Spinning Balthasar
By Tracey Rowland
Recently the name of Hans Urs von Balthasar has been invoked to defend the concept of a more “feminine” Church. On reading some reports it seems that the invocation has now become a meme and the meme itself has morphed into attacks on the reservation of the priesthood to men, as if by the idea of a more feminine Church Balthasar meant the ordination of women.
As a matter of historical fact Balthasar was a staunch defender of the reservation of the priesthood to men. There is no possibility of a debate about this. He believed that the Church, as the Bride of Christ the Bridegroom, is feminine in her deepest corporate identity, and that bishops, and hence priests, cannot be in a spousal relationship with something masculine.
When he criticized what he called the “masculinization” of the Church Balthasar was in no way criticizing the reservation of the priesthood to men, but rather, the trend toward an excessive bureaucratization of the Church. When Balthasar speaks of a “masculine” church he means a church obsessed with its own governance structures, a church obsessed with committees and meetings and talk-fests. He called this the “photocopying Church.”
Paradoxically, it is precisely the increased bureaucratization of the Church that is a popular project for feminist activists. It is they who are, according to a Balthasarian analysis, seeking to masculinize the Church by setting up new boards and committees and angling to get themselves appointed to such bureaucratic structures.
My own close encounter with this phenomenon comes from my experience as a member of a body calling itself the Australian Catholic Women’s Commission. This body was established by the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference back in the year 2000. The members of the Commission (about a dozen of us) were appointed from different dioceses with a mission to fly all over Australia meeting other Catholic women to ask them what they thought the Church could be doing for them. There were four such meetings in far flung parts of the continent every year. The subject of the ordination of women would come up at almost every meeting. In every diocese there were those who supported the ordination of women, and those who were fiercely opposed to the idea. The same sociological types came along to the information gathering meetings in every location except, from memory, in Alice Springs, a town in the heart of the Australian “outback” not known for its middle-class concerns.
The idea of paying the airfares for a dozen people to fly in and out of dioceses to hear the same complaints from the same predictable types of people always seemed to me to be a waste of the Church’s resources. The money spent on airfares, hotel accommodation and the salaries of secretaries could have been spent on medical research into infertility, or breast and ovarian cancers, or on parish-based child-care facilities or accommodation for families in crisis, or on the purchase of diocesan beach houses for poor Catholic families who cannot afford to take their children on a summer holiday. There were any number of ways the money could have been used to assist real Catholic women, but instead it was spent on a bureaucratic project whose major purpose was to generate meetings and write reports on the meetings for bishops to read and digest.
It was a “case study” in what Balthasar called the “photocopying Church,” an attempt to treat issues of a pastoral nature using the techniques of corporate governance. Instead of conflicts being resolved by sound teaching and effective leadership, the idea was to “keep women happy” by inventing a quango and appointing female Catholic elites from both sides of the theological fence to its operations, and then keeping them occupied reading volumes of paper.
A similar drift towards the creation of a Church that looks more and more like a commercial company or political party began to gather speed in Germany in the 1970s. In Germany the Church is fabulously wealthy and the largest private employer in the country. In 2022 its income from the state-imposed Church tax (Kirchensteuer) was 6.85 billion euros. According to a National Catholic Register report in 2023 there are some 800,000 people employed by the Church in Germany. This means that about one in every 30 German Catholics is in an employer-employee relationship with the Church. It is unsurprising therefore that Catholic elites in this country often become obsessed with issues of corporate governance when so many are in a relationship with the Church that is both contractual as well as sacramental. Separating the contractual from the sacramental is no easy psychological exercise.
Balthasar and Ratzinger and other academics in their Communio journal study circles were acutely aware of the situation in Germany with its stark contrasts between the wealthy Church agencies or “Catholic Inc.” and the Church lived and understood as the Body and Bride of Christ. Catholic Inc. runs on secular corporate governance principles, the Body and Bride of Christ runs on a sacramental economy. The former is, in the idiom of both Balthasar and Ratzinger, “masculine,” while the latter is “feminine.”
There is some theological and scriptural backstory to the use of these descriptions. Balthasar suggested that the network of figures surrounding Christ during his life on earth were prototypical of future ecclesial leaders. There is thus the Petrine charism associated with St. Peter and hence with ecclesial governance, the Johannine charism associated with St. John the beloved apostle and hence with the contemplative life of the Church, the Jacobine charism associated with St. James and hence with guarding the tradition and teaching it to new generations uncorrupted, and the Pauline charism associated with St. Paul and hence with prophetic insight and in our own time with ecclesial renewal movements. Only one of these charisms, the Petrine, is focused on ecclesial governance, and only this one is exclusively masculine. There are plenty of contemplative women with the Johannine charism, plenty of scholarly women trying to teach the faith that was handed down from the apostles to new generations, and plenty of women involved in the new ecclesial movements that have mushroomed over the past century. So then, three out of four of these charisms are found equally in men and women.
Further, Balthasar spoke of the Marian charism. Its hallmark is its receptivity to divine will. It is a kind of overarching charism that all members of the Church, male and female, should exhibit. Receptivity to the divine will includes respect for Sacred Scripture, especially the teachings of Christ. With reference to the arguments of those who contend that Christ may have decided not to ordain women simply because the Jewish people of the time had psychological barriers to the acceptance of such a practice, Balthasar commented: “[E]ven though we might always assume that the Sovereign God could have acted differently from the way he actually deigned to act, we nevertheless are by no means licensed to relativize his logic – he being absolute Reason and Logos itself – by imagining other courses of action which he could have taken.”1 In other words, a high level of humility in the face of revelation is part of the Marian charism along with the gift of the Holy Spirit described as “Fear of the Lord” or reverence and awe before the divine majesty.
Another concept one finds in Balthasarian parlance is that of a symphony. One of his books was titled Truth is Symphonic. Within the life of the Church the varying charisms should work in harmony with each other. Problems arise when there is no harmony or when one or other charism is weak or completely overpowered by the others. For example, those whose charism it is to defend the faith from corruption have a significant role in the Church. Truth matters. Theology matters. Bad theology and sloppy thinking generate long-term pastoral disasters. We need scholars who have studied scripture and the dogmatic tradition and this includes people who understand how the component parts of the tradition relate to one another. If Catholic scholarship is dismissed as the pursuit of middle-class nerds, the barque of Peter can become a little unbalanced from its center of gravity. The idea that the only important thing is having charitable feelings is not Christian. Indeed, Ratzinger described the mentality that only feelings (not ideas or doctrines) matter as the “Hinduization of the faith.”
From Balthasar’s perspective each charism can at different ages in the life of the Church be weak or dysfunctional, and so, undermine the soundness of the entire structure, orchestra, body, or whatever is one’s favorite metaphor for the Church. For example, if we take Pope Francis’s favorite metaphor of a “field hospital,” we might say that the charism most closely associated with field hospital work is the Pauline. All kinds of new ecclesial movements have people on the front lines caring for the spiritually wounded. This is a good thing. However a Church cannot be only a field hospital, because needy human beings need more than bandages and blood transfusions. They often need surgery, and the surgeons are the spiritual masters, the Johannine types working in collaboration with the scholars, the Jacobine types. The work of the Petrine charism is one of assisting all the others in view of the whole sacramental economy of the Church. So those with the Pauline charism, working on the front lines in the field hospital, need the other charisms to be strongly at play if people are to be truly healed, and not left on the level of first-response triage, or relegated to palliative care, however valuable that might be.
When Balthasar talks about masculinizing the Church he therefore means something like a myopic focus on the Petrine charism and on governance structures to the neglect of the other charisms, a church obsessed with institutional maintenance. Thus, in his Elucidations, he wrote:
Since the Council [i.e., Vatican II] the Church has to a large extent put off its mystical characteristics; it has become a Church of permanent conversations, organizations, advisory commissions, congresses, synods, commissions, academies, parties, pressure groups, functions, structures and restructurings, sociological experiments, statistics: that is to say, it is more than ever a male Church, if perhaps one should not say a sexless entity, in which a woman may gain for herself a place to the extent that she is ready herself to become such an entity.2
Balthasar concluded that “the masses run away from such a Church.”
Similarly, in his Church, Ecumenism and Politics, Cardinal Ratzinger declared:
The Church is not some piece of machinery, is not just an institution, is not even one of the usual sociological entities. It is a person. It is a woman. It is a mother. It is living. The Marian understanding of the Church is the most decisive contrast to a purely organisational or bureaucratic concept of the Church. We cannot make the Church: we have to be it. And it is only to the extent that faith moulds our being beyond any question of making that we are the Church, that the Church is in us. It is only in being Marian that we become the Church.3
Ratzinger concluded that: “a Church which is nothing but a manager is nothing at all; she is no longer tradition, and, as an intellect that knows no tradition, she becomes pure nothingness, a monster of nothingness.”4
In summary, when Balthasar suggested the Church should be more feminine and less masculine, he did not mean that we needed women priests or more women on governance boards. To misuse his comments in that manner is to show a high-level of ignorance of his ecclesiology.
What we need now is an affirmation of the feminine dimension of the Church. For Balthasar this in some sense would entail a heightened interest in the operation of the Johannine, Pauline, and Jacobine charisms. Instead of a craze for committees and quangos there might be a focus on deep monasticism and consecrated virginity, on family ministry work, on Catholic scholarship and beautiful liturgy, including beautiful liturgical music. There might also be a heightened interest in fostering the sense of sacramentality, a deepening of the faithful’s understanding of the role that each of the sacrament’s play in the economy of our salvation. There would certainly be a heightened interest in the Eucharist.
My favorite quotation from Balthasar appears in his Theology of History. It reveals a lot about what he thinks or who he thinks are the most important members of the Church and they are not necessarily priests. He wrote:
Those who withdraw to the heights to fast and pray in silence are, as Reinhold Schneider made so vividly credible, the pillars bearing the spiritual weight of what happens in history. They share in the uniqueness of Christ, in the freedom of that nobility that is conferred from above, that serene untamed freedom which cannot be caged and put to use. Theirs in the first of all aristocracies, source and justification for all the others, and the last yet remaining to us in an unaristocratic age.5
Of all the charisms categorized by Balthasar the Marian is the most important. It takes priority even over the Petrine, because the Petrine itself must be Marian in the sense that it must be receptive to divine revelation. What really matters is receptivity to the divine will. This is what is most noble and thus aristocratic, where aristocratic is understood as an adjective meaning desiring only the highest and most excellent. In contrast, the fixation on structures and committees, and who sits on the committees, and who does the paperwork, is not aristocratic but gauchely petite-bourgeois!
Professor Tracey Rowland is St. John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame in Australia. She has published 8 books and over 150 articles. In 2020 she was awarded the prestigious Ratzinger Prize for her extensive writings on his theology.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “How Weighty is the argument from ‘Uninterrupted Tradition’ to Justify the Male Priesthood?” in The Church and Women: A Compendium, edited by Helmut Moll (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), 154; cf. 153–160.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Elucidations (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998), 70.
Joseph Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Essays in Ecclesiology (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 20.
Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 101.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994), 124.