Women in the Church or power in the Church? What the group 5 report is really about

Vatican City - The Final Report of Study Group No. 5 on the participation of women in the life and leadership of the Church requires careful reading, because the decisive issue is not simply the recognition of women’s contribution, but the way in which, starting from the demands of certain individuals, women and men alike, the very core of the power of jurisdiction in the Church ends up being called into question. This shift, however, does not take place through a magisterial text worked out with the rigour proper to canon lawyers, theologians and experts in sacramental theology, but is instead attempted through a document that takes up and reworks positions already expressed by clearly ideologically driven figures. The result is a text drafted by a selected group within an already defined horizon of thought, which for that reason does not simply describe a problem, but addresses it from a perspective already directed towards particular conclusions.

An already predetermined framework

The contribution of women to ecclesial life is a historical, spiritual and pastoral fact that no serious Catholic calls into question. For that very reason, the problem with the text does not lie in its stated intention, but in the framework through which it seeks to support certain conclusions. In several places the document appears theologically fragile, heavily exposed to contemporary sociological categories and, in some passages, inclined to shift the axis from the sacramental constitution of the Church to the functionality of roles.

The first issue concerns method. The Report states explicitly that it has adopted a “bottom-up” approach and wishes to privilege concrete experience, discernment in progress and the search for “possible consensuses”. In the second part it goes so far as to define the “question of women” as a “sign of the times” and adds a highly demanding formula: “the Holy Spirit also speaks through it” (p. 10). Yet this leap is highly dangerous and troubling. In Catholic tradition, the signs of the times are not canonised as historical phenomena or cultural pressures in themselves; they are instead tested in the light of Revelation, the Magisterium and the Church’s divine constitution. The document of Group 5, by contrast, tends to confer an almost immediate theological dignity on a historical and cultural process, with the risk of sacralising a social demand before its premises have been fully examined.