eye of the needle until some male ecclesiastic would throw his support behind them for them to legitimacy.

One woman, in particular, stands out in my mind as an extraordinarily spiritually gifted woman—Madame Acarie, whose initiative helped in the development of the French School of Spirituality, which was the spirituality of most of the Catholic Church in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. She was a mystic, but before joining the Carmelites whose monasteries in France she helped found, she tore up her writings, thinking they would not be useful to anyone, because "she was only a woman."

Today there is greater space for women who practice transformative leadership in the ecclesia and whose obvious contribution is acknowledged by the sensus fidei of the Christian community, though not necessarily by the Church hierarchy. Women theological scholars, particularly in the West, are opening up new vistas to the Church’s past and future, enlarging through analytical skills the once closed space on thinking about traditions and imagining what Church could be. Women spiritual leaders who, through direct experience of the divine rather than through office or position in Church structures, are calling forth men and women to progress in interiority through Spirit-led lives. Women pastors or community leaders are continuously creating alternative models of ministry, networks, and alliances across Church groups.

The task to transform ourselves into a Church that is whole and balanced and inclusive falls on all of us, men and women. Naturally, the greater call is on the women for it is they who experience the discrimination, it is they who have the authority on this aspect of the Church because of their "negative contrast experience."

But in Asia, women in general still need to be drawn out, to be educated to come to self-awareness. They need to overcome their timidity and fears and inertia, they must come out of the corners which have given them security through habit and familiarity. They must take risks, even if it means challenging unjust structures and practices. Sometimes this could mean confronting persons in authority and their peers, not in a destructive manner, but to speak from the truth of their being.

Women must search for alternatives to traditional customs and rituals that have excluded them or discriminated against them, if these do not change. They can find creative expressions for celebrating life, particularly in company with other women.

The journey to freedom takes one through darkness, aloneness and pain, through what could be the "dark night." Women should trust their intuition and the Holy Spirit, for it is that inner journey which is precisely what will transform them.

I hope men will also take up the challenge to work for a Church community that approximates the wholeness and equality of the Jesus movement. The call begins with one’s self.

Men should not be afraid to stand in mutuality with women; they are catalysts towards a wholer personality. Men should listen to them. There is the story of the man whose marriage was in trouble, and he sought advice of the Master. The Master said: "You must learn to listen to your wife." The man took the advice to heart and returned after a month to say that he had learned to listen to every word his wife was saying. The Master said with a smile: "Now go home and listen to every word she isn’t saying."

Men should not be afraid to look at their vulnerability; that is the beginning of the spiritual journey. When they feel threatened in their person or in their position by a woman, they need to seize the opportunity to ask themselves about the ground of their security.

There is a need to support and encourage the training of laymen and women who will help transform the Church into a balanced community that is free of clericalism and of sacral pretensions, knowing that what is at stake is not only the "place of women in the Church." What is at stake is the future of all of us in the Church. Ultimately, on the deepest level of reality, we all stand on the common ground of our humanity, our humus, which grandiosity always fails to hide.

And to all of us:

The journey into a transformed Church is a journey into the unknown. "God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather a Spirit of power" (2 Tim 1:6). We are fragile vessels but our strength is in the Spirit who will transform us into a new reality.