by Jimmy Carter
Despite being told by the Vatican to stop talking about their ordination as deacons or priests, some nuns have continued to demand more gender equality in the Catholic Church. In February 2009 the Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI announced that a “doctrinal assessment” of the LCWR would be conducted because of the tenor of their official statements and the content of certain speeches at the organization’s annual assemblies. After the assessment was completed, an archbishop from Seattle was appointed to oversee changes in the LCWR to correct what were considered to be positions that differed from Church teachings on sexuality and “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
The sisters pushed back. They have denied any radical feminist tendencies, misbehavior, or deviation from the Church’s position on any issue, and explained their reasoning behind previous positions. Some of them expressed a belief that the present pontiff, Pope Francis, was not adequately informed about the history of the dispute between themselves and the Vatican, and in May 2013 the pope made a statement intended to correct what he considered to be a mistake and demanded obedience to the Church and its doctrines, citing this as inseparable from the divinity of Jesus Christ. This dispute within the Church is still unresolved, but some nuns, if not the LCWR officially, seem resolute, especially in their request for women to be included in all ministries of the Church. A group called the Women’s Ordination Conference works solely for the ordination of women as priests, deacons, and bishops.
Dr. Phyllis Zagano of Hofstra University sent me the following statement on the subject, which seems to be correct but is perhaps optimistic:
The Catholic Church requires that individuals with real authority be clerics, that is, ordained persons. The ordinary means of entering the clerical state is by ordination to the diaconate. Despite the Church’s objections to ordaining women as priests, discussion about restoring women to the ordained diaconate—an ancient Christian tradition—continues to grow internationally, especially after Pope Francis gave a fairly unqualified “yes” to the concept on his plane ride back from the 2013 World Youth day in Rio de Janeiro. More recently, in August, the pope said, directly, “It is necessary to widen the space for more incisive feminine presence in the church.” Catholic deacons are charged with ministry of the Word, the Liturgy, and Charity. They cannot celebrate Eucharist (say Mass) or hear confessions, but can baptize and witness marriages, proclaim the Gospel during Mass, and can hold certain Church offices. More importantly, ordained persons—in this case deacons, who serve in persona Christi servi (in the person of Christ, servant)—represent the Risen Christ. For the Catholic Church to ordain a woman and have that woman proclaim the Gospel in St. Peter’s would send the strongest possible message to the world that women are made in the image and likeness of God, that women can and do represent Christ.
Nuns are not the only Catholics convinced that women should be permitted to serve as deacons and priests. A public opinion poll by CBS News and the New York Times in 2013 reported that 70 percent of U.S. Catholics believe that Pope Francis should authorize women to become priests. There are also a number of long-serving and dedicated priests who have expressed this belief. One of the most noteworthy is Father Roy Bourgeois, who was ordained in 1972 and assigned to work in a slum near La Paz in Bolivia. He was arrested and deported when he criticized the Bolivian dictator, Hugo Banzer, for abuse of poor people, and he then turned his attention to an example of oppression in El Salvador. When Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated and four nuns were raped and murdered by Salvadoran military troops who had been trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, Father Bourgeois demonstrated against American involvement in strengthening dictatorships throughout Latin America. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to serve eighteen months in prison. The military training program continued and the Washington Post reported that techniques of torture were added to the curriculum in 1982. In 1989 U.S.-trained graduates led troops into Jesuit University in San Salvador and killed six priests, plus their servants.
In 1995 Father Bourgeois wrote a letter to Pope John Paul II, urging that priests be permitted to marry and that women be treated as equals. Two years later he participated in a conference in Rome and repeated this proposal during a public radio broadcast. There was no response from the Vatican, but after he took part in the ordination as a priest of Janice Sevre-Duszynska in Lexington, Kentucky, in 2008, he was notified that he had brought “grave scandal” to the Church and would be excommunicated if he did not recant. He replied that he could not betray his conscience, and continued his role as priest and public supporter of equal rights for women. Three years later he received a similar notice from his immediate superior, with a fifteen-day deadline for compliance. He responded that he had been a Catholic priest for thirty-nine years and added, “In my ministry over the years I have met many devout women in our Church who believe God is calling them to be priests. Why wouldn’t they be called? God created men and women of equal dignity and, as we all know, the call to be a priest comes from God.” He joined an international delegation that went to the Vatican to deliver a petition from fifteen thousand supporters of women’s ordination as priests, and in November 2012 he received a final official notice that he was “dispensed of his sacred bonds” as a priest. Father Bourgeois stated that he regretted the decision but was filled with hope that women will one day be treated as equal to men.
The Vatican’s position can best be described by an edict issued in May 2010, “Normae de gravioribus delictis,” that the attempted sacred ordination of a woman is one of the gravest substantive canonical crimes in the Church, on a par with sexually abusing a child. (Very few priests have been excommunicated who were found guilty of child abuse.) Although there is no current sign, even from newly chosen Pope Francis, that rigid Church doctrine is likely to change, there are some practical trends that may force reconsideration in the future. One is the obvious and almost universal practice of Catholic families of ignoring the mandate against the use of contraceptives to limit family size; another is the knowledge that the prohibition against the use of condoms contributes to the spread of AIDS. Bishops and priests look the other way when contraception is practiced in Africa and other regions and do not confront the issue when their own parishes are involved. A troubling trend within the Church organization is the growing shortage of celibate men who come forward to be priests and the possible effect this sexual restraint has had on the worldwide scandal of priests found guilty of child abuse. There are now more than fifty thousand parishes in the world that do not have an assigned priest, and the need for more parish leaders is even greater in the United States, where the number of priests has steadily dropped, from 58,909 in 1975 to fewer than 39,600 in 2013.
It is known that the first pope, Saint Peter, was married, because Jesus healed his mother-in-law. Because of these kinds of biblical premises and other pressures to emulate the ministry of Christ among parishioners, there may come a time when Catholic priests are permitted to marry and qualified women are called to serve God on an equal basis. Until that time, the enormous influence of the Church could be used forcefully to condemn sexual assaults, genital cutting, child marriage, inadequate pay for women, honor killings, and deprivation of equal rights for women in economic and political affairs. I have written a letter to Pope Francis outlining these opportunities to improve the status of women without addressing the sensitive issue of women as priests. In the Vatican’s response, His Holiness thanked me for my concern and reiterated his insistence on “the need to create still broader opportunities for a more incisive female presence in the Church.” He also believes that “demands that the legitimate rights of women be respected, based on the firm conviction that men and women are equal in dignity, present the Church with profound and challenging questions which cannot be evaded.”
I am pleased that many other Christian denominations are modifying outmoded traditions and responding to pressure from individual worshipers by treating women as equal to men in
all aspects of religious life. As is the custom in some Baptist churches, members of our congregation meet in conference to make all significant decisions, including the democratic election of pastors, deacons, and committee members. As I mentioned earlier, we have a male and a female pastor, and half of our deacons are women (including my wife). Our church is affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and the recently elected leader of this denomination is also a woman. It has long been customary to have women as pastors among African American churches, and in November 2013 the governing body of the Anglican Church voted to move forward a proposal to allow the appointment of women bishops; a final vote will likely take place in 2014. This is part of a general and inexorable trend among Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and other major Protestant denominations in all nations to adopt this same enlightened policy. There have been extended and sometimes heated debates in their annual conferences, but ultimately the collective will has prevailed. It seems that those who are resisting change are losing both numbers and influence among their members in crucial societal matters.
10 | THE GENOCIDE OF GIRLS
During our 1981 visit to rural China, we found local officials very proud of their strictly enforced family planning program. The nation’s population then was just exceeding a billion, and the common slogan throughout China was “One is best, two at most.” We were already familiar with attempts to control the population in another large country, when my mother served as a Peace Corps volunteer in India. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi requested that as a registered nurse she teach sex education to poor families and assist the local doctor in performing mandatory vasectomies on fathers after their first child. Mama objected but had to comply.
In China we saw a number of billboards and posters depicting two happy parents walking through a public park or other nice place and proudly holding the hands of their only child. In every case the child was a boy. At the time, we presumed that this was just the choice of the photographer, but over the years I have come to realize that parents’ special pride in a male child would have serious consequences.
Historically, on a global basis, slightly more males than females have been born, a natural disparity that anthropologists and demographers cannot explain. In a few nations, however, there has been a significant deviation from this ratio, indicating the result of a preference for boys. World Health Organization data show that in India the ratio of girls to boys is 100 to 112. When sex ratio studies began in China in 1960, they found 100 females to 106 males, near the upper border of the normal range. In 1990 the discrepancy had increased to 100 females to 112 males, and by 2010 the ratio was 100 to 118. The PBS News Hour reports that in some areas of India there are only 650 girl babies living for every 1,000 boys, a ratio of 100 to 154! Infanticide, either at the time of birth or later, seems to be the cause. With the availability of sonogram examinations, a new option was presented to parents, who can ascertain the sex of a developing fetus as early as twelve weeks after conception. Inexpensive sonograms can now be hooked up to laptop computers and are widely available even in remote rural areas. In some places the abortion of female fetuses is relatively easy and legal and has even been encouraged.
When these percentages are multiplied by the total number of children born in some of the world’s largest nations, the number of girls that have been eliminated by abortion, neglect, or murder is horrendous. The Indian Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen estimated in 1990 that there were 50 million females “missing” in China, and more than 105 million worldwide. Almost all of the decisions to terminate the existence of these girls were made privately, within families, and not ordained by governments. Shadowline Films produced a documentary entitled It’s a Girl that had its Hong Kong premiere in November 2013. One episode presents a mother in India who states calmly that she has strangled eight of her newborn daughters. This selective murder of girls is called female gendercide or femicide.
In India sexual discrimination also occurs among children who survive birth. A UN Children’s Fund report issued in October 2013 reveals that India accounts for 20 percent of child mortality worldwide. Although there has been some improvement in recent years, India’s under-five child mortality rate in 2012 was 56 deaths per 1,000. By comparison, the rate in equally poor Bangladesh was 41; in Brazil, 14; and in the United States, 7. A special tragedy is that 131 little girls died in India compared to each 100 boys of the same age.
Efforts in India, China, and South Korea to outlaw gendercide or the use of sonograms for the same purpose have been predictably unsuccessful. Mara Hvistendahl is a contributing editor to Science magazine, and in 2012 she wrote Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. In this carefully researched book, she estimates that there are now at least 160 million missing females. This is equivalent to an entire generation of girls being wiped from the face of the earth. To put this into perspective, it is estimated that 500,000 Tutsis were killed in the Rwanda genocide of 1994, and that 6 million Jews were victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
Most of these lethal decisions are still concentrated in the Asian countries mentioned above, but the option of femicide is also exercised in smaller nations and in the more advanced Western world. It appears that more than twice as many girls have been killed by their parents during my lifetime as the total number of combatants and civilians lost in World War II.
One unanticipated result has been a disturbing shortage of brides and a demand for prostitutes to assuage the desires of men without partners. News reports from South Korea indicate that imported brides from less affluent Asian nations are selling for a high price. The latest data show that 12 percent of all marriages of South Korean men are with foreign women from Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Japan. There is a thriving market, with the price of a bride ranging from US$88 to US$660. The girls’ parents receive from US$11 to US$22. The organization Human Rights in China reports that it is usually cheaper to buy a bride from traffickers for about US$320 to US$640 than to pay the normal bride price, which is often two to five times higher. Chinese police report that an average of 17,500 women who were sold into marriage or slavery against their will are rescued each year. Between 1991 and 1996, 143,000 human traffickers were arrested and prosecuted.
This pervasive elimination of girls, both before and after birth, is obvious and well known, but it continues. Preventive laws have been ineffective, and the only apparent solution is to convince parents that a daughter can, in all respects, be an asset to the family. This can be accomplished only by ensuring that girls are educated and given equal opportunities to develop their talents, to earn an income, and to serve their family and community.
11 | RAPE
According to the U.S. Justice Department, there were 191,610 cases of rape or sexual assault in the United States in 2006, and 91 percent of the victims were female. That’s more than 475 women assaulted every day. The estimate is that only 16 percent of these cases are reported to the police; the rate drops to fewer than 5 percent on college campuses. Girls and women of all ages and all backgrounds suffer from the same or worse sexual violence throughout the world, and some traditional practices constitute, extol, and perpetuate sexual violence against women and girls.
Radha Kumar is an author and expert on ethnic conflicts and has been a director at the Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution in New Delhi. She describes rape in India as one of the nation’s most common crimes against women, and the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights asserts that it is a “national problem.” India’s National Crime Records Bureau reports that rape cases have doubled between 1990 and 2008. There were 24,206 cases registered in India in 2011 (one every twenty-two minutes), and many attacks go unreported. The gang rape in Delhi of a twenty-three-year-old student on a bus in December 2012 is one of the most horrible examples: she was raped by several men, who then used an iron rod to penetrate her genitals so deeply that her intestines had to be surgical
ly removed. She died thirteen days later.
There was a tremendous public outcry in India and abroad, and in September 2013 the rapists were sentenced to be hanged. Many have supported the sentence, but human rights activists are raising the alarm that executing these men might actually harm the cause of women’s rights. Divya Iyer, a senior researcher at Amnesty International, makes a compelling case: “The death penalty does not offer a transformative idea in a social context where violence against women often involves notions of honor. It does not change patriarchal attitude and feudal mindset that trivialize and condone violence against women—be it from the man on the bus or a senior politician. . . . The debate around the death penalty deflects attention from the harder procedural and institutional reform that the government must bring about to tackle violence against women more effectively.” This gets to the heart of the matter. Effective law enforcement is crucial, but financial and human resources are not expended on those government functions that actually will prevent sexual violence.