Care needs to be the bedrock of responsibility thereby giving responsibility its proper place as love-bound duty with its substance being the integral care of the whole person. Therefore, the most authentic type of pastoral care & responsibility is supposed to be of the “fertile nurturing” kind rather than coldly officious and administrative. This is because Jesus taught His followers to be this way. Unfortunately, the reality with both these women who reject the virtue of nurturance and those men who impart a cold rationalistic style into their pastoral ministry is at the crux of this problem. Why? Because to be genuinely effective as pastors who imitate their Master, the Good Shepherd, you need to be both fertile and nuturing within the heart and you need to put your ministerial heart of compassion and charity at the absolute centre of what you do and it needs to inform every aspect of how you do what you do, and how you be the person you are, and also your “becoming”, that is, your spiritual growth. Along with that, administrative officiousness and robotic coldness have to be efficaciously replaced with fraternal warmth in the way you meet and greet every single person for it needs to be the bedrock of your encounter with others so they can see and feel the light of Christ eminating from your conduct. If that is predominantly absent, then you are not being true to your vocational calling as a pastor. Rather or instead, you are merely treating it like a secular job that needs to have every box satisfactorially ticked in efficiency-terms minus the central role of love as defining who you are and undergirding everything you do. And this is so much more than being simply about “loving what you do”. Even people in secular roles so often say they “love what they do”. And fair enough. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Moreover too, it is far better that they love what they do on their jobs than not at all. But what essentially differentiates the pastoral charism is that it is supposed to be primarily about being love for another and if you cannot be love for someone, then you have some serious thinking and reflecting to do about why you are even in the pastoral role you occupy.
And so why all the hoo-haa over this whole thing? Why the exacerbation as exemplified in the following quotation:
In a letter read aloud on stage with the pope listening attentively, the students noted that Francis’ landmark 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si (Praised Be) made virtually no mention of women, cited no woman theologians and “exalts their maternal role and forbids them access to ordained ministries.” *
?????
Why?
The point I’m trying to make here is that a new improved pastorate will not be achieved by including those women who abhor or hold attitudes of condescention regarding the female maternal charism. And this is simply because what the current pastorate lacks so severely in the way that it is routinely apprehended and practiced is that essential charism of maternal type nurturance. You need the charism of nurturance as a pastor because this is the essence of the spirit of charity and love as embodied and exemplified by the Good Shepherd, Who btw, is supposed to be the noblest of role models for all pastors. He personafied this charism par exellànce. So, if you do not have that charism in your ministry and/or you are not doing your utmost to conscientiously cultivate this charism, you are not upholding the sacred rights and responsibilities of your vocation in all earnestness, and therefore you are acting contrary to the moral dictates of your vocational life. Hence there is absolutely nothing wrong with exalting the maternal spirit of womanhood and encouraging positive cultural change within the Church by effeminitizing the way in which pastoral governance and responsibility are carried out. That said, there are way too many women who decry this charism as being ‘obsolete’ or ‘passè’ and instead want to bolster their egos through being administrative control-freaks. We have way too many of those in the male order of things as it stands – officious ministers of the cloth who think it their privy to run the whole show like high-flying executives running a multi-national corporation. All this is just worldly clap-trap ruining the whole program of spiritual edification and growth within the Church nevermind outside.
Thus, a nurturance revolution is what is needed in the Church of today, and one that personally knocks on the door of the hearts of men and women alike in order that the Church of tomorrow will become much more authentic and resillient in her witness, and so will not anymore cave in under the behavioural pressures of worldly conformism, especially insofar as interpersonal interrelational dynamics are concerned. Swiss author Paul Tournier MD talks about this unequivocally in his masterpiece The Gift of Feeling. The tragedy of our times is marked by a pervasive almost unnoticable and therefore insidious ubiquitous infestation of social morès with a habituated cold-hearted rationalism as their centrepiece. This habituation seeps into everything, everywhere. It permeates too many relationships and it deadens their otherwise meaningful and joyful presence in our lives. Take a look at this YouTube video and observe it closely.
https://youtu.be/PvUOJI0EFRA?si=7Den8-EsHN1vsPEi
What do you notice going on in the background? When you see the foreground activity, do you notice anything else? Is there anything going on “to the sides”? If so, what do you see? If you see anything else, is what you see genuinely a compatible response of appreciation for what is happening “on stage”?
Honestly, I was shocked after noticing the strange, out of place reactions of the apparent audience happening to the sides of the foreground attraction. For there is no emotion, no natural or authentically appreciative response. These AI deep fake images of people supposedly watching this baby fashion parade are not the slightest bit interested in any of what is panning out, albeit rather entertainingly before them. In fact, the disturbing thing is they appear to be bored and completely disengaged from something which in a normal spirit of good-will, ought to exude a joyful noise of applause, appreciative laughter and amusement. But tragically the opposite is playing out in the midst of the audience and instead it is none other than a stuporfied, writhing mass of manniquin-like deep fake images appearing on the surface to be real people but once deciphored, it looks rather monstrous and hideous because the dead-pan reactions do not match what they appear to be watching – a toddler fashion parade repleate with baby animals too! Such a lurid contrast gives us a disturbing sense of the reality of our unwatchful and uncaring times. Our secular society has become way too de-sensitized to feeling the rawness of innocent appreciation and love. The natural beauty of life as endowed by God no longer has appeal in the hearts of too many. People have forgotten how to spontaneously love and know what it means to care about the natural beauty that exists around about them in the midst of God’s creation. Along with that, the simple joys of life often go unnoticed and unappreciated. A cold indifference coupled with emotional deadening disguised as ‘neutrality’ becomes the rule of thumb in dictating the ins and outs of how someone relates to another. There are exceptions to this and they are often so interspersed with the former that all too often, the existence of the former often eludes or escapes the notice of the latter or being even noticed by the exceptions, since for the most part, these ‘exceptions’ are really only cosmetic exceptions in that they are examples of families for instance, that are ‘well to do’ and ‘have it all together’ so much so that the plight of needy loners who may be yearning for love and acceptance by others does not attract their attention nor does the inverse reality of those ‘crowd-pleasers’ who are cold-heartedly indifferent and robotic in the way they relate to others who may not be ‘wired’ that way, others who for the most part may be more attuned to the importance of listening to their hearts in the way God intended for their hearts to be listened to. Dr Tournier makes a very pertinent observation. He says:
The medicine of the person is not a ‘marginal’ medicine like antipsychiatry or other doctrines that are critical of academic science. You see, once again, we are not concerned with inclining too much to one or other of the two opposite poles [aka: religion and science] but with discovering their many faceted interplay of their complementarity. What is wrong is the imbalance; we suffer from the predominance of things [aka: man-made objects] over persons [aka: sentient relationships, God’s created realm, read: animals, our natural world, and our humanity], so that our technological civilization seems inhuman, and man [and all God’s creation] no more than an object. (p. 12, 1981) ¹
So there you have it! The problem stems from a certain type of social conditioning process, considered ‘normative’ in many contemporary social orders, whereby there is a sidelining of the feminine aspect of nurutrance within God’s created order from both the male and now, only more recently, the female psyche, particularly with the rise of radical feminism undergirding some modern educative norms. For while the students from the Belgian Catholic University in the cited article above have the right to request in all due respects, that women should be admitted into the pastorate, and while they do have a seriously valid point about the need to admit women into the sphere of ordained pastoral roles, they seriously lack the proper understanding of why Pope Francis is stressing the need for a deep cultivation of the gift of maternal nurturance in the feminine vocation. These students appear to be touting a line which has more in common with the cold-hearted ultra-rationalistic tennets of radical feminism, an ideology that boasts a platform where women just become another artificially constructed macho gender with a more creative drive and verve than men! This is a complete and utter affront to God’s creative genius in creating them male and female. It’s not to say either that men ought to be macho misogenystic jerks who, moved by the flesh under the curse of Adam, lord it over women and deny the validity of their own healthy feminine genius, albeit in a silhouetted format when compared to that of women. And women need to own their own masculine genius but, like their male counterparts’ shadow femininity, in a silhouetted format. What this means is that while males are inherently masculine and females inherently feminine, there is an aspect of the opposite endowment in each of the divinely created genders. In other words, God created them male and female but by the same token, He also meant for man to come into a knowledge and appreciation of a naturally apportioned feminine aspect within his own makeup that was given in order that he become a well ordered and balanced person. Likewise with woman, she is supposed to come into a knowledge and appreciation of her God-given masculine aspect, which acts as a counterbalancer to her becoming attached to the curse of Eve, that is, the curse of subservience to the dictates of reliance on male dominance in partnership instead of God. Both the curses of Adam & Eve are antithetical to the promise of the redeemed life under the covenant of the New Adam and the New Eve. Christ is the New Adam, His mother Mary, the New Eve. To become New Creations in Christ is to divest oneself of the old creation, that which lives under the curse of Original Sin. St Paul exhorts us to this exchanged life by stating that when we “put on Christ”, we became New Creations in Him, and at one and the same time, we put off the old garments of being enslaved to the Flesh, that is, the dictates of the old man, the one who was under the curse of Adam and Eve. In this New Creation, we are to be co-joined with Christ as co-heirs, and what this essentially means is that our old nature, our fallen nature is to be discarded, to be dispensed with, and we are to clothe ourselves anew with the new nature we have been given through our adoption as heirs, as sons & daughters of God. Hence we need to live and cultivate our natures according to this newness of life which means that we strive interiorly to break free from the fetters of slavery to the dictates of the flesh, to sin and death. And this then means our perspective on who we are as men or women is positively revolutionized. Men are no longer to be slaves to the control-freak mentality of power-over gratification. Women are no longer to be slaves to being demeaned as ‘servile’, passive, and ‘uningenuitive’. Both male and female now need to acknowledge the mutual complementarity of each other and how that each one of these God-given gendered endowments has within it, an aspect of its complementary pair. Neither are these pairs opposites as in good and evil since while male and female are complementary, and can therefore coexist with each other in harmony, good and evil are truly opposites, are not complementary, and therefore cannot exist side by side in harmony.
I’m angry, so I say take a look at this shit! And by “this shit”, I’m not referring to Pope Francis’ statements. I am instead lauding what he says here. Rather, when bluntly expressing my chagrin, I am referring to the disgraceful and ungrateful way the Catholic University of Louvain reproachfully responded to the beautiful & encouraging words of the Holy Father:
Francis said he liked what they said, but repeated his frequent refrain that “the church is woman,” and only exists because the Virgin Mary agreed to be the mother of Jesus and that men and women were complementary.*
“A woman within the People of God is a daughter, a sister, a mother,” he said, adding “womanhood speaks to us of fruitful welcome, nurturing and life-giving dedication….²
“Woman is fertile welcome. Care. Vital devotion,” Francis said. “Let us be more attentive to the many daily expressions of this love, from friendship to the workplace, from studies to the exercise of responsibility in the church and society, from marriage to motherhood, from virginity to the service of others and the building up of the kingdom of God.” *
Louvain said such terminology had no place in a university or society today. It emphasized the point with the entertainment for the event featuring a jazz rendition of Lady Gaga’s LGBTQ+ anthem “Born This Way.” *
Another spokeswoman for the university had this to say: “We are really shocked,” said Valentine Hendrix, a 22-year-old student. “He reduces us to a role of childbearer, mother, wife, everything we want to emancipate ourselves from.” ²
What an utter absurdity such an unwelcome response to the Holy Father’s beautiful exhortation this piece of, sorry to say it, Louvain trash-response is! An absolute fly in the face of everything decent. Lady Gaga indeed! Just goes to show how necessary is a revolution of the heart as echoed by Ezekiel 11 : 17-21 😄
17Therefore declare that this is what the Lord GOD says: ‘I will gather you from the peoples and assemble you from the countries to which you have been scattered, and I will give back to you the land of Israel.’
18When they return to it, they will remove all its detestable things and all its abominations. 19And I will give them singleness of heart and put a new and right spirit within them; I will remove their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh, one of love alone, 20so that they may follow My statutes, keep My ordinances, and practice them. Then they will be My people, and I will be their God.
21But as for those whose hearts pursue detestable things and abominations, I will bring their conduct down upon their own heads, declares the Lord GOD.”
To be frank, this so-called ‘Lady’ Gaga, as she is in the now-time, is a shameless unrepentant disgrace! Btw, I say this because I am devestated that she still thinks that sex, power, and rock ‘n roll are the lords of life in general and she has no suppleness of conscience to see that what she is doing is very damaging and destructive. It is tragic that she has an uncaring attitude and therefore it is clear that she needs to have a serious illumination of conscience. After all, many have had such illuminations, myself included. I was once so entrenched within a prodigal quogmire that if it wasn’t for God sending me Rock-Bottom, I probably would not have got out of the trap, the snare set for me. I was so low down, in the pit that that damned devil had made but I knew not where I was until God sent me Rock-Bottoming out of my wits. It was an experience like no other and it was sequential in that it happened in segments over an extended period of time right from 1997 through to 2007. It took an entire decade to Rock-Bottom me back to my senses. And it was terrifying inasmuch as it was necessary. But I’m glad it happened because I wouldn’t be writing this blog if it had not happened and I wouldn’t be publicizing the necessities of interior spiritual renewal and transformation for the benefit of many others who so desperately need it. And the same goes for those many, countless others who are currently living under the cloud of darkness & deception that a prodigal life entails. I would not hesitate to include LGBTQIers in amongst this mix. I myself was also once an LGBTQIer and that was when I was deep in the throes of my substance addiction. The Rock-Bottoming experience instigated by God shook me right up & out of that hellish quogmire I had descended right into the thick of. Being as quicksand, if God had done nothing, I would have been pulled down almost to the point of no return if quicksand is anything to go by.
This brings me to another pertinent issue – the banal paucity of apostolic ministries in the Australian Catholic Church for those who struggle with mental health issues. I recently purchased a copy of the official Australian Catholic Church directory for 2024 and was shocked to discover that absolutely no chaplaincy service exists for those who have mental health issues – at least not in the Melbourne Archdiocese anyhow, which I think is frankly appalling. There are chaplains for youth, chaplains for the defence forces, chaplains for major Catholic hospitals, and even one for LGBTQIers but that’s about it. The general issue of mental and spiritual wellbeing has largely been left unaddressed and undercatered for. It’s as though the Church is content to leave that broad spectrum issue to the secular world. So is there no wonder the Church finds her position of influence in society at large to be seriously waning? When you consider that there is such a great and desperate need out there both in the flailing rank & file membership of the Church and in wider society, for more robust mental health supports and services to be made available and accessible, and yet the Melbourne Archdiocese has not covered this area at all is absolutely atrocious and calls for solid and urgent reform. Ministries need to be set up which are grass-roots but also have the strong guiding and steering support of pastoral leadership. The pastoral leadership needs to be relating to the membership base as per the conventions spelled out for seminary formation in Optatam Totius. ** Take the following excerpt from this Vatican II document as an example of the type of healthy fraternal spirit of collaboration, co-operation, and solidarity, bound by the brotherly-sisterly bonds of mutual love and respect that need to be co-factored in to all relational dynamics within the Church at all levels and in all contexts:
“Under the rector’s leadership they are to form a very closely knit community both in spirit and in activity and they are to constitute among themselves and with the students that kind of family that will answer to the Lord’s prayer “That they be one” (cf. John 17:11) and that will develop in the students a deep joy in their own vocation.” **
This formational or formative paridigm ought to be implemented as foundational in a diverse cross-section of settings within the Church right from schools, colleges, and other educational settings through to other miscellaneous pastoral care and chaplaincy ministries including eventually being rolled out as the relationship-building charter for parish life. When I read the following statement that summed up the findings of a research project conducted in the UK & Ireland by a locally based reform lobby Root and Branch, I couldn’t help but gasp in exacerbation “That’d be right!”
“In England and Wales, we researched what happened to points raised in the parish discussions, where there were calls for more action on abuse, for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people, and for women to be admitted to the priesthood and to leadership roles – but we found these had been watered down by the bishops who filtered them for the report document,” ³
While I don’t necessarily think the bishops were wrong to edit the document, I think this lobby group has a strong case relative to the sheer paucity of ministerial & apostolic helps and services for those who on the whole, feel marginalized from the mainstream life of the Church. Insofar as inclusion of LGBTQIers goes, there does need to be an intricate network of pastoral support options and ones at that which can offer help in terms of fraternal support, social work provisions, peer mental health therapy relating to the general plethora of mental health needs including substance use, addiction & crisis management, and gender and sexual orientation issues. My own personal experience in this area as a sufferer serves me well to assist in clarifying any misgivings about these issues. I am also an abuse survivor in the general sense rather than in the more specific sense of clerical sexual abuse. I have come from a background of experience that can testify to a multiplicity of abuse contexts both within and outside of the Church. Therefore, I know firsthand many of the issues in all their depth, breadth, length, and in all their knarledness and convolutedness, in all their manner of contortedness that effectively sabotages and delays healing for months, years, and even decades. Hence I can comprehend the vastness of the overwhelm, and the variegatedness of the vicissitudes that accompany the rough and tumble journey of healing and coming into a sure-footed life reintegration and spiritual wholeness. These are among some of the most sturdy foundations upon which I can speak, can testify, and can articulate an unceasing vision of hope and future blessedness and glory for an authentically renewed One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church here on earth – and all the while, these are firmly achored to the pillar of faith in the divine revelation of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
God bless you all and thankyou kindly for taking the time to read this post 🙏💖
Miscellaneous References
1.) Tournier, P., The Gift of Feeling, 1981, SCM Press Ltd, London.
* Original Article Cited
** Optatam Totius, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651028_optatam-totius_en.html
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