12 After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? 13 You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. 14 So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15 For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. 16 Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. 17 If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. [John 13:12-17, NRSV]
Pope Francis washed the feet of inmate at Rebibbia prison in Rome during the foot-washing at Holy Thursday Mass in 2015. (L’Osservatore Romano)
It has been a long time coming, but now it is here. The rules on foot-washing in the Holy Thursday ritual have now been officially changed so that permission for priests washing women’s feet is now officially decreed.
This breaking news was announced by the Vatican on 20 January 2016.
This change reflects Pope Francis’ own groundbreaking gesture when, just a month after his election in 2013, he washed the feet of young people – including women and Muslims – at a youth detention center outside Rome. Once again, Pope Francis humanises the Church for the 21st century.
No longer do priests who have been washing women’s feet before the rule-change need to feel that they are doing something illicit.
The new law, however, is permissive and not directive in nature. It mandates the inclusion of women in the line-up for feet to be symbolically washed. It does not, however, make it mandatory. In other words, priests are now legally allowed to wash women’s feet, but they are not required to do so.
It falls within reasonable contemplation that with this legal power “to wash” or “not to wash” women’s feet, some (or many) priests may still choose to decline to do it. Power in any domain, we must know, brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is not necessarily among them and, indeed, it seldom is. However, what a declining priest cannot do from this Holy Thursday on, is to choose the simple expedience of falling back on “the law” to end all discussions. As a matter of fact, a recalcitrant stand may betray other ills besides. First, all this talk about “obedience” wears very thin indeed if and when the example and the explicit intentions of a reigning Pontiff are blatantly shunned by obstinate clerics. Second, if one is legally authorized to include, one must include and not continue to exclude, else one is faced with the accusation of a severe prejudice towards women. Third, any priest who continues to exclude women exposes himself to the serious charge that he needs to open his closet to bring to light what assortment of “golden calves” lie hidden in there.
Somehow, Catholics the world over knew that this rule-change was something inevitable, given the deep Gospel-orientation of this Holy Father, his strong pastoral drive, and his acute sense of social justice. After all, this is a leader who is close to the people, one who prioritises, in deeds even more than in words, the human person above rules and doctrines.
For Pope Francis, foot-washing as the Lord Jesus has commanded the disciples to do is a symbolic gesture of humble service, of mutual forgiveness and mutual acceptance within a community of lovers of Christ, a religious family.
Pope Francis did not call for “pastoral conversion” in the Aparecida Concluding Document and Evangelii Gaudium so that the Church can continue to run “business as usual”. Rather, the call is intended to remind the Church of its need to reform so that it is in practice more solidly grounded in Christ. Thus grounded, it will be strengthened in its missionary commitment. So first and foremost, what Pope Francis does is to repeatedly call for a return to the teaching and way of life of Jesus of Nazareth as portrayed in the Gospels. Jesus in the Gospels, in his true, liberated and authentic self, holds the key to this conversion, not beautiful doctrines and harsh rules, and most certainly not some status cum privilege claims on the part of the clergy. The latter would represent nothing other than the faithless, pre-Pentecost behaviour of Jesus’ first disciples whose visions could not be further from those of their Master’s as narrated in Mark 8-10 or in John 4 and many other passages besides.
The Church, the Pope insists, is no more about its own existence and preservation than is the ordained priesthood about status and privileges and their preservation. The Church is a humble tool in service of Christ. As the Second Vatican Council has reiterated, the Church is a sacrament and a sacrament in itself is meaningless except as a sign and instrument that points to Christ and makes Christ present to the people. The Church’s raison d’être is Christ and mission in the name of Christ. The Church exists only to serve humanity by showing the world the face of Christ. The truth is, Christ includes, not excludes. From his days in the Latin American context, Pope Francis has believed that it is most important to make things easy, not to be selective, not to put obstacles in the way of the people’s desire for Jesus. He wants to move the Church from its self-understanding as regulator of faith to a proper notion of Church as facilitator of faith.
To study, reflect on and discuss to any serious degree matters relative to the Church, one must remain ever conscious of those “fundamental” issues some sectors of the community would fight tooth and nail over. And the issue of male priesthood ranks ahead of anything else. This issue is so heavily interest–laden that, it is often fiercely guarded by those who fear their interests might in any minute be eroded. Often, in the thick of heat, things get confused and the values Jesus of Nazareth stood for in the Gospels may not take centre stage. We all need to be alert to possible interest-based arguments, rules and policies, lest we vacate Jesus from any meaningful presence in our lives. To stay faithful to Christ of the Gospels, his evangelical values have got to rank prior to our personal and group interests. Pope Francis, ever since the inception of his pontificate, has set us the right example.
He knows, as we all do, that the ordained priesthood has been elevated to an unassailable position. However one may spin this, the Church as it stands under a strictly enforced organizational policy often risks becoming a split, two-tiered church. In the words of a European theology professor, the most suffocating, oppressive and operative law in the faith community is this: “Ordination in the Catholic Church is ordination towards power; for he who has the power to consecrate, has all the power.” That power, in the context of this discussion, might have been unwittingly used all this time to exclude women, ostensibly supported by arguments which the present rule-change has all but neutralized.
The sad thing is, power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.
This change in the foot-washing rules is but an indication of what the Holy Father wishes to see the Roman Catholic Church become – a Church that includes and not excludes, a Church that is big on service and not on power and status, a Church that goes out to serve and be with the people, especially the Poor, and not a Church of officials who sit in their air-conditioned offices waiting for the people to come and pay them homage.
Pope Francis has seen enough of it to know the biting truth of the corrosive “official” mentality in the Church. So we see him, year after year using the platform of the year-end Christmas greetings to the officials working in the Vatican “household”, to “bash” and shakeup the Roman Catholic clergy. Clerics are not the issue; clericalism is.
As expected, two types of reaction to this rule-change surfaced very promptly. One reaction is positive. Jubilating and celebratory, it says: “We have been washing women’s feet in our parishes for a long time. It is great that it is now legally clarified and affirmed.” So they will go on as usual. The other reaction is negatively resistant. The greatest resistance, upon careful scrutiny, coincides with a harking-back to clericalism. The old figure of the ‘prince’ priest is eagerly anxious to resurface, and does seep through every now and then. When it does, it parades itself as the representative of a privileged caste, the official of a religious power. Then, it shows its true colours, treating even the sacraments as its own so as to assert its supremacy over the laity, demonstrating that power by pronouncing exclusion even from the Table of the Lord. Change-resisting, it argues with the narrow and legalistic mentality of the Pharisees: “This change only speaks permissively upon the use of the word ‘may’. It is not mandatory which would involve the use of the word ‘must’.” They too, will carry on as usual, it seems. Imagine, if most parishes include the women, and yours does not, even though the new law now allows it, what does that say? Why are you so steeped in hatred against women, even women of your own parish?
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, March 2016. All rights reserved.
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