The Feminization of the Catholic Church

There has been much talk of late about a long-observable fact: the feminization of the Catholic Church. My friend Jan was quite impressed with the term and thought it accurately expressed the reality.

“I went to a Catholic church downtown yesterday,” she said, “and really, it was all women on the altar – except for the priest. At Communion four ladies – three in pants –went to the side altar to pick up the chalices. The song leader was sensuous, in a blouse showing cleavage, waving her arms like a traffic cop. Only a few women in the pews were singing along. All the altar boys were girls.”

The Mass service invaded by women and girls in Linz, Austria According to the National Pastoral Life Center (NPLC), today there are more lay ministers than priests working in Catholic parishes: that is, 31,000 lay ministers to 29,000 diocesan priests. It notes that this “revolution in ministry” has meant a “stronger lay, feminine dimension” in the Church. (1)

Quite correctly stated. Almost every parish across the country uses scores of lay eucharistic and song ministers, lectors, and altar servers for its various Masses. Then, there are the liturgists, youth ministers, social concerns directors, adult education coordinators and other professional pastoral positions that never existed before Vatican II. Lay ministers make most of the pastoral visits to the sick and prisoners. And roughly 80 % of these positions are held by women. The NPLC predicts that the overall pattern indicates the bulk of positions will continue to be filled by women. (2)

Parishes have become “feminized,” the NPLC report continues, not only because many lay ministers are women, but also because parish ministry has become more collaborative and concerned with nurturing. This “feminine” spirit is to replace, I suppose, a “masculine” spirit which is more akin with hierarchy and institution.

In short, today’s parish minister is more like to be a layperson – and a woman. And increasingly, women are on the altar doing almost everything – including preaching.

To understand the cause for this feminization, Jan decided to read a book on the topic by the reportedly conservative Catholic Leon J. Podles entitled The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity. But, she reported to me, the book didn’t seem to really explain how things had changed so radically in so short a time. She asked my opinion.

Podles identifies the problem: an altar overrun by women, songs written to please a woman’s sentiments (“You are my everything,” etc.), an ethos of pacifism and self-surrender, all of which serves to render the men who still frequent the churches passive and emasculated.

A young woman in a sweat shirt distributes Communion without seriousness. Below, a woman-cantor directs the singing at the Mass

But he doesn’t even get close to the nail when he tries to hit the cause for the calamity.

Quite extravagantly Podles places the principal responsibility for this process of feminization on St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the rise of scholasticism and the expansion of female monasticism. His rationale for such fantastic claims is simply too complicated to enter into here. There is convoluted twisting and turning through Platonic influences and Aristotelian dichotomies.

In the end he never finds the simple solution to the present-day astonishing crisis of the feminization of the Catholic Church. He fails to see the obvious, that this process is a direct consequence of Vatican Council II.

In the United States today, 45 years after Vatican II, 31,000 lay persons plan liturgies, direct the music groups, schedule the lectors and run the education programs for adults, engaged couples and children; four-fifths of these ecclesial ministers are women. Before Vatican II, most of those jobs did not exist; less than 1 % of these jobs were filled by lay people. (3) Before Vatican II the average parish lay woman were most likely to be found in the Altar Society or Holy Name Society. Today, almost 50 % of all administrative positions in dioceses are held by women.

Before Vatican Council II, Catholic men frequented the Sacraments, took family responsibilities seriously and filled the seminaries. After Vatican Council II, the churches emptied, the divorce rate skyrocketed, and the sacristy was overrun with women. A kind of effeminate man attracted by the New Theology entered the seminaries, and the virile ethos of the Church grew fainter and fainter. It is no wonder not only men, but also many women, are leaving the Catholic Church today or no longer assist at Sunday Mass.

At the 40-year anniversary of the closing of Vatican II, a spate of analysis of the Council’s fruit flooded the Catholic press. I do not know of a single one that failed to underscore the new lay ministry as one of the significant marks of the Council’s legacy. Of course, that lay component is mostly women.

John Paul II posing with altar girls Ministry transformation as part of the Church renewal is based in particular on the teachings of Lumen Gentium, the Constitution on the Church, which encourages the layperson’s active participation in the liturgy. It also presents the Catholic Church as a communion of baptized believers with a call to ministry, which sounds an awful lot to me like the” heretical Protestant statement that “every man is a priest.

The result has been the multiplication of lay ministries, with lay men and women replacing clerics in numerous church positions.

It is clear to the objective onlooker these three things are necessarily enchained: The Clergy is increasingly less numerous and more absent; Lay people are ever more present and taking over clerical tasks; Women are taking over the majority of the lay ecclesiastical jobs. No sign of change

I wish I could tell my friend Jan that I see positive signs of a less femininized Church in the future. But I can’t.

Pope Benedict XVI made it clear from the first day of his election that Vatican II will be the “compass” of his papacy. The compass, of course sets direction. (4) With regard to women and lay ministries, all his actions indicate he will continue the effort to empower women in the Church in all ways short of sacramental ordination.

By the end of John Paul II’s pontificate, women were 21 % of Vatican personnel. (5) Benedict XVI has stated that he would like “to offer more space, more positions of responsibility to women” and affirmed that he would consider opening more influential Church positions to women. (6) Following JPII’s model, he speaks often of the human dignity of the person, decries every kind of “discrimination” against women, and proclaims the need for equality of opportunity in the public sphere.

Among the Bishops, one finds this same concern to increase women’s visibility in the Church. Here is one recent example. At the February 2008 Bishops Conference in India, the Prelates made “women’s empowerment in the church and society” a high item on the agenda to correct the problem of women’s under-representation in administrative and executives roles in the Church. They voted to set quotas, requiring that at least 35 % of members and office bearers in parish and diocesan pastoral councils should be women. The quota will grow gradually until women get at least 50% of positions. (7)

The position of resistance Catholic should adopt is more than a mere “nostalgia” for the old ways of worship. We have an obligation to resist this feminization of the Holy Church.

1. National Pastoral Life Center. Lay and Religious Parish Ministry: A Study Conducted for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1991 2. Ibid. 3. “Today’s parish minister more likely to be a layperson,” Catholic News Service, October 21,2005 4. “Forty years later, Vatican II continues to reverberate through the Church”, Catholic News Service, Oct. 12, 2005. 5. “Women chip Vatican’s glass ceiling with increased numbers, influence,” Catholic News Service, March 7. 2007 6. “Vatican Shows New Openness to Women,” National Catholic Reporter, November 3, 2006 7. “India’s Bishops strive for Gender Equality in Church Bodies,” National Catholic Reporter March 7, 2008.

The largest number of sex-abuse monsters (those with multiple victims and abuse of the sacraments) entered seminary in the 1940s and 1950s. In Boston, the class of 1960 at the archdiocesan seminary was the worst.

Some sort of reform was obviously necessary.

Once again I comment that Traditionalists should thank God for those Roman Catholic chapels and churches that never changed following Vatican II.

Satan is in these Novus Ordo ‘churches’ that look like airplane hangars. where the ‘congregants’ carry on their conversations in loud voices as they know this is not a sanctuary and that nothing important will be happening.

Where’s the confessional? Where’s the tabernacle?

The answer to both is: hidden.

The ‘priest’ is merely the president of the congregation who has abrogated most of his duties to the lay-women who dress like men.

WHY CATHOLIC MEN (Except for the feelings oriented types) HAVE NEVER BEEN ATTRACTED BY THE WHOLE NEW MASS "SCENE"

"In the United States today, 45 years after Vatican II, 31,000 lay persons plan liturgies, direct the music groups, schedule the lectors and run the education programs for adults, engaged couples and children; four-fifths of these ecclesial ministers are women.

Before Vatican II, most of those jobs did not exist; less than 1 % of these jobs were filled by lay people. (3) Before Vatican II the average parish lay woman were most likely to be found in the Altar Society or Holy Name Society. [Additionally]Today, almost 50 % of all administrative positions in dioceses are held by women. Before Vatican Council II, Catholic men frequented the Sacraments, took family responsibilities seriously and filled the seminaries. After Vatican Council II, the churches emptied, the divorce rate skyrocketed, and the sacristy was overrun with women. A kind of effeminate man attracted by the New Theology entered the seminaries, and the virile ethos of the Church grew fainter and fainter. It is no wonder not only men, but also many women, are leaving the Catholic Church today or no longer assist at Sunday Mass."

I refuse to go to my in-laws Catholic events (Confirmation, etc.) because of the horribly sloppy, wrong-headed Masses that are offered up. Men and women handing in shorts handing out the Host, little girls pretending to be altar boys - sickening! I just sit home with my husband and mail in the check, lol.

There is a very interesting book that has been around for a while called The Feminization of American Culture by Ann Douglas. Professor Douglas brings up some very insightful points about how religion became subjected to feminization in the more affluent era of the mid to late 19th century. Whereas the more visceral Calvinism informed the Protestantism of an earlier era in America, the more passive and feminine Unitarianism favored by the rising class of intellectuals and merchants took hold of the American psyche. It is this feminization that took the masculine God who was worthy of worship and the judge of sinful people and made Him into friendly, middle class uncle. It signaled the beginning of the end for Biblical inerrancy in the main stream Protestant churches. Evidently the Roman Catholic Church has undergone a similar invasion since Vatican II.

My uncles would only go to mass (the New Mass) for funerals and weddings. They would see everyone milling around, talking before mass, not genuflecting. They would hear milquetoast sermons about "nice stuff", given by effeminitzed feelings oriented clergy, or women lay ministers. Their time spent there was to them like being dragged to the shopping mall by the wife.

When I got married, in a traditional mass at an SSPX chapel, everything about the church looked like you were back in 1930. It was a small humble church. My uncles walked in and immediately froze! They genuflected and sat down without a word. You could hear a pin drop. THEY INSTANTLY RECOGNIZED that they were in a Holy place, and nothing had started yet. When the priest, the male altar servers, and the bride and groom, and others walked in for the wedding. they all were dressed like Catholics dressed at church in 1930's, my uncles were even more impressed. My wife was 25, that was 10 years ago.

THAT"S WHAT ATTRACTS MEN!

My uncles never forgot that wedding, and I'm certain that it was because of that ONE TIME that they saw/heard a real Catholic mass (the first since like 1958), that we were able to convert them before they died.(one died 3 seconds after receiving the REAL sacrament of Extreme Unction! Not that new fangled "healing of the sick")

Your “reform” then was to bring in effeminitized clergy, and women, and chase away the real men?

1) It's not MY reform. I was in protestant Sunday School at the time. My married homosexual alcoholic youth minister was very enthusiastic about V II, we studied it all the time. I'm merely a well-informed observer.

2) By "reform", I was referring to the pervasive control over the Church by powerful homosexual leaders like Spellman and O'Connell.

3) If you think V II was (among other things) a "turn towards protestantism", I think you're right. Given the enormous homosexual corruption of the pre-Vatican II American church, JXXIII had a limited menu of options to work with. I understand the opinion that he made unwise choices, you may be correct about that.

4) The judgement of the fruits of V II should be made independently of the nature of AmChurch in the 1940s and 1950s - a church run by powerful homosexual cardinals who created a system to groom and ordain the Birminghams, the Shanleys, the Geoghans who were unleashed on Catholic families before V II was even convened.

5) THAT was the reality of AmChurch in the 1950s, and presenting it as a faithful witness to the gospel and a faithful disciple of the Holy Spirit (in opposition to V II) is misguided.

re:Sensuous cleavage in pants!

I know that you have been conditioned to think that what you wrote makes you look like "one of the guys", but THAT IS A BIG LIE. Learn from your mistakes and move on.

I have 5 children eight years old and younger who sometimes read my monitor when I step away. Please be carefull what you put out there for everyone in the world to see. You should never talk like that to ANYONE. It is not Catholic.

God Bless,

In the Knights of Columbus. The Parish Council is the preferred assembly to “halls”. Early in our existence it was suggested by certain people on the Paris Council that we not meet in the hall. The Pastor would have none of it. We are now the most effective and visible ministry in our Parish.

The article seems to find fault with the modern Mass as a result of Vatican II.

I’m not so sure if it is Vatican II, the misinterpretted implementation of Vatican II, or an aging and shrinking number of priests to perform all of their functions.

All of the above?

What is the basis for the thought that altar servers need to be male?

I was an altar server in the 70s. Back then, girls were not allowed. My church tried them for a little while but were quickly told not to use them.

As an altar server in the 70s, I had a lot more functions than what altar servers do today. I held the Lectionary for the priest to read. I participated in the distribution of the Host by holding a crumb catcher under people’s chin. I had many functions for Stations of the Cross and weddings.

Could it be that these functions were eliminated because of female altar servers?

“Warning, this post has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with bigotry. All Catholic and Orthodox Catholic posters, as well as all Christians of good will, are advised to avoid such threads as they are here to generate hate, not the love of Christ.”

As Great Lent comes upon us, this is a time to reflect and pray and devote our minds, thoughts and services to God.

LOVE your post. You capture it so perfectly and I love your uncles, too! My father was buried from an Orthodox Catholic Church - my mother insisted. It was lovely. And so lovely to see how many people REFUSED Communion because they were in a state of sin. Not like the horrible suburban Masses where everybody crowds the aisles and altars because they don’t believe that the Host is the Body & Blood of Jesus Christ. Also, after years of horrible services, I was surprised and somewhat shocked to hear the priest say my dad was going to be marching around in Purgatory for awhile, lol! I guess we all are!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.