Union Seminary President Complains on MSNBC about Male-Led Catholic Church

“Sometimes you have to see women in positions of power before you can get back up to the big image and begin to open it up so we could imagine God in female imagery,” said Serene Jones, president of the once prestigious Union Theological Seminary in New York. Jones made this assertion on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show on February 19, 2012 in response to the controversy about the Obama Administration’s mandate requiring employers to provide contraception insurance coverage despite religious objections.

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing on the contraception mandate and its conflict with religious freedom on Thursday, February 16 in which there were no women on the first panel, and only two on the second.  Because of the lack of representation of women about an issue that so directly affects them, Melissa Harris-Perry and Jones discussed how they think the dominant view of God as masculine causes sexist views against women in authority, and leads to lack of female representation.

Jones reasoned: “If you have a male God sitting on top of the entire cosmos, this is what you think truth and authority are about, then of course, as it trickles down from that you’re not going to be able to imagine women actually stepping into positions of power.” Changing this perception requires viewing God as female, or at least in an ambiguous way, according to Jones. She told  how when she was teaching her daughter to pray, “I just started doing the Lord’s Prayer, not even ‘our mother and father,’ I just started saying ‘our mother’ because I thought she gets the ‘our father’ everywhere else.”  Eventually, “when she was seven and finally for the first time in church heard ‘our Father,’ she was completely confused. She was like, ‘Mom, why would they stick ‘father’ in there?’” Jones said. Such redefinition of God “is the way we need to imagine our future,” she said.

Once this “trickle down” effect takes place, in Jones’s view, women will take on more leadership roles in the Church and secular realm. This is important, she explained, because “we all know that women, as they engage in public life do so differently than men.” According to Jones, women “are more concerned about community … they are much more concerned, I think, about caring particularly for children and the negative impact policies can have on children.”

Jones and Harris-Perry also lamented the absence of nuns on the Congressional witness panels because, “Nuns have a different perspective on this than the bishops,” the show host claimed. Harris-Perry explained, “Not that they have a different theology than the bishops, but they do have a different perspective of what something like contraception does in local communities.”  Despite implying that nuns would support the HHS mandate simply because they are women and know what is happening “on the ground,” many nuns have expressed opposition to the mandate. Fourteen nuns, and many other women signed the “Unacceptable” joint protest letter against the contraception coverage mandate.

Yet Jones agreed with Harris-Perry and added, “If we had more nuns in all facets of the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church would be a much different Church.” “Watch the Elevation of the new Cardinals,” she said, “It’s the elevation of men, and they all look just alike. What does that say about that segment of our world in which women are simply not allowed?”

Harris-Perry said discussing the implications of the contraception mandate for religious freedom should not be the focal point of conversation for the Catholic Church because “[the Church] still has not fully addressed publicly the issue of childhood sex abuse which was undoubtedly infected and injected into the male leadership of this Church and [explains] their inability to address it.” She briefly hesitated, asking, “As a non-Catholic, can I really go there?” Jones answered, “I have no problem going there and I’m not a Catholic … it’s one of those examples in which you ask the question what difference would women’s religious leadership make?”

Because “statistically, women do not sexually abuse children anywhere near at the level that we find it just generally in the general public with men, if there were women in the clergy we would not see the incidents at the level that we see them now, it would be a different story” Jones asserted. She claimed “it’s also the case that without women there you get a kind of closed door culture that only allows certain kinds of conversations to happen.” Ultimately, Jones concluded, “It’s a club.”