Women Taking Priests’ Roles Become ‘Genderless’ and ‘Bureaucratized’

"She becomes genderless and a functionary, and this does not make the Church more feminine, nor does it make it more servant-like."

From LifeSiteNews

By His Lordship Marian Eleganti, OSB, Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of Chur

Today, women allow themselves to be bureaucratized to do what a cleric does within the hierarchy of the Church, up to the highest Vatican offices. She becomes genderless and a functionary, and this does not make the Church more feminine, nor does it make it more servant-like.

The following is an essay by Bishop Marian Eleganti, auxiliary bishop emeritus of Chur, Switzerland, on women in the Church and the clericalization of the laity.

As Pope Benedict XVI told Peter Seewald, Hans Küng wanted a Church where the laity would have the same voting rights as bishops and priests (co-determination) as early as the 1960s.

He understood the church synodally as a democratic “council” (concilium). The term in brackets formed the template for the journal with the same name.

Conservative theologians responded to this with the journal Communio, which understood the Church not democratically “bottom-up” as a sociological entity (committee/concilium), but sacramentally (“top-down”) from the Holy Eucharist as a hierarchically organized communion of unequal but equally dignified people.

Based on these memories alone, it is easy to see how the idea of egalitarian relationships between laity and clergy in synodal assemblies and committees (deliberative co-determination) is not new. As with Luther, this form of synodality is based on Baptism. It is considered higher than ordination.

However, this does not improve matters, as the deconstruction of the sacred consecrated priesthood continues unabated. Without priests, however, there will be no Church.

Until they disappear in certain regions of the world, priests will be downgraded to the (mere) head of a liturgical assembly and made the moderator of pastoral care teams or the coordinator of committees, commissions, and groups. In many places, they have already delegated these tasks. At the same time, lay people are jumping into the places the priest has vacated instead of taking their place in society.

They bless graves while priests and bishops stand reverently and idly by. The clericalized layman, who no longer wants to be called a layman but a pastoral worker due to his “theological expertise,” takes on the tasks that the priest performs on the basis of ordination without being ordained, a development that was already foreseeable at the end of the 1970s when the profession of pastoral assistant was introduced.

Linked to this is a progressive desacralization of the Holy Mass into a “group experience” and “themed service.” The sacrifice of the Mass has become a foreign concept, as it requires an ordained priest to offer it. Instead, we have widespread “liturgies of the word” by full-time lay people who also administer communion, which does not require ordination, only an unseen priest who has consecrated the hosts beforehand.

For the reasons mentioned, there are fewer and fewer priests. The marginalization of the priest is progressing, so much so that its necessity has been seriously questioned during the “Synodal Path” in Germany.

This leads us to the second point: Hans Urs von Balthasar already wrote in the 1970s:

“If today this fruitful tension is weakening (between the Marian and Petrine elements[…]) because Mariology is being deprived of its position, and if women are being forced into hierarchical offices in the course of the democratization of the Church, then they will only be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. The post-conciliar Church has largely lost its mystical features; it is a Church of permanent discussions, organizations, committees, congresses, synods, commissions, academies, parties, pressure groups, functions, structures and restructuring, sociological experiments, statistics: more than ever a male Church unless it is a genderless entity in which women will conquer their place to the extent that they are ready to become such themselves.” (Clarifications, Einsiedeln 2008, 5th ed. p. 70).

How right he is! This is because the woman allows herself to be bureaucratized to do what a cleric (bishop/priest) did before within the hierarchy of the Church, up to the highest Vatican offices. Thus, in Balthasar’s sense, she becomes genderless and a functionary, not very mystical but happy to share in the power of men in the Church. This does not make the Church more feminine, nor does it make it more servant-like.

For a feminine Church, the woman in it would have to live differently from the man, more mystically, without striving for the tasks or functions previously exercised by him.

The same applies to the (full-time) layperson who, without ordination, wants to do everything like the priest. He, too, loses his own charism and fails to maintain his proper place. So now we encounter women at all hierarchical levels of power (the wrong category in our context), in Balthasar’s sense, a process of self-alienation of women and the Church at the same time.

In fact, the two are connected. It’s amazing how blind everyone involved is. In the ordinariates, for example, there is now a female chancellor, and everyone thinks that the Church and women’s issues are making progress. We are now waiting for the “deaconesses,” a potentially foreseeably small group compared to the majority of women in the Church, which is not really relevant for the position of women in the Church.

But we are not there yet. For my part, I even believe that they will never exist, but perhaps a kind of unconsecrated, dedicated “deaconess” who is given priestly functions or tasks without being a priestess or consecrated deacon, similar to the incense dispensers in the new Mayan rite.

Symbolically speaking, the Tower of Pisa is not going to straighten anymore. The problem is its foundation. In other words: We have had the wrong structural approach for 60 years.