VATICAN CITY — Early every morning, in a beautiful domed room off to the side of St. Peter’s Basilica, you can see a charming scene that is at once a commotion yet also nearly silent. It’s dozens of priests rushing to find and don their vestments to say Mass, to pick up a cruet carrying holy water and wine to be turned into the blood of Christ.
These are priests, aided by altar servers donning purple robes, preparing to say an early Mass in one of the basilica’s many chapels. And in this domed room, the sacristy, the occupants are all male.
The church, even after nearly 2,000 years, does not ordain women as priests. Every Pope entombed in St. Peter’s is a man. This is one example that leads contemporary critics to say the Catholic Church is anti-woman.
But these critics should look more closely.
Eight chapels line the main floor of St. Peter’s. Four of them are built around Mary, the mother of God. Perhaps the most august chapel in the basilica is the chapel of the choir. In this Cappella Del Coro, with its distinctive dark wooden choir stand, carved with stunning bas relief, the altarpiece is a painting by Baroque master Pietro Bianchi depicting Mary Immaculate, crowned in gold, being venerated by three saints — Francis of Assisi, Anthony of Padua, and John Chrysostom. The remains, or some portion of the remains, of all three men are in this chapel.
Michelangelo’s “Pietà,” the most famous and beautiful sculpture in the Basilica, depicts Mary holding Jesus just taken down from the Cross. Near St. Peter’s, the most celebrated chapel in the world, the Sistine Chapel, is dedicated to Mary.
The Catholic Church holds up Mary as many things, including a role model for women. Also, the veneration of Mary is supposed to be a model for how we are expected to esteem all women.
And the church does place many women in places of high esteem. When a Catholic enters St. Peter’s and dips his or her fingers in the holy water font, it is beneath a statue of St. Teresa and a statue of Madeleine Sophie Barat. Across the way, above the other font, is St. Lucy Filippini. Above every archway from the main center aisle (the nave), is a sculpture of a woman. The obvious symbolism: Only through women does anyone enter into the Christian faith.
Because counting the proportion of men and women is popular these days, consider this: If you stand before the high altar in St. Peter’s Basilica, statues of six saints are visible before you — and a majority of them are women.
Women’s prominence is visible not only in the architecture of the church, but also in its history. Of course the church has been home to plenty of misogyny — every human institution has. But in many ways, the church has been the most important force in elevating women.
Silicon Valley and Wall Street these days desperately try to identify and exalt “woman founders.” On this score, they are playing a long game of catch-up with the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Hospital Association was founded by a bunch of nuns summoned by Mother Esperance Finn. The result was hundreds of hospitals, about 800 of which were founded by Catholic nuns. Women have founded more than 10,000 Catholic schools and universities in the U.S. alone, and the first native-born U.S. citizen to be canonized in the U.S. was St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, who founded Catholic girls schools starting in 1809.
The leadership of women in the Church today, as captured in a 2013 dispatch from the Vatican by Ashley McGuire, titled “Are women already running the Catholic Church.”
Catholics take their art and history seriously as teacher and guide, but doctrine and faith are the heart of what it means to be Catholic. Here, the contemporary liberal feminist critic finds the worst offenses by the church.
Stirred by the revolutionary spirit of the late 1960s and the 1970s, popular culture and media saw the sexual revolution as a great liberation of women. Specifically, the weakening of marriage, through divorce and the open acceptance of premarital sex, was supposed to free women from the repressive constraints of traditional matrimony. The birth control pill was and is held up as something of a secular sacrament of liberation.
The Catholic Church then and now rejected divorce, sex out of wedlock, and artificial contraception, thereby fueling the charge that church teaching was harmful for women. This debate is too large for this column, but if we want to examine the supposed benefits for women of the sexual revolution, we need to look beyond elite circles, and to the working class and poor of all races.
In these less fortunate circles of America, marriage is disappearing, out-of-wedlock birth is much more common than birth to a married couple. The results: more single mothers trying to raise a child on their own, a generation of boys raised without a model of fidelity to or respect for women, and a generation of girls raised not realizing that they deserve such fidelity and, indeed, veneration.
Even those who can’t come to accept Catholic teaching ought to consider that perhaps the norm of reserving sex to the lifelong monogamous marriage was a norm that served to elevate and protect women. Of course, traditional marriage in some cultural settings has made women vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. But that’s a reason for changes in the surrounding culture, not for the scrapping such a valuable institution.
Productive debate regarding women in the Catholic Church has a couple of chasms that are nearly impossible to bridge. First, there is a deep disdain for the church in modern culture, springing from many sources, ranging from bigotry, to blind politics, to totally understandable anger about histories of abuse.
The other chasm is more ideological. The church holds up men and women as totally equal on the fundamental level — we are all made in the image of God, and Christ died for every woman as he died for every man. That teaching itself is good for women. But as the scene in St. Peter’s sacristy shows, and as history has repeated, the church sees that in some important ways, men and women have different roles in this world. To some minds, there is no equality between the sexes unless we somehow erase the differences between the sexes.
Elite morality thus pretends today that men and women are not naturally different in crucial ways. The church? She won’t preach that lie.
