pondering gender & the church

I haven't been able to get this Nicholas Kristof piece out of my head. It tells the story of a young woman, 27 years old and the mother of four, 11 weeks pregnant and suffering from the potentially life-threatening condition of pulmonary hypertension. But really it tells the story of Sister Margaret McBride, who sat on the ethics committee of the Catholic hospital in Phoenix to which this young mother went, and who approved an emergency abortion in order to alleviate the risk to the mother's health and life, and who as a result was ex-communicated by her Bishop, one Thomas Olmsted.

There are so many things wrong with this story.

How is it that the Church demonstrates such quick and decisive action when it comes to punishing the women who serve it (and who work so hard to serve the communities in which they live) but demonstrates such foot-dragging and lack of conviction when it comes to protecting children from abusive Catholic priests?

How is it that this Bishop can claim that "the mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s,” thus implying that the child's life should be preferred over the mother's (not to mention over the welfare of her four young children and her husband and everyone who loves her)?

Someone pointed out in the comments section of the piece that Judaism treats such situations very differently than Catholicism. Apparently in Judaic custom, a woman's life is actually worth more than a fetus's life, and if a pregnancy is causing health problems the woman is encouraged to terminate it. This came as a shock to me: this notion that an entire religion might treat women as somehow equal or more valuable to the world than a fetus. And the shock of it struck me as being innately sad.

The commenter goes on to say that perhaps this is due to the fact that rabbis can marry and raise families. It is perhaps easy for the men who rule from on high in the Catholic Church to decree that a woman's life cannot be preferred over a fetus's life -- they have no wives, no daughters, no grand-daughters. This is purely a question of ethics to them, morality in a vacuum, and has little bearing on their real lives.

I've been thinking about this ever since, and it's not that individual priests are necessarily misogynistic, or that unmarried men are inherently misogynistic, or anything that extreme. But there are two pieces to this that have created a male-dominated echo-chamber within the Church: women themselves are fundamentally excluded from the highest levels of power, and the men with the power have fundamentally isolated themselves from women.

Can an organization that so clearly sees women as "other" be expected to treat women fairly? And should we allow such an organization to be in such a position of power over women?

I am half joking when I say this, but I think every bishop, every cardinal, every pope should have a daughter. And then, and only then, should these men even be able to make the argument that an 11-week-old fetus is more valuable to them and to the world than that daughter.

Until then, let the women speak. Oh, and un-ex-communicate Sister Margaret. Or may she find happiness in a faith that doesn't devalue women quite so much.