"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites” (Matthew 23: 13). I vividly remember Father Bob preaching on Jesus’s cry of woe to the religious leaders of his day: “These are harsh words from Jesus.” Woe in the Hebrew Bible expresses intense anger in the face of wrongdoing. In the strongest terms possible, Jesus denounces the Pharisees for failing to practice what they preach: God’s law of “judgement, mercy and fidelity” (Matthew 23: 23).
This prophetic renunciation is the Gospel passage I have prayed with since reading the Pennsylvania grand jury report on the sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by 300 priests over seven decades. Woe seems the only word capable of expressing the rage, grief and pain incited by such widespread, calculated predation. Woe to those who committed these evil actions an their cover up. Jesus, in his ministry as a mighty prophet, condemned the systemic domination of vulnerable people by the clerical caste of his time. He told his disciples, “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted” (Matthew 23:12), announcing the reversal of power that will inaugurate the Reign of God.
Even in the midst of crisis, the Holy Spirit mercifully sustains our church. She raises up prophets among us to name the sin of clericalism and imagine new ways of ministering. How can we better imitate Jesus’ collaborative model of servant leadership? The prophetic voices who have most inspired me belong to Catholic Sisters. I entered adulthood in the midst of the 2009 Vatican investigation of American women religious. As I belatedly reckoned with the 2002 clerical abuse scandal in Boston (I had been too young, at the time, to understand its gravity), I simultaneously beheld an outpouring of support for Sisters who faithfully ministered to the poor and marginalized. Thousands of Catholics bore witness to the Sisters’ practice of Christ-like mercy and compassion. These women preach with their lives. Their example of fidelity to the People of God, in prayer and ministry, gave me—and continues to give me—hope for the Church. American women religious have embraced whole-heartedly the call of the Second Vatican Council to read the signs of the times in preaching the Gospel to the world today.
The Saint Thomas More community had the honor this semester of hearing lectures by two women religious who have brought a prophetic edge to their vocation as feminist theologians: Sister Sandra Schneiders, I.H.M., S.T.D., who pioneered the academic study of spirituality, and Sister Mary Catherine Hilkert, O.P., Ph.D., who brings a Catholic sacramental imagination to bear on the theology of preaching. Both speakers offered messages of hope for renewing the church through full recognition of the laity’s baptismal call to ministry.
During her lecture on a Sunday evening in November, Schneiders condemned clericalism, arguing we must recover Jesus’s teaching on ministry. Jesus showed the disciples how to lead within an egalitarian community when he washed their feet at the Last Supper (John 13: 1-20). This event is identified, in Scripture and in the Holy Thursday liturgy, with the institution of the Eucharist. Schneiders, in explicating this passage, argued that nowhere does the evangelist mention the total number or gender of all disciples present who had their feet washed—the supposition that only the twelve male Apostles were present is a later misinterpretation. Jesus confronts Peter, who thinks that Jesus, the Master, should not humble himself by washing others’ feet, which even a servant would not do. Jesus, however, not only reverses the hierarchical relationship between master and servant; he calls the disciples into a new bond, one that can only exist between equals: friendship. “I have called you friends,” Jesus insists (John 15:15). Critiquing humanity’s will to marginalize and exclude, Jesus set in motion God’s Reign of equitable justice, inclusive peace and compassionate love.
During her lecture in October, Hilkert proposed that the Church move forward from the current crisis by welcoming women’s full participation in the life of the Church; specifically, by inviting women to preach within the liturgy. Her first book, Naming Grace (Bloomsbury Academic, 1997), lifts up the vocation of women and lay men to preach the Gospel. Lay preaching does not detract from the sacramental ministry of the ordained; rather, it allows for collaboration between women and men to whom the Spirit has given the gift of preaching. Indeed, women with the preaching charism have a right and responsibility to use that gift for building up the church. Hilkert called our attention to biblical and historical precedents for women’s preaching: Jesus’s mother and Mary Magdalene in the Gospels; Phoebe and Junia in the early church; the women doctors of the church, including Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila; as well as women religious and lay ministers after Vatican II. Of course, Catholic women already do preach in richly diverse ways – through writing, teaching and care- giving. But welcoming women’s voices in the pulpit during communal liturgy offers yet another voice to the current crisis of leadership and moral authority.
And so, even in the midst of woe, the projects of both Sr. Schneiders and Sr. Hilkert expand the narrative of Christian ministry, constantly comforting—and challenging—me to find ways to follow the example of Jesus’s ministry.
Pictured above, Annie Killian GRD '19 and Sr. Schneiders share a warm moment under the portrait of Fr. T. Lawrason Riggs '10, first Catholic Chaplain at Yale.
