Perhaps I just wasn’t so well informed before, but it seems, doesn’t it, that we’ve been seeing an upswing recently in the number of women pretending to be ordained? Fr. Z has mentioned several lately, and in his most recent post asked for suggestions about what one might say in a chance encounter with a woman who believed that she had been ordained to the priesthood. I find that a difficult question to answer in the abstract. There would be a mountain of issues to tackle with such an individual, about the nature of the priesthood, authority, obedience and the differences between men and women… well, I’m not one to shy away from engaging people in debate, but I think I might have to play that one by ear a little. A woman who has actually been (pretend) ordained and subsequently excommunicated, is pretty far gone already.

A somewhat better question, I think, is of what could be done to ward off such impulses in Catholic women. On one level it’s silly to ask, “what has inspired this sudden push for women’s ordination now in particular?” because if anything it seems more over-determined than under-explained. Traditional Catholics are never lacking for explanations of what’s gone wrong with modern women. Vatican II, modernism, feminism, women working, women wearing pants… I’m sure to be flooded with angry, insistent answers if I open the floor to that question. But even so, it strikes me that we might make a few fairly obvious observations, followed by some suggestions for measures that might help to improve the situation.

The fact is that women have been clamoring more and more for positions of power and influence within the Church. This is a sad thing; even leaving aside all the arguments about women specifically, it’s really not fitting for anyone to clamor for power or influence within the Church. Any person willing to raise a ruckus and protest Church authorities as a means to gaining an ecclesial office would show, ipso facto, that he was unfit to hold it. And of course, when it comes to women and the priesthood, it’s just a metaphysical fact that women can’t be ordained priests. But let’s leave all that aside for the moment to notice another thing that these shrill demands (and pretend ordinations) seem clearly to reveal: many women don’t feel needed or valued, within their parishes and the Church as a whole

Someone is likely to step in here and suggest that this problem is a result of the women’s own pride, and their refusal to be satisfied until they are in charge. No doubt that is a significant factor. But, if I might make another, more generous suggestion, I would say that women have been in a kind of identity crisis for some time, in large part because of the severe weakening of family and community ties that has plagued the Western world in recent decades. In the absence of those social ties, what Robert Putnam would call “social capital,” women have a very difficult time assuming the roles that they might have played in Catholic communities 500 or 200 or even 50 years ago. The result is that they are left feeling stranded and useless, pointless accessories in a world run by men. When priests or bishops point out to them things that they can contribute (print programs! tend altar linens! organize the coffee hour!) they cynically observe that these things can be done equally well by men, and often are. It feels to them as if the system is set up to diminish them; if women’s potential contributions are represented by X, men’s would be X plus 50. Looking at things in those terms, it’s hard not to feel like a second-class citizen.

Perhaps I should go back a step here. What do I mean by “social capital?” Well, the basic idea would be that Americans don’t form communities very much anymore. I got some sense for this when I lived abroad, in Uzbekistan and in the Gaza Strip. A lot of people I met there had literally never been more than a few miles from where they were born. They had scores of relatives in their home cities and knew literally hundreds of people within a few minutes’ walk. They knew everybody’s problems, and everybody’s triumphs. In these societies, deep and lasting community ties are formed. Neighbors get together on a regular basis to chat, and they help one another through difficult times. When a building project is undertaken, multiple men from the area come to help. When a baby is born, the neighbor women are coming and going for days. Weddings and funerals are less elegant than ours, but much better attended.

American society is much, much lonelier. Many of us barely know our neighbors, and can name only a handful of people whom we see socially on a semi-regular basis. I have lots of ideas about the causes of this decline. I’ll list them rapidly without too much explanation, since that’s not the central topic of this post. But I hope it’ll be readily apparent that this is a large and complex problem, endemic to the nature of our society.

1) Communities are built on mutual understanding and shared assumptions. In an increasingly diverse and pluralistic society, we don’t necessarily have much in common with our neighbors.

2) Social networks are built up over time, and in highly mobile societies like ours, people just don’t stay in one place long enough to build them.

3) Communities are drawn together by shared needs. A whole host of developments — technological advancement, increased standard of living, increased urbanization and specialization of labor, proliferation of government entitlement programs — have made it so that we aren’t really dependent on our neighbors for life’s necessities. Homes are built by contractors. Babies are born in hospitals. Protection comes from the police, and disaster relief is provided by insurance companies. Obviously these things diminish human suffering in many ways. But they steal away much of the impetus for forming community bonds.

I could go on, but I expect the point is reasonably clear. In some times and places, a family moving to a new region would be quickly enveloped into the life of a well-established community, which would make certain demands of them, but would also provide friendship and support. Women especially have generally been the glue that holds such communities together. In these circumstances, certain tasks tend to impress themselves on women naturally. This family has a child who is very ill — who can help tend it? Who can bring meals? This young man needs a wife — who would be right for him? How could we get them together? When the basic necessities have been met, groups of women can turn their attention to a variety of other pursuits, usually of a sort that will enhance community life in general. For example, homes and communities can be beautified in a variety of ways, and so women might plant flower gardens, decorate, paint, or embroider. Music and dancing make social events more enjoyable, so women have often become accomplished in these. Children need to be amused, so storytelling and singing, and the composing of comic verses, are all excellent skills for women. And of course, women often play a significant role in the education of children, so a broad knowledge of languages and literature, history, mathematics and, of course, our holy faith, is certainly of great practical use. Communities of women could recognize the worth of such talents, encourage one another in developing them, and band together to ensure that people were cared for, and that the various talents of different women were used for the betterment of the community.

These days such communities are rare in America. In some respects we really don’t need them as much — for example, it really isn’t a bad thing that we have competent law enforcement and high standards of medical care. Keeping house has become much easier too, what with all our gadgets and machine-made products, and that brings lots of advantages. But socially, there’s an awful hole. Women feel it the most, because they were the ones who always relied the most on local communities for social support. This is, I think, the most important reason why so many women want to work these days. Workplaces are one environment in which some sort of social network can still be found. Work environments have that necessity, that need to accomplish things, that can still provided the basis for a kind of community. Staying at home, by contrast, is often very lonely, and without a community to keep them busy and active women are likely to feel that their talents are unappreciated and their interests ignored. Children, if they’re lucky enough to have them, might keep them rather busy when they’re young (though even then, it’s pretty lonely raising children without the benefit of some adult company.) But the children will grow up quickly enough, and probably move away, and then these women may still have thirty years or more with no real community and nobody who needs them. Maybe it doesn’t always happen that way, but this is the sort of fear that makes women want to keep a foot in some kind of professional community.

And, getting back to the original question, I think this explains a lot about women who want to be priests. If we’ve reached the point where bishops need to provide lists of “things women can do” to persuade female parishioners that they’re not useless, something is already badly wrong. At one time, a parish would have been a thriving community. The women would have found plenty to do, what with caring for the young and the old and the sick, beautifying the church and the community generally, planning social events, and so on. They would not have complained that “a man can do all these things too,” because one thing a man can not do is be an integral part of a network of women, with the particular social dynamic that only such a network can have. These days, though, parish life is much more threadbare. People in the parish often barely know one another, and community events tend to be rare. As in American life generally, what does survive is the official work. Mass. The Sacraments. The exercise of ecclesial offices. These things we still have. And when these are mostly what’s left of Catholic life, women understandably look at their parish and say, “hey, we’re being excluded from everything.”

Now, after all this analysis, there’s bound to be someone out there who will want to say, “okay, you’ve convinced me. Go form some communities, women!” Well, it’s not that simple. These things have to form organically; it’s not something that one person, or even a group of people, can just decide to create. Women aren’t specially to blame for the harsh conditions that have made community formation so difficult. But it does strike me that there might be things that could be done to re-invigorate networks of women, and to help them understand that they really do have a critical and unique role to play within Catholic life.

I can think of several suggestions, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll just offer one. If we want people to be community-oriented, we need to start young. Couldn’t we do more for Catholic girls? Admittedly my experience in this area is quite limited — I never was a Catholic girl, nor do I currently have any of my own. But based on casual observation, it’s always seemed to me that girls are a bit neglected within Catholic communities, including traditional-type Catholic communities. In Novus communities, of course, they give women jobs (first as altar girls and then as readers, extraordinary ministers, etc.) but not the sort of jobs that traditional Catholics would approve. One would hope that traditional communities would be a model of something better — but in the traditional communities that I’ve had contact with, I haven’t been able to see that much of anything is done for the girls.

Boys can be trained as altar boys, and are encouraged to do so. At my old parish in Scranton I remember noticing bulletins for boys’ camps organized by the FSSP, and I’ve also heard of a few traditionally-oriented boys’ schools. Now, I understand why we don’t want to train girls to serve at the altar, and that the FSSP wouldn’t be the right organization to arrange camps for girls. But still, the situation seems somewhat unfortunate. Between their altar boy training and their other activities, boys will be put in regular contact with other Catholic boys. They will form friendships, have interesting activities, and be given a role within the community. Meanwhile, you can tell the girls that they have a “complimentary” role, but at least at the younger ages you could hardly blame them for feeling that their brothers get to do everything. They’re unlikely to be made to feel much better if their “complimentary role” mainly revolves around doing chores at home. Again, I’ve never been a traditional Catholic girl, so maybe there are all kinds of wonderful opportunities for them that I just don’t know about. Maybe they do form something like the complex networks of women that I described above. If so, that’s great. But I definitely know that some Novus families in traditional-leaning parishes worry about this problem when their girls are politely told that they’ll no longer be needed to serve Mass, and I suspect they’re not the only ones who have these worries. Insofar as the girls are feeling neglected, aren’t there some things we could reasonably do to help them be more involved?

As a Mormon girl (and Mormons are another group that definitely believes in complimentarity between the sexes) I was involved in all sorts of activities. We did service projects, had sports teams, organized game nights and much more. We had a Girls’ Camp every summer. We also got lots of lessons on marriage and family, choosing appropriate people to date, sexual purity, preparing ourselves to be good wives, and so forth. Now, couldn’t Catholic communities do something along these lines? Form groups of girls and arrange girl-appropriate activities for them? Some of the activities could involve service to the parish. For example, the girls could learn to tend altar linens. They could do charitable works by bringing food to sick people, helping with community events, or whatever was needed. They could devote some time to prayer and catechesis, and lessons of particular use to the young (i.e. concerning sexual purity.) And also, they could do some fun things — softball, camping, quilting, whatever. Such organized groups could really help young women to feel useful and connected to the parish, thus diminishing the false notion that you can’t really contribute much unless you’ve been ordained.

More strategies along those lines might be offered, but for the last segment of this essay, I thought I might change tacks a bit, and make another suggestion. It is this: while a certain amount might be done to revive social networks among women, there’s going to be something of a limit. One reason close communities are in decline is because they’re not needed so much anymore. Society is set up now to compensate for a lot of the problems that were once dealt with in this informal social way. And further, much of the work that was traditionally ceded to women has just become a lot easier. Chickens no longer need to be wrung and plucked, bread is bought in bags, and sewing clothes by hand doesn’t really save you much money these days. If women tried to confine themselves to “traditional women’s work”, they’d have a lot of time on their hands. We need to find a way to conceive of women’s roles that will account for the greater leisure that our society affords us.

There are lots of things that might be said about this… but as just one suggestion, might we perhaps bring back the idea of the “accomplished woman?” This is perhaps something of a female equivalent to a “gentleman of leisure.” It’s not quite so leisurely in many cases, but the general idea is the same: if you’re not training yourself for a particular specialized job, you ought to get the best general education possible, and be as thoroughly well-rounded as you can. Thus, the accomplished woman would of course have necessary practical skills (e.g. cooking, cleaning house, fixing things), and also some array of semi-practical skills of a sort that, without being strictly necessary to life, nonetheless make it more pleasant (e.g. decorating, gardening, quilting.) Further, she would seek to improve her mind through a study of the humanities. She would develop an appreciation for music and the arts, a good working knowledge of classical languages, and as much familiarity as possible with literature, poetry, history, philosophy and rhetoric. And of course she would study the faith. A good combination of these various characteristics would make for an “accomplished woman.”

Every society needs to have certain people like this. They are capable workers in all kinds of situations, and they keep us from losing sight of so many of the finer things in life. Encouraging women to fill that role would be of benefit to everybody, and I like this idea particularly because we really need more people like this; the jack-of-all-trades is a rarity in our society. But further, nothing could be a better preparation for marriage and motherhood. The accomplished woman would be a pleasant companion to her husband, an inspiration to her children, and, and well equipped to help with schoolwork, to homeschool, or just to explain things to inquisitive young minds. Insofar as a lack of career left her without many social resources, her education and her many skills would surely equip her to spend her spare hours in pleasant, uplifting, and often useful ways. And, for those women who never became mothers (whether because they never married, or because they were unable to have children), such training would enable them to be employable at a variety of tasks.

Of course I’m not suggesting that we should make the arts or the humanities the exclusive domain of women, but if we wanted to revive something like the traditional family in a model that’s appropriate to our time, it might be wise to instill in young men that they ultimately need to turn their energy towards some kind of career-worthy specialization, and to urge young women to broaden themselves as much as possible with extensive general studies, and also with a wide array of hobbies and other interests. Catholic boys’ and girls’ schools (and perhaps women’s and men’s universities, too) could plan their curricula accordingly.

Again, these are just a few suggestions. I welcome others. What does seem clear to me is this. There’s been a lot of discontent brewing in recent years because women feel useless and undervalued in Catholic parishes. The solution has to lie in some combination of 1) revitalizing parishes so that women can take up something like the role that they have traditionally played in Catholic communities, and 2) finding constructive ways to use women’s energy and talents that don’t rely so heavily on social networks that no longer exist.

Give women some better ideas for how to be women, and we may find them less eager to be men.