Holy Foreskin! Female apostles and the Magdalenian Charism
A man's praise of women
The Pope, on a CBS interview this week, did not equivocate on the possibility of women taking Holy Orders in the Catholic Church (a flat “no” was issued, muchas gracias). At the same time, he nodded to a kind of non-sacramental female ministry, exercised de facto in history, and also to a common ‘apostleship’: all baptised Christians are sent out on their task, as it were, by the Lord Jesus; however great, however small.
It would not be unreasonable to talk of a certain brittleness exhibited in defenders of this state of affairs when the inevitable question, “but why not ordained ministry?”, comes around. For to talk of women possessing requisite willingness, charismata and even a kind of ‘apostolicity’ now - but denying that this carries over into candidacy for the presbyterate - requires delicate argumentative surgery (assuming we take blunt gainsay off the table). But it is this surgery that proponents of women’s ordination insist has been restitched and resliced over time, to keep at bay any inconvenient scratching. Brooten, writing in an anthology of arguments on the issue, points out one such shift: in this case, to do with a figure called Junia who features at the end of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. This Junia is said by St Paul to be ‘renowned (episemoi) among the Apostles’, which, read inclusively, gives us evidence of a female Apostle right in the 1st century. “In light of Romans 16:7 then, the assertion that ‘Jesus did not entrust the apostolic charge to women’ must be revised. The implications for women priests should be self-evident.” (p.143, 1977)
Self-evident maybe, because not only has this led to a later textual tradition whereby Junia is mangled into a nonextant male name ‘Junias’, but it has also prompted rather dismal text critical discussions in which exegetes try and squint at the grammar a bit and read the line as “renowned by the Apostles” (see the ESV translation, and the study by Burer and Wallace, 2001, which argues for the exclusive reading). As noted by Linda Belleville though, this falls flat for a few technical reasons, but she ends with a more positive case for the relative liberty of wealthy women in the Greco-Roman world making good sense of what Junia must really be: “That there would be a female leader and church planter of such note in the apostolic ranks of the early church should come as no surprise against the backdrop of such a religio-cultural milieu” (Belleville, 2005). If the argument for a male-only presbytery that Brooten is presuming goes something like: “Christ instituted the Apostolic rank to indicate his willed pattern for future leadership”, a teleologically driven scholar has to circumvent the fact of an apostola, plain as day, in the pages of the New Testament, to avoid sanctioning women’s ordination.
A later case - a Junia Junior, if you will - of this kind of discomfort around an apostola is St Catherine of Siena, the 14th century Italian mystic. She wrote only one book, the Dialogia, but voluminous correspondence, and we have a biography by her confessor, Raymond of Capua. Is this another instance where a woman with a sharp sense of vocation has it sanded off by an anxious male interpreter? St Catherine’s own words speak of a defiant conviction that God, in Christ, had commissioned and spoken to her directly, even in ways which transgressed the institutional hierarchy. She wrote to Raymond quite chirpily that
I wanted to make my confession to you; but divine Goodness gave me more than I was asking for, since when I asked for you he gave me himself, and gave me absolution and remission of both my sins and yours.
(Saint Catherine Of Siena: As Seen In Her Letters, 1905, T226
One could say that it is only owing to Raymond’s absence that she is permitted to go further up the command chain and seek forgiveness; nonetheless, the claim to have achieved reconciliation for the reconciler is surely a bold inversion of the confessor-confessee dynamic. So much for penance; as for other priestly gestures, when asked by her convert Niccolò to attend his execution, she did not hesitate to fulfil sacerdotal functions: “He wanted me to make the sign of the cross on him. When he had received the sign, I said, ‘Down for the wedding, my dear Brother!’” (T273). In her Dialogia, she is a Moses-like mediator, interceding on behalf of the blotted Church, begging for Divine absolution: “It is my will, then, and I beg it as a favour, that you have mercy on your people” (Dialogia, SPCK 1990, p. 48)
And yet, Raymond’s Vita of St Catherine paints a meeker picture. As Heather Webb (2005) points out:
For Raymond, Catherine's sanctity is predicated on this tension between container and contained. Her weak female body miraculously contains and carries out the divine will. Catherine's own narration, by contrast, depicts a divine being in need of more than the mere shell of her body (p. 816)
Raymond paints her as a ‘weaker vessel’, charged with singular divine favour and insight certainly, but emphatically passive. The result is a more palatable figure within the acceptable limits of mediaeval piety, replete with, for instance, an affinity for bridal-mysticism that she never really applied to herself, at least in her own words. St Catherine is therefore, by way of Raymond’s interpretation, at the forefront of people’s minds when they think of nuns ‘married to Christ’ - this, despite the fact that she was not a nun, and “never discusses a marriage that has occurred between only herself and Christ” in her own works (James Aaron White, PhD, p. 125, 2022). Raymond depicts a rather schmaltzy scene where Christ “with his all-holy right hand… placed it on the ringfinger of Catherine’s right hand, saying as he did so: ‘Behold, I espouse you in faith to me, your Creator and your Saviour.’” (Vita, p. 107).
A telling bit of erasure is the removal of a foreskin. That is, Raymond does not make use, in his marriage scene, of St Catherine’s mystical apprehension of Christ’s prepuce - the Holy Foreskin, which was a very popular, if controversial, devotional activity in the late Middle Ages. St Catherine cites it a few times in advice to other women, insisting that their betrothal to Christ is best imaged in his circumcision. His foreskin is his dowry, his marital ‘money down’, if you like; it confirmed by bloodshed his willingness to join Israel, to come ‘under the Law’, and thereby sealed his intention to redeem the world by becoming the Jewish Messiah. She writes to a lady: “Thou art a bride, for Christ in His circumcision showed that He would wed the human race” (T50). She speaks elsewhere of their wedding ring being made from the little flesh accrued from Jesus on “the eighth day”, the day a male Hebrew was traditionally ritually inducted. In Raymond’s marriage scene, the ring is made from diamonds (analogously, her adamantine faith) and four pearls (also symbolic, this time of four purities).
Raymond’s discomfort was clearly shared. Devotion to the Holy Foreskin was banned by the Pope, on pain of excommunication, in 1900. Perhaps, though evocative for women wanting to dwell on Christ’s commitment as a son or a lover of mankind, the nagging thought of the procedure behind it was liable only to make men wince, rather than prayerfully reflect. Thinking here though about Junia, editorially relegated to merely ‘admired by the Apostles’, and St Catherine being forced into the role of nubile damsel, we see the difficult negotiations that have to happen as men notice, admire - but on some very real level fear - the feminine calling, with all that that might threaten for our thunder being stolen.
There is, though, another story to tell than just one of the male ego trying brazenly to rob women of their apostleship. St Chrysostom in the 5th century writes very gamely of the Junia passage: “how great the wisdom of this woman must have been that she was even deemed worthy of the title of apostle” (Homily 31 on Romans). Where, here, are the intellectual hang-ups about what this must mean for women’s ordination? St Chrysostom seems to square his opposition to that with a full embrace of Junia’s vocation. Is this just a cognitive dissonance that St Chrysostom holds in tension? Or perhaps, to his mind, there is no contradiction between the highest appreciation for female charisms with a commitment to traditional order.
Raymond, too, may not have been as chauvinistic as all that. Getting someone canonised requires playing the game a little, and it could all be testament to his greater admiration for St Catherine that he dealt lightly with details in order to speed up the process. It is true that St Catherine had a bold public ministry, seeing herself as more of a bolshy bridegroom than the timid Pope himself, whom she chastised and counselled (see Webb, 2005, on a vision in which she demanded Christ to take her heart and transfuse its power into the struggling Church). But it would be a grave mistake to assume she called for a suspension of traditional order, or rebellion against the Pope, whom she called ‘Christ on earth’. She had the utmost respect for the Church’s ministry, and believed them to possess authority (‘the keys’) to the redemptive Blood of Jesus Christ in the sacraments, and that this power could not be effaced by any personal sinfulness:
[Ministers] are my anointed ones and I call them my ‘christs,’ because I have appointed them to be my ministers to you and have sent them like fragrant flowers into the mystic body of holy Church. No angel has this dignity, but I have given it to those men whom I have chosen to be my ministers
(Dialogia, p. 212)
Her apostolic mission (“best summed up as a desire for God and a desire for the salvation of the world”, O’Driscoll, 2004), then, clearly permitted transgressive action by reference to a higher authority. She had, as it were, prerogative; a certain suspension of the ordinary was permitted by extraordinary means to allow the fulfilment of her mission. It was not a power to be wielded against the traditions - rather, it was the continued presence of ‘business-as-usual’ which gave her activity such remarkable - such episemotic - strength. Her forerunner was that great Apostle to the Apostles:
Catherine gains great strength and self-confidence from Mary Madgalene, the fearless female apostola whose example teaches women to seek and to love God in unconventional ways without regard for gossip or criticism, and to preach the Gospel of salvation to all who will listen (Karen Scott, 1992, p. 42)
This essay is really not about the issue of women taking Holy Orders in the Church, though I appreciate that each side will see Junia and St. Catherine, and form their corollaries. Ultimately, I am convinced that the question is not about interpreting authors, but discerning authority; not “but what do the sources say?”, but “what are our sources, and who says so?”. We cannot just shake the canonical Scriptures about, like a Magic 8 Ball, and hope they reveal an answer. What this essay is about is affirming a type of women’s ministry shaped in a Magdalenian mould - though I would like to acknowledge and apologise for the frustration felt by many women at attempts at neutrality like this, when to their mind, the Church either has ordained roles for them, or it doesn’t. I am sorry that the choice seems starker for them than for their male counterparts. All I can say is the matter can only be worked out the hard way. But what cannot be doubted it the reality of the apostolicity of women’s ministry: it is, from my outsider’s perspective, a real, particular, direct, and intimate call, one that as a man, I actually don’t understand very well. I could weep at the image of St Catherine seeing the sea for the first time in 1375, five years before her death at age thirty-three - a great and Holy woman, so captivated by water: “so taken by its beauty that thereafter she would often refer to God as a peaceful sea” (McDermott, 2007, p. 645). She saw in the sea a whole framework for natural theology consummated in the revelation of Christ: the sea shows us our reflection - it is something ‘out there’ which makes self-knowledge possible. We love this thing, because it has graciously agreed to be the grounds of our own life and image. This great thing reflectively takes on, as it were, our image, in order to let us see it too. We can then, by recognising ourselves, see the things which mark our face - our sin, our need of washing. To see such a deep, clear testimony to God’s pedagogy in nature, after one look, is beyond remarkable. This illiterate woman, who became a Doctor of the Church (declared by Pope St. John Paul II in 1970), became wise through prayer, not schooling. Take her thoughts on Judas, and his real crime - one of the most perceptive pieces of Biblical interpretation I have ever heard:
This is that sin which is never forgiven, now or ever: the refusal, the scorning, of my mercy. For this offends me more than all the other sins they have committed. So the despair of Judas displeased me more and was a greater insult to my Son than his betrayal had been.
Dialogia, p. 79
Perhaps it is harder for a man to humanly see the absolute fullness of God’s love here - to understand truly a desire beyond limits, which reaches out to us more longingly than we could possibly imagine. Judas presumed he was beyond the pale, but, as St. Catherine saw, not even betraying the Son of God himself will do that for you, such is God’s love for us. The only real condemnation is the one we put on ourselves. And so, men can only but dimly discern the Magdalenian charism, precisely because it is meant to encourage and lead us. For men, with all our brittle feelings that the universe is out to get us and we must defend ourselves, salvation is rocky - it is either the confidence and stability of St Peter, the Rock - or inversely, the agony and self-damnation of Judas, hitting hard against the rocky ground when his hangman’s rope snaps. It is men, after all, who are the wavering ones, and who doubt their commission, and for this, we need women, who intuit far more deeply, and can act as icons of, humanity’s status as the Beloved.
Their gift is to see what men cannot, and do what they cannot. Where St Catherine saw the whole arc of salvation in the sea, St Peter sees only his doom, as he wails for Jesus to save him from sinking (Matthew 14:30). It was the women who stayed at the foot of the cross while the men ran away. It is the women who anointed Christ with expensive oil, while the men tutted at the expense. It is the woman who says “let it be, according to thy word”. It is women who reach out to touch the hems of garments while the Twelve enjoy the Master’s company. For the act of spotting a Messiah after lengthy discipleship, St Peter is given the keys to the Kingdom; the Samaritan woman, spotting the same thing after five minutes chatting with a stranger by a well, is given something of equally great note: that deeper awareness of being ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven - and a mission to tell whole villages about it.