John Shea: Epiphany’s Challenge 2024

Dear Bishops of Asia,

The first session of the Synodal Assembly in Rome is now over. The second and final session will be held in Rome this coming October. Again, I write to you with five stories intro­ducing letters to Pope Francis and his Council of Cardinals, and with “A Paradigm of the Fully Human,” which I sent to you this past July but did not really introduce.

(1) This story never leaves me. Back in 1991, I was invited to Madras (Chennai) to speak at a conference honor­ing Father D. S. Amalor­pavadass who was so instrumental in bringing Vatican Council II to India. In a workshop on pastoral counsel­ling after the con­ference, a priest from a neigh­boring country said: “Can I ask you a prac­tical question?” He told me that his most difficult pastoral problem was that mothers were killing their baby girls. Their families were too poor to provide a dowry, and it was too difficult to keep them. Later, it came to me: How can the church talk about the dignity and worth of women when it also sees women—much as in other traditional cultures—as inferior to men, as ‘‘not fully in the likeness of Jesus’’?

(2) In the 1994 letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II says: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” Since then, the global church has been functioning in a dialogue vacuum—a vacuum severely compromising care, trust, honesty, teaching, and timely research. Two con­cerns most neglected continue to be: (1) a credible, informed under­standing of sexuality and gender; and (2) what it means for us to develop as an adult, a fully human being. 

(3) In 1974, I was blessed to get an M.A. in Pastoral Counselling at St. Paul University in Ottawa. In 1980, I got a Ph.D. in Religious Studies (Psychology of Religion) at the University of Ottawa. In 1981, the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Edu­cation of Fordham University hired me to teach psychology and religion, pastoral counseling and care, and human and religious development. In this third binary, for years I happily taught Life Cycle I each fall and Life Cycle IIeach spring.

(4) In 2018, I published Adulthood, Morality, and the Fully Human: A Mosaic of Peace. In 2021, I published an updated synopsis: “A Paradigm of the Fully Human: Integrity and Mutuality, Care, and Justice, Love vs. Hatred and Peace vs. Violence.” From a natural-law, bedrock-of-democracy, bedrock-of-sustainability perspective, the whole­ness of integrity and the related­ness of mutuality only grow together. Integrity invites, makes possible, and fosters our mutuality; relating in mutu­al­ity with whomever or whatever is other invites, makes possible, and fosters our integrity. They are the natural binary of human growth, a natural law.

Being integral and relating in mutuality unfolding together is a process-paradox, the one needing the other to become itself. Charles Taylor says: “one is a self among other selves.” Gabriel Marcel says “others give me to myself.” Paulo Freire says: “No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.” Catherine LaCugna is equally clear: we “are created to know and be known, to love and be loved, to share life with other persons”; she explains that we are “essentially relational, created as ‘being-toward-the-other,’ most free when living in right relationship with God and with all of creation.” 

In a nutshell, the paradigm of the fully human is:

A self that is integral and mutual—taken together—begets a self that acts in care and justice. Being caring and acting justly—taken toge­ther—begets a self that is loving and peaceful. Love and peace—taken together—is the epitome of the fully human, the self most prized and most powerful, the self actively opposing the hatred and violence we find in the world as well as in ourselves.  

These three interrelated binaries are a natural, relational, “whole-person” view of human development. They transform the sep­arate, stand-alone “in­divid­ual self” with its auton­omy, rationality and freedom bequeathed by Western culture, philosophical thinking, and the Enlightenment. They reveal an adult “relational self” of integrity and mutuality with its hallmarks of empathy, intimacy, and care—a self, says David Tracy, “radically related to reality.” This “relational self” aptly describes who Jesus is. This “relational self” also describes each of us as we become fully human. 

(5) Sadly, the history of the church is deeply steeped in despicable patri­archal thinking about women. In light of this ugly history, to focus on the diaconate—apparently the plan for next October in Rome—can only engage this ignorant mindset. We need an adult, fully human approach. Integ­rity and mutuality, care and justice, love and peace are who we all are today as we find our­selves in our cultures. Nothing—surely no his­torical countenancing of misogy­nist thinking—can be allowed to trip up, confuse, conceal, or cancel our actual status with each other as adults, as full human beings. It is as adults that Vatican Council IIaddresses us.

Bishops of the FABC: Will a caring voice for the full status of women be heard with each other now and then later in Rome? Will you trans­form for all of us the solitary “individual self” of the culture into a fully human “relation­al self” of faith? Will you affirm women’s integrity and safeguard precious family life?

Sincerely,

John J. Shea, O.S.A., M.P.S., Ph.D., MSW (Fordham University, 1981-2002; Boston College, 2003-2012; former Fellow, American Association of Pastoral Counselors) 

P.S. I had the privilege of serving for a number of years on the Inter­national Advisory Board of SERFAC in Chennai with Archbishop (later Cardinal) Soter Fernandez of Kuala Lumpur. Many of you may have known him. A former President of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei, he was exceptionally caring, down-to-earth, and courageous, a person who for me personifies Asian dialogue and wisdom.

Epiphany 2024

Dear Pope Francis

I write to you yet again. I hope you are well. I keep praying for you. Your concern for injustice, migrants, the poor, reform of the Vatican, environment, climate change, and synodality is quite exceptional. Enclosed are a letter to each member of your Council of Cardinals and an article that describes human integrity and mutuality together.

In the beginning of your papacy, you addressed the need for honest dialogue in the church. It was quite encouraging. You used to say: “dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.” You even said: “dialogue fearlessly.”

On the ordination of women, however, there is only silence. You urge no dialogue at all—let alone anything synodal or gender inclusive. You are our leader, our Supreme Bridgebuilder. When will you call for the reform most critical for the church’s oneness and its leavening of the world?

How can our church be whole if every woman in it is “not fully in the likeness of Jesus”? Why the imago Dei of women ignored, disparaged, and nullified by you and the Vatican? What is it that keeps women from fully imaging our Three-In-One God? Will women’s integral development ever be included in your signature “integral human development”?

Will an intelligent view of gender ever dawn on a tragically uninformed, indolent, sleep-walked, dogma-feared magisterium? Will today’s Vatican misogyny—robust, centuries-encrusted, unjust, puerile, and degrading— thwart the Spirit’s animation of the church now and for ages to come?

Pope Francis, if the clericalism you love to rail against is a symptom, will you decry the underlying disease? Will you ever liberate servant ministry from patriarchal conceit? Will you insist on being a Patriarchal Pontiff who honors male gonadal difference but fails to honor the obvious body- and-soul integrity of the millions and millions of women in your care?

How long this confounding contradiction? How long this confounding violation of solidarity? How long this confounding defenestration of women from a church with no windows. How long, how long, how long?

Sincerely,

John J. Shea, O.S.A.

Copy: Each Member of the Council of Cardinals