JO KADLECEK reads US Catholic columnist Phyllis Zagano’s book, ‘Just Catholic: The Future Is Now’…
Phyllis Zagano
Just Catholic: The Future is Now
Garratt Publishing, Australia, 2021.
ISBN-13: 978-1922484185
This past week, the American Southern Baptists voted to expel any church with women pastors. They also decided to bar their churches in the future from allowing women to lead on staff of the country’s largest protestant denominations.
The psalmist’s words come to mind in response: “how long, oh Lord?”
“By making accessible the issues around ecclesial reform so consistently and confrontationally in her column, “Just Catholic” – issues that many have been afraid to raise, Zagano has helped frame relevant discussions with respect, logic, grace and humour.”
Certainly, women have long done it tough within religions and denominations across the centuries and the globe, with women leaders especially facing long histories of chauvinism, bullying, and exile.
It’s nothing short of miraculous, then, that women still make up half the church in today’s world, Protestant and Catholic. Thankfully, women have also taken up prophetic roles to speak against the injustices too often rife and dissonant with religious communities.
Consider, for instance, how on 5th June, 2013 – 10 years before the Southern Baptists’ vote – one such prophet wrote and published a short essay in the National Catholic Reporter she called, “The Dangerous ‘Deaconess’ Discussion”. In it, Phyllis Zagano, now considered the world’s expert on women in the diaconate in the Catholic Church, said that what lies at the heart of modern debates was the “O” word: “ordination. Up until the 12th century or so, both men and women were ordained as deacons. Liturgies, tombstones, council documents and papal letters attest to that fact.”
Zagano goes on to define historical impacts in the context of contemporary arguments around ordaining women as deacons, one step shy of priesthood, and concludes that “to say women cannot image Christ undermines the essential teaching that all persons (male and female) are made in the image and likeness of God…Deacons serve in the person of Christ, [as] servant. To say women are ‘unordainable’ because the current law forbids it mixes apples and toothpaste: law does not determine theology.”
Though Zagano has continued to research, lecture and establish her place as an academic, it is her columns in the National Catholic Reporter that solidified her impact and prophetic role. Yes, she is today considered an acclaimed Catholic scholar who has lectured throughout the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, and holds a research position at Hofstra University in New York.
But by making accessible the issues around ecclesial reform so consistently and confrontationally in her column, “Just Catholic” – issues that many have been afraid to raise, Zagano has helped frame relevant discussions with respect, logic, grace and humour. Originally intending to write only about Catholic issues in the column, she offered her views with resonance and integrity. The world’s brokenness and pain, however, redirected her and broadened her focus in her columns.
Now, in a collection of more than 50 such essays from her “Just Catholic” column, those otherwise unfamiliar with her work can benefit from her perspective in one book of the same title. And as one reviewer said, “anyone unconvinced about ordaining women deacons, this makes you think they should have a place at the table”.
Divided under eight headings – ‘Women in the World and the Church’; ‘The Problem of Clericalism’; ‘Can the Church turn away from Sin?’; ‘Where is the Gospel?’; ‘The Poorest Among Us’; ‘The Life You Same’; ‘Synodality’; and ‘Hope for Women Deacons’ – Zagano’s strongest and timeliest essays are reprinted. The collection spans 10 years and dozens of topics from immigration, gender inequality, morality, the poor and dignity of life issues. The heart of it, though, is her consistent argument for the difference women deacons could make for the Catholic church.
Dr Neil Ormerod, professor at Sydney College of Divinity, who endorses the book, rightly considers Zagano’s work as, “‘good trouble’, asking unsettling questions of the church, societal trends, politics and culture” and concludes that, “this collection of essays covers an astounding range of topics with sharp insight and sound judgment”.
Likewise, “her passion for justice is powerful and universal; in a word it is Catholic,” writes Father Frank Brennan, rector at Newman College, University of Melbourne. “Her grounded and informed attention to injustice at the borders of life and at national borders reflects her lived experience as a woman on the borders of a clericalized church. Her utter conviction in Just Catholic is infectious.”
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Reading through the “infectious” passion of these essays can sometimes remind the reader of the 20th century advocate for the poor and Catholic Worker founder, Dorothy Day, whose columns in the Catholic Worker newspaper (still published) reflected a similar prophetic frankness. Zagano’s role and reach is different and broader, though, while still pursuing the same unsettling demands for justice in the name of Christian faith.
As Zagano says toward the end of her collection that “If I seem to write sometimes in exasperation, know that I seek to give voice to the voiceless thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of women whose dignity is disregarded, whose intelligence is disbelieved, and whose very humanity is discounted”.
“That various outlets allow me to speak for them is a cherished privilege.”
