Andrea Grillo, enemy of tradition and the Latin Mass, supporter of the female diaconate
On the diaconate for women: letter to Massimo Nardello 10 May 2024 by: Andrea Grillo
Dear Massimo,
When I read the text of your last intervention on SettimanaNews, entitled The female diaconate, two cautions, I didn't want to believe what I was reading and for this reason I decided to write to you openly, to tell you all my disagreement. Which is not about the things you say, but about how you say them. And it is not only about the specific topic, but about the more general way of understanding tradition.
It is entirely reasonable that on things that do not involve the ultimate truths, one can have different opinions. However, to support your thesis, you do not hesitate to "demonize" and heavily judge every prospect of true change. The problem is that you make what is not decisive and ultimate and this not only strikes me, but pushes me to tell you more clearly what I think of what you wrote.
First of all on "caution". You even put it in the title and construct your article as two moments of exercising caution. But caution is a component of prudence. What I read instead, under the name of caution, is not caution, but fear, a crazy fear, which has not led you to prudence, but to imprudence, to summary judgments, and even to vulgar judgments. I use this term because what drives me to write is the reaction to an act of injustice, which you perhaps have not even realized. An act of injustice towards tradition and especially towards women. I would like to explain to you better the reason for this reaction of mine.
Tradition and novelty
Your first caution/fear concerns none other than tradition, precisely. You believe that tradition must impose itself, even if we no longer understand it. And above all that tradition is autonomous with respect to the interpretation that we can give to it. Above all because every instance that arises from the "world" appears to you, and you judge it, as a form of betrayal of tradition.
Since you have also written so much about the Second Vatican Council, this surprises me a lot: have you ever heard of “signs of the times”? Perhaps you think that it was a form of “anthropocentrism” that induced John XXIII to speak of “the entry of women into the public sphere”? Perhaps you think that the Church has nothing to learn from history? Perhaps the content of Dignitatis humanae and the admission of religious freedom as a general principle are also anthropocentrism?
What do you lack to slowly embrace Lefebvre’s positions immediately after the Council? I believe that in the first “caution-fear” that you expressed, you lost control of the words you were using and placed yourself in a position that is no different from traditionalism, when you identify tradition with the past. No, tradition is precisely the possibility of novelty. On the other hand, you seem to be interested only in things not changing, not in them being justified.
Because you only use the weakest argument: “if it hasn’t been before, it can’t be today either”. But if you don’t find a reason for this, if you don’t say why, but hide in the mere past, you speak only out of fear, putting aside both reason and faith. Whose worst enemy is precisely fear. Let’s examine the core of your reasoning better: you say, the question is to understand “in what way tradition is normative”. Right.
But then you add that “to complicate things” there is an anthropocentric theological vision, that is, in your opinion, a theological perspective that affirms man and denies God. Here you become not only unjust, but blind. Try to look at what happened not in the ordained ministry, but in marriage. Why on earth did the rite of the ring, which for 350 years was only one, the one that the husband put on the wife’s finger, in 1969 become “exchange of rings”? Because of an anthropocentric drift? Or because we have laboriously acquired that husband and wife, not just man and woman, have equal rights in the family? Why don't you tear your clothes for this loss of tradition? Why don't you react so harshly to the fact that John XXIII, in Pacem in terris, is the first pope to say that the source of this evolution is not Scripture or ecclesiastical Tradition, but the Declaration of Fundamental Human Rights? Why don't you join Lefebvre in denouncing this as an "anthropocentric fall"?
Instead, you prefer to hide your fear of an "authoritative woman" on the ecclesiastical level by saying that "in Catholicism there is no shared position". Not even in the USA, in the 1860s, was there a shared position on slaves to be recognized as equal citizens before the law. Would this be a good reason to let slavery continue?
Here caution only means fear. Which is never a good advisor for the theologian. You accuse those who speak of a “female diaconate” of wanting to deconstruct the normative value of tradition. Because you have already decided, without providing any evidence, that tradition is immobile. But this is the worst way to consider tradition.
And it is not that by using the example of the Pope you are making much progress. Blondel had already understood this 120 years ago, but you persist in thinking like many theologians of the 1800s. Because the model with which the Pope, only at the end of the 19th century, was thought of as an absolute sovereign who sums up in himself all legislative, executive and judicial power, is a modern way, too modern, of thinking about the episcopate and the bishop of Rome, with respect to which the sacramentality of the episcopate affirmed by the Council and the “synodality” we have been discussing in recent years is a fair correction, which seeks to escape from the shallows of an absolute conception of power.
This is not deconstruction, but hermeneutics of tradition, which can be judged as “anthropocentrism” only if, instead of prudence, fear is given the floor. Therefore, your argument must be turned on its head: you think that any modification of tradition is divisive, which you read as “giving in to anthropocentrism”. I say that the definition of man and woman, over which the Church has no power, redefines the roles of authority in the Church. And it is the task of tradition with a capital T to listen to history and not to reconstruct it at a table. Today, thinking of judging ecclesial and ministerial reality with the understanding of man and woman of 800 years ago is divisive. And confusing faith with the culture of an era is the true dangerous anthropocentrism, even when it is dressed in a solemn way and is sacralized. Errors of judgment are never sacred.
Fear of female leadership in the Church
But unfortunately you did not stop. You went ahead and even went so far as to believe that a possible opening of the diaconate to women would be an irremediable weakening of the diaconate itself. To reach this conclusion, you first of all read the diaconate in a forced way, that is, as a sort of “attack” on the natural baptismal ministry.
You say many things that in themselves also appear reasonable, but you place them on a horizon in which the diaconate should not be thought of as “service”, but as leadership. It is your legitimate vision, which you not only use dialectically with respect to the baptismal service, but which then leads to completely unacceptable consequences when you get to say:
In my opinion, if Pope Francis were to decide to authorize it [the female diaconate], the probable strong resistance to female leadership in the Catholic Church could push to level the diaconal service even more on the baptismal one. Thus both deacons and deacons would have no authoritative role, but would simply be men and women who have distinguished themselves for their service and who have therefore been rewarded with ordination.
You do not realize that all your reasoning has behind it, in a not too hidden way, the key argument with which the Middle Ages radically excluded any possible ordination of women: that is, the inability of women to exercise leadership in public. Your caution, which you would like to invest even the Pope with, is in reality the fruit of fear and of a theology that is not only old, but of which we should be ashamed. Instead, not only do you not challenge it, but you use it as an "argument".
You say, in essence: the diaconate is already very weak, even though it is interpreted by "strong males"; if we entrust it to weak females, then we really want to bury it... Here fear and prejudice have forced your hand and you have written things for which I would feel the duty to apologize to all the women who read such a text. Excuse me for saying it like this: but do you need so many years of study of tradition, documents, theology to make a joke at the bar? The theologian speaks with the best possible reflection, not while playing scopa (obviously only with three other men).
Museum or garden?
I wonder how you can think of all this as "caution in tradition". The qualifying point of women's access to the diaconate (the only diaconate common to men and women) is precisely to be understood in an inverted way. The presence of women in the ministry can allow a great reinterpretation of a "minor ministry", which has remained such precisely for the many reasons that you were able to recall, but which can find precisely in the fall of the "male reserve" not the final blow (in the judicial sense of the term) but the gift of grace of a new horizon.
Tradition can be scary because it is the principle of change.
Cathcon: Hence the extraordinary title of Traditionis Custodes for a document suppressing the Latin Mass. A theological world of doublespeak.
If it becomes an insurance policy, only reassuring, it is distorted and domesticated. Tradition must be scary because it is demanding: at its core is the freedom with which the Spirit leads history and displaces our plans. The necessary caution is therefore the ability to face the change that is imposed, not to always invent new tricks to avoid it.
Allow me to conclude with an image. After reading your text one has a sense of oppression and closure, one leaves the museum not comforted by the "marble statues" that one has visited. Tradition is rather a garden, not a museum. A garden that can bloom again, as long as one is not afraid of the sun, water, wind, animals, men and women. The museum "protects" and "preserves", but without flowers and without fruit; the garden exposes and puts at risk, but gives flowers and fruit. I think that anthropocentric is a theology that presumes to stay only in the closed museum or to stretch out its legs under the bar table, playing cards among men only. God is always in the risk of life.
Cathcon: He could and would use the same arguments for female ordination to the priesthood, which is why female diaconate should be resisted fiercely. He is attempting to ultimately destroy the priesthood in the same way that he attempts to destroy the Latin Mass by inspiring Traditionis Custodes.
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