Could Christ Have Been a Woman?
(continued)

Fr. Pennington: Well, I certainly would not agree with that. Father Panteleimon and Christian Orthodoxy as a whole-though again I probably shouldn't generalize-say that everything stopped with the Seventh Council. What he's saying there is much more in line with the early Patristic outlook.
But at the same time, as I said, we still have an awful lot of cultural conditioning that's holding us back enormously, and just to fill that out a little, the truth of the matter is that most of us men still wouldn't exactly want a woman to be our boss. So I often say that the first thing women have to do is to help men to grow up so that men are able to be equals. The reason we men try to keep women down is that in reality we're scared to death of them-because when they are truly empowered, and we're not, well, what's going to happen?
Of course I certainly don't think that the physiological differences, as you just quoted there from Father Panteleimon, pose any kind of problem. And what may come out of those differences isn't, in the integral person, a problem either. As I said before, I think they're a complementarity and an enrichment. And I certainly don't think that they dictate any kind of hierarchy, either. But one of the great challenges that the Catholic Church has, precisely because it's Catholic, or "universal"-unlike, say, the Episcopal Church, in which the national church in the United States could do one thing and the one in Indonesia could do another-is that there is a universal teaching authority and a kind of moving together. Now if you've traveled around the world as I have, you're especially aware that this whole evolution of consciousness with regard to the equality of men and women is at very different places in different countries. In some countries, they're just not ready for it at all. And so the Catholic Church is like a good teacher who meets the students where they are and only takes them to the next step they can master because the teacher knows that if they're too far out in front of their students, they'll lose them. And when you're talking about a class that is universal, or even just one parish for that matter, you just have to try to get a sense of what the next step is for the group as a whole. I was talking to a parish priest yesterday and he was telling me that when you get up in the pulpit, and you've got people in that parish from one end of the spectrum to the other, somebody's going to damn just about anything you say.
You know, the Catholic Church took quite a leap at the Second Vatican Council and changed a lot of things for the first time in four hundred years, and that really has stretched and strained a lot of people. So moving ahead with the women's thing has been a matter of doing it gently. Women have moved into the sanctuary and are taking new roles as lectors, ministers of the eucharist, parish counsels, officers of the diocese and so on, so gradually people are getting used to that. But we're in a country where this evolution is perhaps the most advanced and yet, even here, we still see all the drag that's around! And when you go to a country that's been cut off, like China, say, it's quite clear that they have a long, long way to go.

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