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Catholic author and speaker Elizabeth Kelly joins us for a discussion of the supposed “anti-woman” bias in Christianity. Is it real, or is it just a modern story disconnected from historical reality? Kelly is the author of books for and about Christian women, including Love Like a Saint: Cultivating Virtue with Holy Women.
Cy Kellett:
Is Christianity anti-woman? Liz Kelly is next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome again to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We try to be current here. We try to be up to date, address the new things that come up here at Catholic Answers Focus. But there are some perennials that we try to deal with from time to time as well. And one of the perennial complaints about Christianity, and maybe it’s implicit in a lot of media, like I’m thinking about the Handmaid’s Tale and that kind of thing, is this idea that there’s something anti-woman about Christianity. Is that true?
Cy Kellett:
We turned to Liz Kelly for an answer. Elizabeth Kelly, a wonderful writer and speaker. You can find her at lizk.org. She’s written books, such as Love Like a Saint, Cultivating Virtue with Holy Women, and a whole bunch of other very fine books. She’ll also come out and speak wherever you are. And she’s a subtle and very helpful thinker. And so we asked, we just put the question to her. Is there evidence that Christianity is an anti-woman religion? Is Jesus himself, Saint Paul, that kind of thing. Is there an anti-woman bias there? And even if it’s not in the ancient church, is it present in the present practice of Christianity? Here’s what Liz Kelly had to say.
Cy Kellett:
Liz Kelly, thank you very much, first of all, for being here with us on Catholic Answers Focus.
Liz Kelly:
Delighted. Delighted to join you.
Cy Kellett:
And congratulations on your own podcasts, Deep Down Things, which we’ll maybe talk about a little bit before we end.
Liz Kelly:
Thank you. Let’s do that.
Cy Kellett:
One of the things we try to do on Focus is take the time to go more deeply into defending the church or explaining the church in some ways. And one of the common complaints against the church, and even, I would say, is a theme of those who would maybe like to keep folks away from the Catholic church, is that Catholic Christianity and maybe Christianity more generally is anti-woman. And even anti-woman from its very conception. So I would say that there’s two ways that this gets expressed. One is, well, women are second-class citizens within Christianity, and the other is, actually, Christianity just hates women. It’s all about woman hatred. So, you feel comfortable tackling those topics?
Liz Kelly:
In 10 minutes. Sure.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. Yeah. Clear up all the misconceptions.
Liz Kelly:
Yeah, all of them. Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Right. So, certainly for Catholics, I think in the secular media and any reporting on the all male priesthood, involves the word yet. It always involves the word yet. The Catholic church has not yet come to the point where it’s ready to ordain women. So the assumption is, this is something that’s wrong with the church. Eventually it will get around to being fixed because it’s clearly anti-woman. How do you respond to that as a Catholic?
Liz Kelly:
Well, the reservation of priesthood to men is no more anti-woman than it is the natural reservation of motherhood to women. There is an element where the church is honoring a natural and spiritual fittedness to different tasks within the church. And we wouldn’t be accused of ageism if we said, “We’re not going to put guns in the hands of ten-year-olds and recruit them for the military.” Everyone would say, “No, there’s something about that that doesn’t quite fit.” And in the same way, the church is simply asking mothers to be mothers and fathers to be fathers, even on the spiritual claim. So in that respect, rather than it being some sort of limitation, it’s actually honoring and dignifying the role that women play in the church.
Cy Kellett:
Well, here we run up against an immediate problem in that you have to defend manhood and womanhood as distinct. You have to make all the qualifications equal, but distinct realities. Is that still possible in a transgendered world?
Liz Kelly:
Yeah. I think it’s more important than ever. I can remember, I was at a Vatican Congress in 2008 and it was in honor of Mulieris Dignitatem, and scholars came from all around the world to talk about what Pope John Paul meant when he said, “We need the feminine genius.” So we were just all there discussing that. There were people presenting from all over the world. It was very interesting because one woman stood up in the back and she said, “Well, what we’re really here to talk about is ordaining women to the priesthood.” And another person stood up from another part of the world and said, “No, actually we don’t have the authority to change that.” And so they started into this conversation, which descended into a lot of arguing very quickly.
Liz Kelly:
And this beautiful elderly bishop, he looked like he was about 110 years old, he shuffled up to the microphone. I’ll never forget it. And he said, “We cannot demonize this question or the people who ask it.”
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Liz Kelly:
“We have to give them a robust account of church teaching on human sexuality and how that plays out within vocation.” So I think the first thing is that we have to, as Catholics, really gather our vocabulary in order to answer this in a robust way, because people are going to continue to ask it for the rest of human history. So we can’t just say, “Well, it’s just not about church authority,” or whatever. And I do think that we are gathering a more robust vocabulary to be able to answer some of these questions. But the first thing I would say is, we can’t ever demonize the question itself. It’s always going to be asked.
Liz Kelly:
And I think one of the first entry points for me with this, is always going to center on, how do we define power versus authority? And if we can enter into the categories of those two words, then we can really get to the heart of the matter very quickly. Students will come into my class, woman and man, and say, “Oh, women have no authority in the church. They have no power in the church.” And of course, my response is, “Well, tell that to Mother Teresa,” for example. Even posthumously, she might be one of the most powerful feminine presences in the world.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Liz Kelly:
Even though she’s still dead. So what’s the difference between power and authority in the church? How is the church recognizing authority? And there were plenty of women in the church who have had tremendous influence, tremendous effect. I think of Catherine Doherty. I just wrote a chapter about her in my new book. So we have to understand that the priesthood acts on the authority of Christ Jesus and that women can speak. The fact that women don’t have power is not the same as saying that they have no authority.
Liz Kelly:
And we have many examples of women in the church whose voices were incredibly influential and remain influential. You can go into any third world country and say the name Mother Teresa and people are going to know who that is. But if you say Jose Bergoglio, they’re not going to know who that is. Now, if you say Pope Francis, they might know who Pope Francis is. But that’s because of the authority that has been entrusted to him through the church because of his position, not because he’s a man.
Cy Kellett:
Well, I guess a Catholic is called, it’s part of our fundamental vocation, not to seek power or think of power in the way that the world does. Would you say that that’s a fair thing and that’s part of the conflict here?
Liz Kelly:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And also, the church has been champions of women, champions of giving women the kind of culture that will support them to do what they really want to do. It’s the exact opposite of what I think many people think of with respect to the church. But really, I think the church honors the family in such an incredibly important way. And one of the biggest pieces of that is women and motherhood.
Liz Kelly:
And I think one of the questions we have been talking about was, is church teaching really meant to leave women at home, leave them in the kitchen and all of that. And you only have to look to Saint Edith Stein or any number of the women philosophers, who would say that family life is meant to prepare you for a broader, robust life beyond the home. So it’s the exact opposite. Everything that’s going on in the home is really intended to prepare you for a much more robust life outside of the home, beyond the home.
Cy Kellett:
Just one more thing on power in the church. I think this is something that actually, in a practical way, people who don’t know the Catholic church don’t know. But if you said, “Who runs most Catholic institutions? Is it women or men?” Or, “Who runs most departments in the average diocese or schools or hospitals?” I don’t think that men would have the advantage in that. And so it’s priesthood that is the issue. It’s not leadership or power in the worldly sense. I mean, some of the most powerful Catholics in the country are, for example, women running entire hospital networks or universities or that kind of thing.
Liz Kelly:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And so then that invites a deeper discussion of what the priesthood really is and what the essential role of the priest is. Can a woman teach? Yes. Can she preach? Yes. I mean, can she run a parish? Yes, she can do all of these sorts of things, but the essence of the priesthood is available to men in the way that they are in the image and likeness of Christ in the sacraments. And again, this is a much deeper conversation, but we spend a whole semester talking about exactly what the priesthood is and why it’s reserved just to men. And there’s great material out there.
Liz Kelly:
Sister Sara Butler, who initially wanted to argue for women’s ordination, started doing a very rigorous, robust study of the issue and ended up having an intellectual conversion after she went through all the different church documents and the arguments and things like that. She has written about this extensively. There’s a beautiful, very, very accessible book on that. And I think it’s important to remember when you pick up Sister Butler’s material that she was really convinced she was right, that women should be ordained. And it was through her own intensive, intellectual work that really helped her to understand why the church does what it does.
Cy Kellett:
Liz Kelly, our guest, we’re talking about the role of women in the church and also the kind of complaint against the church, I suppose, the argument against the Catholic church and its moral authority because it’s alleged anti-woman stance. All right, Liz, I’m going to say, okay, you can tell me about all the university presidents you want, chancellors of dioceses. You can talk about Mary Magdalen, Mary, the mother of God. Put all that on one side of the scale. On the other side of the scale is one sentence from St. Paul, which destroys… And you know exactly what I’m about to say. ” Wives, be submissive to your husbands.” No matter what we do in the real world, that one sentence typifies the Christian view for many, many people.
Liz Kelly:
And again, that is an absolutely legitimate question. So we don’t want to skirt over it. We don’t want to say, “Oh, [put up 00:13:34].” But we do want to invite people to take that line in the context, in which it was given, where the language to a modern ear does sound like a rebuke, but a lot of what Jesus taught was offensive to people. A lot of what Jesus taught made them bristle and think, “Oh, I’m not giving up all I have to help the poor.” There was a lot that was taught that was uncomfortable, and nobody likes rebuke. Nobody likes to receive that kind of tone that Paul sometimes uses. So the fact that it makes you a little uncomfortable, that’s incredibly human. But I think it’s important to keep two things in mind.
Liz Kelly:
One, Paul would have been very aware that many of the pagans to whom he was speaking were coming directly out of a pagan worship that had many female deities. And so he would want to be very careful about what he would invite you to worship. And so that would have definitely been on his mind. But also if we take this passage in its full context, nowhere does he wag a finger at women and say, “And you better love your husband.” It’s very interesting that in the next few lines, he says, “Men, you need to love your wife. You need to love her so much that you’re willing to lay down your life for her.” So there is an exhortation, there’s a kind of bifurcation in that exhortation in terms of its language, but at the same time, both are being challenged to live lives of service. Does that make sense?
Cy Kellett:
Sure. It makes sense to me, but I think that it does offend against the current liberation and empowerment mentality that all of society has. Everybody’s trying to be liberated and empowered and it doesn’t sound liberating and empowering.
Liz Kelly:
Sure, sure. Most of the gospel message doesn’t. Welcome to Christianity.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Take up your cross each day and follow it, doesn’t sound so liberating and empowered either. Yeah.
Liz Kelly:
[inaudible 00:16:10]. I’m going to run a political campaign on taking up your cross. You’ve never been elected.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Liz Kelly:
But there’s a reason that the Pope has the crying room. He receives this incredible burden to be the leader of the church, and the first thing they do is they shuffle him into a room called the crying room where he can go, “Oh my gosh, I have just been asked to do this incredibly difficult thing.” So, any Christian life, male or female, any way that you embody vocation involves sacrifice. I saw it with my brother. My brother’s a priest. He’s now the director of our junior seminary. He used to work on Wall Street. He used to drive a Porsche. He did middle market management and I watched him giving away all of his worldly goods as he was preparing for the priesthood. I saw him giving away all of his rights, really. He doesn’t even belong to himself anymore. He belongs to the church in the same way that I belong to my husband and my husband belongs to me. We joke about that all the time, how he belongs to me and so on and so forth.
Liz Kelly:
But in any case, but there’s a reality in that. So all of Christian life calls for a willingness to sacrifice everything, to sacrifice everything. And that is not attractive to a modern ear, that wants to be themselves and discover themselves and all that sort of thing. And yet, our charisms, stewarding our charisms, operating in our charisms, is the surest way to become what you were meant to become. It’s the most satisfying way to become what you were meant to be. And this is exactly church teaching, but it appears on the surface to fly in the face of honoring the human person in such a specific and dignified way.
Cy Kellett:
Well, then let me just move on to this then. I’m going to guess, you’re a well-educated person, you’re probably aware of the fact that women’s relationship with children involves dependencies that men never experience. So the church, in calling on husbands and wives to be open to life, that’s asking actually in base physical terms, more of women than it is of men. And so a lot of modern people think of children, really like the advocacy for families that welcome lots of children, this can’t be seen by the modern person in many ways as anything other than anti-woman. So do you see what I’m saying? So I want you to address that, the whole idea of woman as mother and the great, really heroic demands on mothers, even to the core of their body, that the church insists, “Yeah. That is actually part of your life and you have to be open to it.”
Liz Kelly:
Yeah. Yeah. Two things I think of. One is there’s such a fundamental misunderstanding of the gift of children. They have become goods in a way.
Cy Kellett:
Product type goods.
Liz Kelly:
Yes. They’ve become products. For example, years ago, the sperm banks stopped accepting sperm from red headed men. Why? Because nobody wanted a red headed child. Nobody was coming into the sperm bank looking for a redhead. So they no longer had any value in the sperm bank. Now if that isn’t evidence of turning our children into a product, I can’t imagine what is. So, that’s the first thing to understand.
Liz Kelly:
The second thing I think, is we need to emphasize that participating in the creation of a human soul, a human person who will live into eternity, is the most startling invitation to enter into the creative imagination of God, himself, that there can be, right?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Liz Kelly:
God has an idea, and it’s this incredible person. We are an idea of God himself. So we need to reclaim the understanding of the sanctity of the human person and the great gift it is to be able to join God in that creative moment, creating something eternal. This isn’t a duck. This isn’t an Oreo cookie. This isn’t a new tire coming off the assembly line. I mean, this is a human person who will live forever, whose soul will join God in eternity. So when Catholics have all these kids, it’s not because they don’t have any discipline or they’re not thinking about the earth. What they’re doing is celebrating the capacity to join their creator in the most important creative gift that could possibly be. When we lose that, when we start thinking of our kids as something we have to put through college, something who’s got to get good grades and be a reflection of how wonderful a parent I am and all of that. I mean, that’s when we really get into trouble.
Liz Kelly:
My column this month is basically on fatherhood and some of the gifts that my father gave me, one of them being, we think of fathers as giving life at the moment of conception and then their job is done. But I remember when I was trying to figure out whether I was going to go to graduate school for writing or graduate school for law, my father was a lawyer and a judge and law was big in our house and I really respected it. And he said, “You know, of all my kids you’d make a great lawyer. You love to argue.” And he said, “But when you write, I don’t even know where that comes from. And that seems to me to be something very special.” And in that moment, he was giving me permission to not have a life like his, to not pursue the path that he knew. That is as much a bestowal of life, as it is the moment of conception. For him to fan the flame of the gifts that I’ve been given is just another way that fathers continue to give life.
Liz Kelly:
So, we think of motherhood and fatherhood as very interchangeable, and they really aren’t. They really aren’t. And that’s a big inconvenience, but it’s also the source of the greatest joy and creativity that we’ll ever experience as human beings.
Cy Kellett:
This idea of the way that you express the Christian idea of parenthood, the Christian idea of the woman as mother, it just is the exact opposite of the young woman, and I’m not trying to insult this woman. I hope it doesn’t come across that way, Liz, but the young woman who says, “In all sincerity, I don’t want to be just a mom.”
Cy Kellett:
Do you see what I’m saying? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her saying, “I don’t want to be just a mom.” But at the root of that, the way that that’s formulated, is a lack of appreciation for who and what she is.
Liz Kelly:
That’s just turning mom into a product.
Cy Kellett:
Oh yeah, right.
Liz Kelly:
It’s just turning motherhood into robotism. A robot cannot form a human person. They could feed them, they could change their diapers. There’s all kinds of things like that, that they could do, but you cannot replace the essence of motherhood with a machine. And they’ve been seeing this in Japan. They’ve been using robots to take care of the elderly, and they don’t flourish because it’s a machine. You can’t just turn motherhood into another product that comes off an assembly line. And plus each woman puts her own unique stamp on it.
Liz Kelly:
My mom was a very different mom from the way my sisters have been mothers to their kids. So there is something so unique and unrepeatable about it. And not only that, but my mom was a different mom to me than she was to my brother, than she was to my older siblings. It’s like she had to meet me where I was and recognize me in my limitations. I’m part hermit. I’m very introverted. I’m not the same with my other kids. So I mean, to be just a mom, I can’t imagine a more incredibly difficult, nuanced job that would require more skill and sensitivity. I can’t think of one. I can’t think of one.
Cy Kellett:
Well, I feel like we’ve run down a good number, and as you said, we could just go on and on and on about this. This is not something you settle. But I do appreciate your ability to give almost an invitational kind of a summary of the Catholic position on these. But I want to give you an opportunity before we end, to ask you if there’s any counter evidence against. In fact, not only is it not the case that the church is anti-woman, but is there evidence that the church is pro-woman?
Liz Kelly:
Sure. First of all, it’s always difficult to put these two forces as though they’re opposed, man against woman. You want to step back from that. And the first thing I would say is look at the incarnation, Jesus taking on human nature, automatically exalts human nature for everyone, male, female. So already I’m enjoying an exalted situation because of Christ and because of Christ taking on human nature. And that links me to him in a way that is not repeatable in any other kind of category. But yes, then I would say certainly that the church is pro-woman. You look at all she has done. I think of all the women I know who work on the pro-life front lines. Most of the women that I know who are militantly pro-life, I mean, they’re out there dealing with people who are considering abortion right now.
Liz Kelly:
I mean really on the front line. It’s all women. It’s a lot of women who are out there and that work, so that they are given that position, that they earned that position, that they can hold it in a unique way, I think is further evidence that the church is very pro-women. But, I guess again, I don’t want to parse it out like the church is either going to be pro-man or pro-woman, but that’s not how it works.
Liz Kelly:
I think of this example. A girlfriend of mine was getting ready to retire and she was offered this great retirement package at the university. And she came up into my office and she said, “I feel so bad. It’s a great blessing for me, but what are you guys going to do when I’m gone? I don’t want to leave you guys in the lurch or whatever.” And I remember thinking, this is exactly the lie that the devil wants you to believe, that a blessing for one person is somehow going to be a curse for somebody else. So that a blessing for women is somehow going to be a curse against women, that God cannot bless and honor and dignify both at the same time, in their own unique ways. And I remember talking to her. I said, “Honey, that’s not how God works. This blessing for you, that’s a blessing for us. We love to see you land so well. I have total confidence that we’ll find another person who will bring a new and refreshing energy to the job that you held for so long.”
Liz Kelly:
But so to say, even pro-man, pro-woman, I get a little tentative, even at those sorts of things because they tend too much to end up in a punitive kind of relationship where they’re battling against each other, rather than both being exalted through the incarnation. Do you know what I mean?
Cy Kellett:
I do, and it just sounds so Catholic. But the idea of the Lord drawing us into a relationship with one another, where your good is my good, or I just will the highest good for you. That’s what Christianity is at its heart.
Liz Kelly:
Of course it is. And so I think that’s really important to be aware of our nomenclature, that we don’t want [inaudible 00:30:18] too much from the culture of pro this, pro that, because it does set up that opposing force, and as Catholics, we’re completely comfortable living in the paradoxical tension of both, and we believe in the visible and the invisible. We lay down our life to gain it. We have God man, virgin mother. I mean, we’re always putting these impossible things into dynamic tension with one another. And I think that’s the same thing with women and men, that we flourish and thrive when we’re in this dynamic tension. It doesn’t have to be that one is going to thrive and the other doesn’t. That’s not God’s intention.
Cy Kellett:
Indeed. Liz Kelly, I always love talking with you. You have a wonderful mind. People can find you at lizk.org, right?
Liz Kelly:
Yes, yes, yes.
Cy Kellett:
I’m so grateful that you took the time with us. And I’d like to take a little time to devote just to your podcast for a minute to let people know about it, because I mean, you’re doing a lot of hard work, carrying Dave and the two priests. You’re doing a great job. You’re doing a great job carrying the dead weight and making a very fine podcast. Tell me more about these conversations you’re having on Deep Down Things?
Liz Kelly:
Sure. So one of my jobs is I help run Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought & Culture, and in the last year or so, we have turned that into a podcast where Dave, the editor and I will interview different contributors. It’s just been an absolute ball in that I think the way that sometimes these people will talk about their work is a little bit different than the way they write about their work. And so it’s just been wonderful to have these very humane, live conversations with contributors from around the world. We’ve had people from multiple countries who will call in, we record those. And then we have two priest friends who will write and offer spiritual meditation on the work that has been discussed. And it could be anything from icons to Russell Kirk.
Liz Kelly:
We had a great conversation with Brad Birzer and he talked about how Russell Kirk used to wear a cape and walk around campus. He just had this great Gothic sense of him, but so it’s been really, really fruitful and wonderful to learn a little bit more about our contributors, but also to take their work and make it a little bit more accessible to a listening audience.
Cy Kellett:
And it’s just the kind of conversation we need, intelligent humane, as you said, about important things. And so I hope people will find Deep Down Things. I’m very excited that in the near future, Catholic Answers and Deep Down Things will be associated. I’m really looking forward to that Liz.
Liz Kelly:
Thank you. Thank you.
Cy Kellett:
Well, thanks for taking the time with us.
Liz Kelly:
Any time.
Cy Kellett:
I hope you will check out Liz’s podcast, Deep Down Things. Lots of great, really smart, but quite accessible Catholic conversation going on over there, Deep Down Things. You’ll find it, just put her name in or Deep Down Things or visit her website, lizk.org, and you can find out that information. I hope that you are somewhat convinced or at least challenged in your thinking, if you’re a person who assumes that there’s an anti-woman bias in Christianity. It is true that Christian people, that Christ himself, saw men and women and the relationships between men and women, in a different light than is current. We don’t think about men and women and the relationships between us in the way that a post sexual revolution world does. Does that mean that we’re behind the times or does that mean that we’ve held on to truths that the world is letting go of, much to its detriment? You have to decide, but at the very least, I hope Liz has given you some reason to stop and think about that.
Cy Kellett:
I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and you can send me an email. Well it’ll get to us. All of us will read it, if you send it to focus@catholic.com. We love getting your emails. And if you have suggestions for future episodes, or maybe a follow-up question that occurs to you because of this episode, something that was provoked, focus@catholic.com. Also, please support us. We need your support in order to keep doing what we do here. You can do so at givecatholic.com. If you’re watching on YouTube, don’t forget to like and subscribe. If you’re listening on one of the podcast services and you subscribe, that’d be great because then you’ll get notices when new episodes are available. And we could always use that five star review and maybe a few nice words to help someone else come in to the Catholic Answers Focus family.
Cy Kellett:
This is Catholic Answers Focus. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here.