Bridges

This weekend a grandchild sought information about the Von Trapp family beyond that offered in the movie, “The Sound of Music.”  I pulled out Maria Von Trapp’s book and familiarized the child with key differences between movie and reality.  This 4-year-old grasped that movies differ from reality, myth from reality.  

Also this weekend, the priest at Mass expressed hopes of Pope Leo XIV building bridges between progressives and traditionalists within the Church.  I started musing about parallels between these two weekend experiences. 

 

I don’t know much about the new pope so cannot predict what he’ll do.  However, I’m not yet sure if I care.  Maybe because to me, much of the hierarchy seems heavily fixated on a “Catholicism the Movie” type mythology while I’m tied to Catholicism in real life.  

 

Bridge building needs to be more substantive than a one-way bridge inviting progressive Catholics mostly operating in the real world to jump into the heavy myth world of traditionalist Catholics as if they are Mary Poppins jumping into a chalk drawing fantasyland.  The bridge cannot be merely smiley-faced traditionalists telling progressives they’re misguided but that said traditionalists stand ready with their halos in place and arms wide-open to welcome back these misguided souls.  Bridges will exist when traditionalists join progressives in reality as readily as they welcome progressives into their fantasyland.  This requires traditionalists being willing to question long-standing traditions because bridging means moving to meet somewhere in the middle.

 

I’ve read that the new pope prior to being elected pope defended a few long-standing traditions including the all-male clergy and disparagement of same-sex unions.  These traditions happen to be two biggies inspiring progressives to eschew the traditionalists and the Catholic Church itself.  We’ll leave another biggie: women’s reproductive health for another day.  To build a bridge between the traditionalists and progressives, Leo XIV is going to need to re-examine the foundations of those traditions and be willing to move.

 

Let’s quickly summarize the rickety theological scaffolding for the myths tied to these traditions which can be found in  Lumen Gentium, (The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church 1964 ), Inter Insigniores (Paul VI 1976), Theology of the Body and Mulieris Dignitatem (written in 1979-1984 and 1988 respectively by John Paul II whom I lovingly refer to as the patron saint of sexual predators based upon him protecting so many serial offenders who … pure coincidence here, I’m sure… fundraised boatloads of money for the Church, but I digress.) 

 

In summary, the hierarchy teaches:

1.   God is a dude based on the hierarchy selectively exclusively embracing scriptural metaphors referring to God as masculine and ignoring passages referring to God as feminine.

2.   Marriages are only between dudes and dudettes.

3.   Jesus is God and is married to the church, though Jesus never refers to the faithful as his bride, but instead only as sheep, children and wedding guests, and never compares the Kingdom of God to marriage but instead to weeds, seeds, yeast and vineyards. 

4.   Since God and Jesus are dudes, the Church must be the dudette bride in the marriage.

5.   For a sacrament to be “real” the symbols used in the sacrament must have a “natural resemblance” to what is being recalled.

6.   The sacrament of Eucharist is also the matrimonial sacrament of the dude Jesus marrying the dudette Church so that they can create together.

7.   Whoever plays the part of Jesus during Mass will act in persona Christi (in the person of Christ) … because they said so and despite Jesus telling the disciples to “do this in memory of me” not “do this in persona of me.”

8.   The only “natural resemblance” that will cause people to see Jesus in the Mass celebrant is if the priest has the same sex organs as Jesus, organs that will be suitably buried under the priest’s totally not girly-girl dresses – excuse me, vestments. 

9.   However, the part of the dudette church can be played by either boys or girls because sometimes priests celebrate Mass by themselves.  Don’t go there with imagery of a priest marrying himself.  Also, priests are the official voice of both the male and female sides of this Jesus/Church marriage. No, this is not the Church setting a precedent for priests dabbling in the trans realm with their manly men voices in dresses also being 100% the official voices of the girly-girl Church.  Gonna have to cut you off from the sacramental wine if you keep up with that kind of crazy talk.  Furthermore, sometimes boys don’t become priests and are just part of the dudette Church and they can’t come up with a better way to solve this.  So, dudes can be the dude and/or the dudette in the marriage.

10. Ergo the part of Jesus in the form of the priest must be a literal male but the part of the Church can be anyone capable of fogging glass because the Church is but a metaphorical female. 

11. If this union between the literal male priest and the metaphorical female Church does not occur, all of salvation history unravels.

12. “Good boys and girls” will not question any of the theological scaffolding that marginalizes women from one of the seven sacraments, Holy Orders.  Ditto for teachings about same sex unions.

 

That’s the movie version, the myth.  In the real world, people can see “natural resemblance” for men, women and non-binary people in the person of other men, women and non-binary people without confinement to gender.  “You remind me so much of your dad,” is a statement I’ve heard uttered at me repeatedly throughout life.

 

In the real world of logic, one can easily say, “You say males can play both the part of bride and bridegroom in a marriage?  I do believe you just gave theological justification for same-sex marriage and possibly trans individuals as well.”  This scaffolding of theology is so fraught with contradictions and inconsistencies that at most you can support one of these two traditional myths.  Either males can play both “marriage” roles in the Mass and you justify same-sex marriage, or both “marriage” roles in the Mass are metaphorical and can be played by men or women and you justify women’s ordination.  

 

There is also the option of having real live married people re-write the abundant theological myths about marriage and inject copious amounts of reality into those documents.  Ditto for women about women.  It would be comical were it not so negatively impacting to women that in Mulieris Dignitatem (The Dignity of Women), John Paul II acknowledges the rampant historic sexism and misogyny of the early Church “fathers” but then waves his hand dismissively saying that this didn’t impact their clarity writing about women’s roles in the church one iota.  Right… and I suppose JPII also believed that Klan members never allowed their prejudices against African Americans to cloud their judgment when setting policy about African Americans either.  

 

Now it’s time to fold in a third activity from this past weekend: enthusiastically singing along to music from the movie “Frozen” with the previously mentioned grandkid.  In “Let it Go,” that movie’s signature song, the young queen Elsa sings about struggling and ultimately setting herself free from the societal conditioning and consequently the gaslighting she’s been subjected to her whole life that’s been telling her to conceal her true self.

Don't let them in, don't let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don't feel, don't let them know
Well, now they know

 

Let it go, let it go
Can't hold it back anymore
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door
I don't care what they're going to say
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway

 

Herein lies the split between reality and myth.  God calls women to Holy Orders.  God creates gay people.  Enough people have endured tremendous hardships to be their authentic selves that it's pretty apparent that this is how God made these folks.  The gaslighters try to tell women called to ordination and gays called to marriage that they’re crazy and/or evil.  But, for people thus touched by God to do otherwise than accept that this is who God made them to be, they are not only tormenting themselves, they are denying the truth of who they are. The torment they endure from external forces is cruel and abundant but less crushing than continuing to pretend they are someone other than who they are.  The hierarchy gaslighting such people is insidious and needs to stop.

 

Many progressives, whether they remain in the Church or not, can identify with Queen Elsa’s sentiments.  They’re going to walk in truth, becoming who God meant them to become and encouraging others to become who God meant them to become.  They’re not going to contort God so that the misinformed and misguided ramblings of many a sexist theologian can be preserved.  

 

They turn away and slam the door on the myth if the myth impedes or prevents people from becoming their full authentic selves.  They are walking away from gaslighting that paints people as “bad,” “disordered” or “damned” simply for listening to God or following Gospel premises.  They are beyond caring what the traditionalists say because they have been cold-shouldered by this crowd so much that they have become acclimatized to being out of favor.  Being held in low esteem by people who gaslight and dehumanize others is seen as a badge of honor rather than a tragedy.

 

Queen Elsa continues in the song,

 

It's funny how some distance makes everything seem small

And the fears that once controlled me can't get to me at all

It's time to see what I can do

To test the limits and break through

 

For centuries, the Church hierarchy controlled secular society in addition to religious dimensions of life.  That created growing spirals of power with control breeding fear leading to greater control and greater fear.  However, as the hierarchy’s secular control has diminished, so has their power because fear subsides. Consequently, here in the U.S. the hierarchy formed an unholy alliance with secular politicians who shine glimmers of hope that they will return control to them despite these same politicians violating gospel principle after gospel principle.  Side note: If the only way you can keep your spouse is to create an atmosphere of power-imbalance-fueled terror, you have a toxic unhealthy marriage.  Second side note: Marriage based upon coercion is considered grounds to annul the union. 

 

Those who braved challenging the hierarchy have realized with a little distance from the power myth that their fears were unfounded.  They step away and in doing so let loose with their God-given gifts that were previously suppressed and sometimes outright demonized by the hierarchy.  They help others become their authentic God-given selves too – others who have been tormented by the gaslighting trying to convince them that God’s calling and gifts were actually “evil.”

 

So what does bridge-building look like for people who, like Queen Elsa feel,

 

My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around

And one thought crystallizes like an icy blast

I'm never going back, the past is in the past

 

Once the myth’s spell is broken, can you ever go back?  Can or should someone who has broken the spell of a gaslighter return to the gaslighting environment?  We’re not trying to bridge the gap between a group of coffee lovers and hot cocoa lovers wherein we can simply serve both and everyone is happy.  The progressives aren’t going to strike a middle ground on dehumanization.  “Gosh, if you only dehumanize my gay family member 3 days a week instead of 7, I’ll come back.”  

 

The Rule of St. Augustine, the monastic rule to which Pope Leo, an avowed Augustinian, presumably adheres only has eight short chapters yet one entire chapter is devoted to maintaining chastity.  That chapter speaks about women as if they are temptresses to be avoided.  I struggle to envision someone who adheres to that rule making sufficient movement away from dehumanizing institutionalized sexism to build a bridge that a progressive is willing to trod upon.  The progressives are moving away from sexism and homophobia; they’re not going back.

 

Bridging in the Church is far more complex than my grandchild bridging fact and fantasy in “The Sound of Music.”  It will require the feminine voice being apparent within the official voice of the female Church.  It will require deconstructing destructive dehumanizing myths.  Most importantly, it will require traditionalists moving theologically– an activity they historically eschew.