Sister Elizabeth Johnson’s Challenge To The Vatican (extracts from an essay by Jamie L. Manson )
“You say Mary is too passive. Isn’t obedience the greatest virtue?”
This was one of 40 questions sent to Elizabeth Johnson by a cardinal when she was up for a tenure-track position at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in September 1987. A respected scholar for decades, Johnson found her application rubber-stamped by every committee within the school, yet still needed approval from the Vatican’s powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Given that she had written an article questioning the traditional view of Mary as humble and obedient, further rubber-stamping was not guaranteed.
The cardinal interrogating her was Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger was still not satisfied. He proceeded to take the extraordinary measure of calling every cardinal in the United States to come to Washington to interrogate her on the content of the article. Johnson was the first female faculty member to come up for tenure at CUA, and the first to be subjected to an examination by the cardinals. “There were these men and they had all the power. I was vulnerable and at their mercy,” Johnson remembers. “There was patriarchy using its power against me, to deprive me of what, in fairness, I should have been given.” Twenty-five years later, the recollection still brings waves of sadness and anger across her face.
Her most recent clash with the church hierarchy played itself out quite publicly in March 2011, after the publication of her book The Quest for the Living God, in which she argues for a broader and deeper language for God, particularly language that reflects the reality that “God loves women and passionately desires their flourishing.”
Though it met with high accolades from both the academy and laypeople, the Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a condemnation of the book. They declared that the publication “completely undermines the Gospel and the faith of those who believe in God.” Its feminist themes were a particular sticking point for the nine-man committee, who criticized Johnson’s “characterization of the Church’s names for God as humanly-constructed metaphors,” arguing that the titles that the Church uses for God cannot be supplanted “by novel human constructions” aimed at “promoting the socio-political status of women.”
Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” held that physical and anatomical differences are evidence that God (dictates) distinct roles for men and women in both church and society. John Paul II: … women are endowed with a “feminine genius” — a special capacity to offer tenderness and nurture to the community. But special is not equal, and in 1994 John Paul II declared … that not only would women forever be banned from the Roman Catholic priesthood, but “that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” To this day, clergy who choose to vocalize support for the idea of the ordination of women risk excommunication.
Johnson’s ability to balance patience and respect for the institution with rigorous scholarship and academic integrity eventually won her tenure. But there was one moment in the inquest that seems to have emblazoned itself forever on her memory: Toward the end of the questioning, Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law slammed shut his binder of Johnson’s writings and scoffed, “You mostly teach Christology. You’re not going to do anymore of this feminist stuff.” He pushed the files away.
“It was a breakthrough moment for me, painful as it was,” she says, “because it planted the seeds for She Who Is,” referring to her groundbreaking book of feminist theology. As Johnson drafted that text, Law’s words swirled in her head, fueling her passionate exploration of feminine images of God. The book was published in 1992, one year after Johnson left CUA for Fordham. (“I needed to be in a place where I could do my work without always looking over my shoulder worrying about being silenced or criticized by the hierarchy.”)