The Lead

Canon Ginnie Kennerley has some thoughts about the desire to preserve the purely male priesthood:

... the demand for “sacramental assurance” – the guarantee that the priest celebrating the Eucharist has not been ordained by a woman bishop, or even by a bishop originally ordained by a woman – is a demonstration of “magical thinking” at its most primitive, akin to ritual rain-making ceremonies and tribal rituals designed to control the uncontrollable. ... As I understand it, magical thinking relies on perceived (but un-confirmable) causal links between desired events and the phenomena that appear normally to accompany or precede them. It assumes that, by ensuring that there is no change in the supposed link of cause and effect, we can ensure the desired result every time – in effect, we imagine we can control the action of God. ... An obvious example of this way of “thinking” is the conviction that no woman can effectively celebrate the Eucharist, because to change the pattern of the celebrant having always been a man in days gone by is to change a significant variable of the mystery of the sacrament – which will mean that the “magic” won’t happen.

Read in the Irish Times here. She is responding to Mary Condren's op-ed which we reported on last week. See also Kennerley's sermon of July 25

God is not dependent on our rituals to give us his grace, his blessing, his forgiveness and his guiding presence in our lives. Nor can the gender of a priest or bishop possibly stand in the way of his will to nourish us and bless us. Any limitation to that blessing can only lie in our own closed and obstinate hearts, not in God’s will to bless. Have we not, whether as Anglican or Catholic Christians, learned long ago that “the unworthiness of the minister hinders not the effect of the Sacrament”? How then could purely biological handicap, if such it be considered, cause any difficulty?
So my message today is simply this: we need to leave magical thinking about the sacraments in the distant past where it belongs, and recognise that the blessing we receive depends on nothing but our common openness to God and God’s desire to redeem us from all that separates us from him - to perfect us as human beings created male and female together to reflect God’s glory. The sacraments focus that redeeming love for us, but they do not manipulate God or control him in any way. Rather they open up the channel through which we can more easily receive that love and truth and healing into our lives.

Comments (5)

"God is not dependent on our rituals to give us his grace, his blessing, his forgiveness and his guiding presence in our lives."

While I wholeheartedly agree with this statement, it does verge on suggesting that Apostolic Succession is unnecessary. Perhaps a better argument might be that being a woman is a simple physical difference that matters as much as skin color or height when pertaining to celebrating the sacraments. We all have physical differences; none of them should obstruct us from being effective ministers of the sacraments.

Posted by Matthew Buterbaugh+ | July 28, 2010 9:15 AM

Given the shortage of ordination certificates and even reasonably contemporary stories of laying on of hands, the first crucial few years of Apostolic Succession are pretty dicey (and we won't even mention the absence of priests in the modern sense through all that time).

Posted by F.Harry Stowe | July 28, 2010 9:31 AM

Thanks for the change in title - the line between trying to control God and offering our concerns to God is a fine one. I verge over into magical thinking when I use rituals that essentially bargain - if I "do this" then I bind God to "do that." In the case of women as priests - or like the kids game of "step on a crack, break your mother' back" The evidence is not conclusive about the role of women in the early church - even though the anti-women forces proclaim their proofs forcefully. The proof of priest charism is lived out in community - the call and affirmation comes in the doing not the thinking.

Posted by Ann Fontaine | July 28, 2010 11:08 AM

This is certainly true. It does not follow from that, however, that God has not nevertheless given the Church certain rituals by which his grace, his blessing, and his guiding presence may be ordinarily invoked and made real.

If God can save without baptism (as he certainly can), should we then dispense with baptism? If God can save without a priesthood, should we therefore scrap it, relegating it to the "distant past"?

These are obviously not new considerations. Our Baptist friends have been believing for centuries that what we call the sacraments effect nothing. They long ago gave up such "magical thinking." But I don't know that their greater modernity necessarily means that they are right.

Posted by rick allen | July 28, 2010 11:36 AM

On the one hand, Rick, I would refer you up to Fr Matthew's comment at top...

...and on the other, I believe Canon Kennerley is correct, also.

For me, it's one of those paradox thingies: 1) Sacraments ARE magical-thinking and 2) couldn't we all use a bit more magic in our lives?

Where magical-thinking runs down the Imago Dei (in this case, made female), however, is where I draw the line.

JC Fisher

Posted by tgflux | July 28, 2010 3:04 PM

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