One of the most dangerous things in theology, I believe, is to make the images by which we attempt to understand the mysteries of Christianity into ideas that are literally true.
As the U.S. theologian Reinhold Niebuhr famously said, we need to take symbols seriously, but we cannot take them literally. For example
- Christ does not literally sit at the right hand of the Father.
- God does not have a body, and even though Jesus spoke of God as “Father”.
- God’s fatherhood cannot be the same as human fatherhood, for God is not male.
- We speak of the fire of Hell and Purgatory, but I can’t imagine any theologian today who would understand it as a fire that we know as human beings.
- We speak of the Eucharist as the Body of Christ, but the doctrine of “real presence” is not a physical presence but the presence of the risen, glorified body of Christ—a sacramental presence much more “real” than we can ever imagine.
The bride of Christ
In the same way, we speak of the church in female images. Israel is imaged, for example by the prophet Ezekiel (Chapter 16), as God’s bride, and in Ephesians 5:25-27 as the bride of Christ.
Church and papal documents use female images and pronouns for the church—for example, the Second Vatican Council’s document “Ad Gentes” famous line that “the pilgrim church is missionary by her very nature.” And the liturgy almost always speaks of the church as a “she.”
In Eucharistic Prayer II, for example, we pray that God remember the church “scattered throughout the world, and bring her to the fullness of charity.”
But speaking in this way is to use an image. The church is not female. The church is not a “she.”
The Second Vatican Council images the church in many ways. The church is certainly—literally—the People of God (although that is also an allusion to the image of the church as the New Israel), but the council also speaks of the church as
- the body of Christ,
- a temple of the Spirit,
- a field,
- a building,
- a flock,
- a vineyard,
- Jerusalem,
- our mother,
- Christ’s spouse (see “Lumen Gentium“).
As the text itself says—these are metaphors. The church is, but of course it is not!
Metaphors lead us into Mystery, but they do not capture the Mystery itself. As we all know, Juliet is not the rising sun!
The Vatican Study Group
Speaking of the church literally as “she” is only one of the several major flaws of the Sept. 18 document issued by the Vatican Study Group on women’s diaconate, but, to my mind, it is a fatal one.
The document states that a strong theological opinion insists that women being ordained to the sacramental diaconate would jeopardize “the nuptial meaning of salvation” and the “spousal meaning of the three levels of” the Sacrament of Order.
What the Study Group has done is to take literally the image of the church as the bride of Christ, and in that way necessitating the importance of the maleness of Jesus (which is doctrinally misleading, since the formulas refer only to the Word becoming “human” and “flesh”).
The church is not a “she.”
A better argument needed
As Linda Pocher, a critic wrote of the document, if one is to continue to exclude women from the diaconate, one should at least come up with a better argument!
- Stephen B. Bevans, SVD, is a priest in the Roman Catholic missionary congregation of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD). He is the Louis J. Luzbetak, SVD Professor of Mission and Culture, Emeritus, at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago. He has edited or published twenty-one books, the latest of which is Community of Missonary Disciples: The Continuing Creation of the Church (Orbis, 2024)