Post 189
When the church changes its mind
Hi all - this piece originally had a better title and more words and was set to run last week after a couple months of on-and-off writing. I have argued before that if you’re going to write something and ask people to spend time reading it, you should at least be entertaining, and maybe even offer people consolation or some sense that things can get better than this. I didn’t run the piece because last week was not the time to be entertaining, and I was not in a good spot to offer anyone any consolation. BUT: I am sharing a few disjointed parts of this essay with you now, in case you find some consolation reading them, because I did find some consolation writing them.
The consolation is this: the things that seem absolutely unchangeable and sealed in lead, the things that seem like they will be around forever and there's nothing we can do to change them, those things do change.
On May 19th, a community of representatives from various world religions received an address from Pope Leo XIV, the first supreme pontiff ever to argue that Siamese Dream is a better album than Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness1. Among other things, Leo said in his address:
“In a special way I greet our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters. Because of the Jewish roots of Christianity, all Christians have a special relationship with Judaism. The conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate (no. 4) emphasises the greatness of the spiritual heritage shared by Christians and Jews, encouraging mutual knowledge and esteem. The theological dialogue between Christians and Jews remains ever important and close to my heart. Even in these difficult times, marked by conflicts and misunderstandings, it is necessary to continue the momentum of this precious dialogue of ours.”
“Mutual knowledge and esteem” has defined the relationship between the Catholic and Jewish faiths for millennia centuries slightly less than sixty years, that’s how long the famous Vatican II conciliar document Nostra Aetate has been out, emphasizing the special relationship between Christianity and Judaism. But before Nostra Aetate…hoo boy. It used to be written into the Good Friday liturgy that the Jewish people were “perfidious” and directly responsible for Jesus’ death, a practice which continued for centuries before Pope John XXIII had to literally correct a deacon mid-liturgy. Old conciliar documents from the sixteenth century give a shout-out to people of the Jewish faith specifically for not being “able to reach eternal life, but will go into the eternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels”. But we went from all of that to Nostra Aetate, to this:
“The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God…the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”
To put it bluntly: the church used to teach one thing, and now it teaches the opposite. From perfidy and eternal fire, to not rejected or accursed, to mutual knowledge and esteem. Church teaching is divinely inspired and mediated through the magisterium and reflects eternal and unchanging truths and our teachings unfold within Benedict XVI’s “hermeneutic of continuity”…but this changed, about as much as anything can possibly change.
And it’s not like Nostra Aetate sailed through the Council, either. This document was the subject of a lot of debate, tied up in old prejudices and geopolitical considerations and media leaks and deep questions about how the church, newly defined by the council as the “people of God”, would relate to any religions outside of the church. But Pope John XXIII, informed by his work aiding Jewish refugees during World War II, and building on his efforts to improve Chrisian-Jewish relationships throughout his papacy, knew that things had to change, and so church teaching, something that we know never changes, changed.
In 2019, former priest James Carroll wrote a cover story for the Atlantic calling for radical changes to the church’s teachings on an all-male priesthood and priestly celibacy, in order to weaken the hold of clericalism on the church, in light of the abuse scandals that had recently crested. I am not opposed to those changes, given that what we have going right now sure as shit isn’t working for us. But to anyone who would tell Carroll that the church can’t possibly change those teachings, he would respond: no, we’ve changed teachings before. We changed what the Catholic church taught about our relationship with the Jewish people:
“The model of potential transformation for this or any pope remains the radical post-Holocaust revision of Catholic teachings about Jews—the high point of Vatican II. The formal renunciation of the “Christ killer” slander by a solemn Church council, together with the affirmation of the integrity of Judaism, reaches far more deeply into Catholic doctrine and tradition than anything having to do with the overthrow of clericalism, whether that involves women’s ordination, married priests, or other questions of sexuality. The recasting of the Church’s relationship with the Jewish people, as I see it, was the single largest revision of Christian theology ever accomplished. The habit of Catholic (or Christian) anti-Judaism is not fully broken, but its theological justification has been expunged. Under the assertive leadership of a pope, profound change can occur, and it can occur quickly.”
There’s no getting around this: church teaching can change, and it can change completely. David Armstrong and Jordan Daniel Wood, in their excellent series on “Reform Catholicism” from earlier this year, point out that:
“The Trads are totally correct, for example, that Vatican II changed Church teaching about Jews and Judaism. Not just clarified, not just updated: changed it, such that before Vatican II, the official teaching of Catholicism was that Jews and Judaism were cursed, condemned, and outcast by God, and after Vatican II, those teachings were officially discarded.”
You should know this: the institutional church taught something for centuries, and considered this teaching central to both its identity and the history of salvation. The church eventually started teaching the opposite of their original teaching, not because God changed His mind, but because the old teaching was clearly wrong, it had always been wrong, and the new guy in charge had a new background and so he knew continuing to teach this teaching was untenable. Some members of the institution fought to hold on to this teaching anyways, and they lost that fight and got dragged kicking and screaming into an era where church teaching had changed permanently. You should know that this can happen.
In March of 2023, the Vatican released a statement formally repudiating the “Doctrine of Discovery”, a collection of papal bulls, mostly from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, used by imperial powers to justify the colonization of the new world, extraction of its resources, and forced conversion of its indigenous people. That the Catholic church was willing to distance itself from this dark episode of its history was very brave and impressive if you’re willing to overlook that the Episcopalians, Methodists. Unitarians, Disciples of Christ, World Council of Churches, and Quakers had all beaten them to it by at least a decade. NCR ran a six-part series on the legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery back in 2015 - yeah, 2015! Not 2020 when everyone was like “Ben and Jerry’s apologizes for slavery”2, five years before that! Indigenous activists had agitated for years against this being part of the church’s formal teaching corpus3, because its impact was continuing to echo throughout their relationship with their countries and their faith. The church had put out formal documents stating that it was totally okay with the European powers carving up the new world and taking it from the people who already lived there, and it wasn’t until 2023 that they admitted “we shouldn’t have done that”. To its credit, that 2023 statement does own that:
“These papal bulls did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples. The Church is also aware that the contents of these documents were manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities. It is only just to recognize these errors.”
However, the statement also says this up top:
“The “doctrine of discovery” is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church. Historical research clearly demonstrates that the papal documents in question, written in a specific historical period and linked to political questions, have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.”
Which is good to clarify, that these papal bulls which include turns of phrase like “barbarous nations [should] be overthrown and brought to the faith itself" should never have been thought of as legitimate church teachings. I guess I didn’t really know that papal bulls didn’t “count”, so that’s on me; to clarify, here’s a definition from this article at Church Life Journal from a member of the National Institute for Newman Studies:
“Papal Bulls represent one of the oldest and most solemn forms of papal documents. Derived from the leaden seal (bulla) traditionally attached to them with silken cords, bulls are reserved for weighty matters such as canonizations, declarations of dogma, establishment of dioceses, or granting of privileges. They possess a formal and authoritative tone.”
Ah okay, makes sense that we would never consider that a serious expression of the Catholic faith, and obviously opinions can differ on how seriously you’re supposed to take a papal proclamation named for the literal leaden seal placed upon the document to signify its weight and permanence. It definitely clears up any questions on how seriously we should take any future church communication that is “linked to political questions”.
You should know this: the Pope can make a pronouncement about a policy that the church officially condones, a policy that will have life-or-death stakes for masses of people, and he can seal that pronouncement with lead and make it the church's official position kept in the historical record forever, but the church can also, in the future, officially say “uh, that's wrong, we don't believe that, and we actually never believed it, so please forget that we ever did it”. Something that was literally set in lead changed once, which means that something else can change another time. You should know that this can happen.
So I’ve written about women’s ordination before, and the church’s bullshit reasons for refusing to do it; when my daughter tells me “dad I don’t like that women can’t be priests,” my response is always an enthusiastic “I DON’T MUCH CARE FOR IT EITHER”. The reason why the Catholic church does not allow women to administer the sacraments or otherwise participate in ordained ministry, the actual reason and not a joke reason I made up but a real reason that Paul VI wrote down and promulgated in Inter Insigniores, is that every man kind of looks like Jesus and every woman definitely doesn’t look like Jesus, and if you put a woman into ordained ministry who by default doesn’t look like Jesus, the faithful will be like “wait, who is that, what’s going on”:
“The same natural resemblance is required for persons as for things: when Christ's role in the Eucharist is to be expressed sacramentally, there would not be this “natural resemblance” which must exist between Christ and his minister if the role of Christ were not taken by a man: in such a case it would be difficult to see in the minister the image of Christ. For Christ himself was and remains a man."
This is, obviously, stupid; my pastor, while male, doesn’t otherwise physically resemble Jesus, for many reasons including “he has a tight haircut” and “he’s Puerto Rican”. If I can suspend disbelief for him, I feel like I could probably make it work with a woman at the altar because I'm a goddam adult. But that’s the teaching of the church. It is eternal and unchanging. John Paul II made that very clear in 1994 when he promulgated Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, and again, this is a real thing he wrote and not a thing I made up to land a dark joke:
“Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church's judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful."
I guess in the strictest sense, this wasn’t an ex cathedra statement on doctrine, but if you choose the wording “this judgement is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful” in a papal document, I am going to assume that you mean this as a teaching with very little wiggle room, “regarding a matter of great importance”. “Look guys, I’m going to tell you what you believe in this debate, which is not a debate, because you believe this, definitively.” So that’s it for women ever serving in ordained ministry. It’s not a debate, it never was, that has been preserved by the constant and universal tradition of the church, and this judgment is definitely held by all the church’s faithful. Unless it’s not.
Throughout the Vatican’s “Synod on Synodality” that began with parish-level listening sessions in 2021, the ability of women to fully serve in the church, including in ordained roles, came up on every continent. This was captured in the October 2023 Instrumentum Laboris, the final synthesis of the listening sessions before the big meetings in the Vatican:
“Different positions have been expressed regarding women's access to the diaconal ministry. For some, this step would be unacceptable because they consider it a discontinuity with Tradition. For others, however, opening access for women to the diaconate would restore the practice of the Early Church. Others still, discern it as an appropriate and necessary response to the signs of the times, faithful to the Tradition, and one that would find an echo in the hearts of many who seek new energy and vitality in the Church…It is urgent to ensure that women can participate in decision-making processes and assume roles of responsibility in pastoral care and ministry. The Holy Father has significantly increased the number of women in positions of responsibility in the Roman Curia. This should also happen at other levels of Church life, in consecrated life and dioceses. Provision needs to be made in Canon Law accordingly. Theological and pastoral research on the access of women to the diaconate should be continued, benefiting from consideration of the results of the commissions specially established by the Holy Father, and from the theological, historical and exegetical research already undertaken.”
There’s a lot in there, of course, and the scope of that statement ends at the diaconate, but what's not in here is “we have a judgment on the role of women that is definitively held by all of the Church’s faithful.” The role of women in the church - a topic on which every Pope up through Francis has said unbelievably stupid things and if we give Leo time he may get there too! - was an issue that could not be ignored at the Synod, to the point where going in to the Synod, changes to canon law were deemed a priority for discussion, and where it was acknowledged from the start that there were not judgments definitively held by all of the faithful. And while the Synod meetings didn’t always treat this topic very well, we did get to this statement in the final November 2024 Synod document, which is now official magisterial teaching:
“Crucial turning points in Church history confirm the essential contribution of women moved by the Spirit. Women make up the majority of churchgoers and are often the first witnesses to the faith in families. They are active in the life of small Christian communities and parishes. They run schools, hospitals and shelters. They lead initiatives for reconciliation and promoting human dignity and social justice. Women contribute to theological research and are present in positions of responsibility in Church institutions, in diocesan curia and the Roman Curia. There are women who hold positions of authority and are leaders of their communities. This Assembly asks for full implementation of all the opportunities already provided for in Canon Law with regard to the role of women, particularly in those places where they remain underutilised. There is no reason or impediment that should prevent women from carrying out leadership roles in the Church: what comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped. Additionally, the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue. The Assembly also asks that more attention be given to the language and images used in preaching, teaching, catechesis, and the drafting of official Church documents, giving more space to the contributions of female saints, theologians and mystics.”
I’m not going to pretend that this has all worked out great; it hasn’t. It’s not like women are now saying Mass at your local parish, or are anywhere close to that. This has not gone as far as it should, and it has not moved as quickly as it should. My daughter still doesn’t like it, and I still don’t much care for it either. But you should know this: in my lifetime, we were told, from the very top, what we all definitively believed as members of the church’s faithful, about what women could do in the church. And members of the church’s faithful chose not to accept that, and said so, and when the institutional church decided to listen to them, the institutional church realized that something else was coming from the Holy Spirit, and that “what comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped”, and now they have acknowledged that in magisterial documents. An issue that was definitively settled becomes an issue where debate can no longer be put off. It is only one crack in the wall, but that means that the wall can crack. You should know that this can happen.
I haven’t made a big secret of my opinion on the church’s teachings on gender identity, expressed in teaching documents like 2024’s Dignitas Infinita. My opinion, for those of you that may be new readers, is negative. Church teachings are written as a response to an amorphous “gender theory” that does not appear to be tied to any scholarly work. The party line on transgender people, who exist, is that they do not exist. Lines that the church actually wrote down and promulgated as teachings like “all attempts to obscure reference to the interminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected” are, if you give them even five seconds of consideration, insane. Teachings on anyone who does not conform to the institutional church’s standards on gender identity and sexual orientation are inconsistent with other teachings in the same documents and give the impression that they were copy-pasted in after watching a Newsmax segment. The arguments that the institutional church makes to defend its positions are rooted in right-wing talking points instead of any theological or academic arguments. I’m saying that they’re bad at this, and being bad at this has real consequences. Our bishops use these teachings to turn people away from housing and food assistance, and pursue court cases to deregulate the mental healthcare profession, and pressure the government to defund suicide hotlines. Marginalized people can get hurt, and die, because of what the church teaches. I would like these teachings to change, but obviously, we know that church teaching never changes. The church has always taught that there are exactly two genders and every man is exactly like every other man in terms of masculinity and every woman is exactly like every other woman in terms of femininity, and it’s not like Thomas Aquinas was sitting around writing that gender was a spectrum.
You have probably guessed where I’m going with this. Church teaching, as we’ve seen, does change when holding onto it becomes untenable. Also, Aquinas did sit around writing that gender was a spectrum.
Earlier this year, I had a chance to read Holy Body: Gender and Sexual Difference in Theological Anthropology and Ecclesiology by Emmanuel College professor Brianne Bell Jacobs4, and when I made a passing reference to that book in an essay earlier this year, I wrote that “if there’s any justice it will be used as an important piece of research by whoever makes the structural changes that actually fix the Catholic church”. Here’s an important piece of research that Jacobs includes in her book: the teaching on how we have these two clearly defined complimentary genders that we learned about from things like JPII’s Theology of the Body, and how nothing can shake that gender binary, is a relatively new construction in the Catholic church. It is not a teaching that has been consistent; the church’s teaching on gender has changed over time, and it’s currently very different from what theologians like Thomas Aquinas were writing. Jacobs has a hell of a pull quote from the Summa (I. q.92 a.1. reply to objection 1):
“As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence; such as that of a south wind, which is most, as the Philosopher observes.”
Now, I’m not saying Aquinas’ gender spectrum is great; rather than ranging from “feminine” to “masculine”, it ranges from “bad (woman, possibly wind-driven)” to “man”. As is clear from his writings, Aquinas saw the feminine gender identity not as an equal compliment to the other end of a binary, but rather as a deficiency that could exist at varying levels on the way to being a proper and fully formed human being, which was, of course, a dude. Jacobs takes that “insight”, combines it with other early sources through which she was able to trawl, and lands here [emphasis mine]:
“Aquinas thought of women as failed teleological process and of a lower order than men. That “lower-ness,” that “failed telos,” is what constitutionally defines women…I share…a commitment to the tradition and sources of Christianity. I diverge from the idea that the complementary gender binary is biological and God-given. That idea is not in the tradition or sources.”
“Of course the church teaches that gender is fixed and unchangeable, the gender binary is beautiful and divine, that’s why the church has always taught it.” No it has not, it used to teach that women were different levels of “insufficiently man”. “Well, okay, but Aquinas’ teachings are different just because they were consistent with the scientific standards of his time.” That is not the argument you want to use, because the church’s current teachings are inconsistent with medical and scientific standards, we spent a whole lot of time looking at that last year. The church is bad at this, this teaching is bad and wrong, and it has consequences. In the later chapters of Jacobs’ book, she explores some of the consequences of choosing to shape society around standards “in which ‘woman’ is produced as the one who is subjugated, and ‘man’ is the one above, subjugating…the gender binary functions to render those who are a foil to white men in terms of their availability, and to produce them as the predicate upon which white masculinity knows itself as primary and dominant.” Teachings from our church shape culture and policy in a way that affects our parishes and schools and charities, and influences the people who represent us in our government. And there is existing work on the right way to treat these issues, and the institutional church currently chooses to ignore it.
With that in mind, you should know this: I am not saying that the church's existing teachings on gender identity need to be recontextualized or communicated with more pastoral language. I am not saying that I respectfully disagree with how the church expresses this teaching and choose to navigate my life as a Catholic around this disagreement. I'm saying that the church's teaching is wrong, is objectively incorrect, and needs to change, and my faith compels me to say so. The church's teachings on gender identity are wrong because they are not based on any consistent standards or sources. The church's teachings on gender identity are wrong because decades of medical literature say that they are wrong. The church's teachings on gender identity are wrong because they lead to policies that will needlessly hurt vulnerable people and cost lives. The institution responsible for these teachings does not need to reframe the existing teachings or reword them or build them into the larger context of the church's mission of evangelization. The teachings need to change. The teachings have already changed. The teachings can change further. And if something as unchangeable as church teaching can change, imagine what else can change.
The consolation is this: the things that seem absolutely unchangeable and sealed in lead, the things that seem like they will be around forever and there's nothing we can do to change them, those things do change.
He’s correct, it is a better album, I’m just saying that previous pontiffs hadn’t taken up the question.
I can’t believe that link still works.
Just like the critiques of Junipero Serra’s canonization campaign were not some woke-erati plot that arose in 2020 but rather a sustained opposition that stretched back sixty years.
I have corresponded with both Prof. Jacobs and her husband over email, and she was kind enough to send me a copy of her book. It was very generous of her, although you should know that professors do this all the time. If you have one positive interaction with any professor in any context, they will mail you their book. They all have crates of them just sitting around in their respective garages and they’re desperate to get rid of them.