www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Feminine and Masculine, East and West

I think what is bugging me is that the Faith seems to have turned into Suburbianity...

I wonder how much ethnicity/culture plays a part as well ...

MEN THINK RELIGION, and especially the church, is for women. Why are women “the more devout sex”?1 Modern churches are women’s clubs with a few male officers. Or as Brenda E. Basher puts it, “If American religion were imaginatively conceptualized as a clothing store, two-thirds of its floor space would house garments for women; the manager’s office would be occupied almost exclusively by men.”

Men still run most churches, but in the pews women outnumber men in all countries of Western civilization, in Europe, in the Americas, in Aus- tralia. Nor is the absence of males of recent origin. Cotton Mather puzzled over the absence of men from New England churches, and medieval preachers claimed women practiced their religion far more than men did. But men do not show this same aversion to all churches and religions. The Orthodox seem to have a balance, and Islam and Judaism have a predominantly male membership. Something is creating a barrier between Western Christianity and men, and that something is the subject of this book. . .

A friend of mine stayed for several weeks in an Italian town, and he and his wife attended daily mass. He was the only man in the church apart from the priest, and his presence was so unusual that it attracted the attention of the carabinieri, who investigated to see what hanky-panky was going on. After he crossed the Aegean to Greece, he was startled by the difference in the Orthodox churches. If anything, there were more men than women; the men also led the singing and filled the churches with the deep resonance of their voices. The only time Americans will hear anything like this is if they attend a concert by a touring Russian Orthodox choir. There is no church music for basso profunda written by Americans. . .

Because Christianity is now seen as a part of the sphere of life proper to women rather than to men, it sometimes attracts men whose own masculinity is somewhat doubtful. By this I do not mean homosexuals, although a certain type of homosexual is included. Rather religion is seen as a safe field, a refuge from the challenges of life, and therefore attracts men who are fearful of making the break with the secure world of child- hood dominated by women. These are men who have problems following the path of masculine development, a pattern I will examine in detail later in the book. It is a truism among Catholics that priests become priests be- cause of the influence of their mothers, and many priests are emotionally very close to their mothers, more so than to men, even to their fathers.5 The sentimental sermons on Mother’s Day used to be a great set piece, a five-hanky special, in Catholic churches. Even devotion to Mary was af- fected. Such devotion has a sound theological base, but tended to replace a relationship to Christ or to the Father. The rationale for this was some- times made explicit. At one Dominican seminary in the 1940s, a profes- sor developed a following, which later matured into a small cult. He ex- plained Catholic devotion to Mary in this way: Men have a more distant relationship with their fathers than with their mothers. They therefore have more trouble relating to a masculine God (the Father or Jesus) than to the reflection of maternal love in Mary. Devotion to Mary, on this view, should be stressed more than devotion to Christ. Despite the extraordi- nary theological implications of this line of thought, the professor obvi- ously struck a nerve in his seminarian disciples: they were the sort of men who felt more comfortable with the feminine than with the masculine. The situation holds true in most of the Protestant clergy. Mary was not available, but first sentimentality, and now feminism, have filled the void.

This feminization of the clergy explains the lack of reflection on a subject that the clergy should be interested in: Why does half their potential congregation show an active lack of interest in Christianity, an indifference that sometimes considers male attendance at church suspect? Among Catholics, the few writers that have paid much at- tention to the question are Jesuits. As the early Jesuits were among the most masculine of Catholic religious movements, this is not surpris- ing. Yet the work of Walter Ong and Patrick Arnold has produced no last- ing response. Catholic circles are full of committees and conferences on the place of women in the church, and almost none on the absence of men. . .

Nor has the absence of men left women untouched. As we shall see, women have been forced into an unnatural mold by a misunderstanding among Christians of the feminine. Much of current feminism is an un- derstandable reaction against a caricature of femininity. The breakdown of the proper relationship of masculinity and femininity, male and fe- male, Adam and Eve, is at the root of many of the church’s failures in the modern world. This situation would not surprise the author of Genesis.