No group in human society, no matter where in the world that society is, has been more betrayed by religion than have women. “I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that’s the way it is, period.” That egg on Pat Robertson’s chin is a combination of his fear of chaos, his lack of faith in a just God and his need to bolster the power and control center of his false-self energy center, but we won’t tell him. It would only make him more afraid and increase his doubt.
When the church feels threatened it tightens control and defaults to an immature ego state, i.e. it becomes patronizing and treats adults as children. The Vatican has resorted to silencing women—and men for that matter—and banned the discussion about allowing women to become priests. Of the three basic ego-states of child, parent and adult, the church—true to P-B form—assumes the ego state of parent trying to relegate the faithful to the ego state of children. Many of the faithful, however—and this should alarm the Vatican—have left the church behind and have attained the consciousness of the mature adult ego state and are demanding that the church hierarchy do the same. The rebellious nun, Joan Chittister asks the question, “The church has historically discussed slavery, usury, the divinity of Jesus. Why would you not discuss issues pertinent to women?”
When Chittister agreed to address the first international conference of a group called Women’s Ordination Worldwide in Dublin, the Vatican issued a “precept of obedience” forbidding her to attend the conference on pain of undefined “just penalties.” Chittister was handed a letter signed by 127 of Mount Benedict’s 128 active nuns supporting her decision to attend and address the conference on the night of her departure. The grounds for their decision were: “Mount St. Benedicts is run on a model of “co-responsibility” rather than a “superior-subordinate” [parent-child] model, and prayerful consensus did not support the travel ban.”
The nuns had turned to their own inner wisdom and demonstrated what the future of a P-A religion could be. It’s time to take the wholesome and profound aspects of the religious paradigm and transcend to an inclusive, conscious, mature and compassionate spiritual community.
“A religion which looks askance upon half the human race and which regards every involuntary motion of mind, heart and body as a symptom of fatal concupiscence can only alienate men and women from their condition. Western Christianity never fully recovered from this neurotic misogyny. Augustine left us with a difficult heritage. A religion which teaches men and women to regard their humanity as chronically flawed can alienate them from themselves. Even though Christianity had originally been quiet positive for women, it had already developed a misogynistic tendency in the West by the time of Augustine. ‘What is the difference,’ he wrote a friend, ‘whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman.’ Woman’s only function was childbearing which passed the contagion of Original Sin to the next generation, like a venereal disease.”
Augustine’s paranoia is still alive and well in both Catholic and Protestant churches and it is time that we escape his unhealthy, neurotic clutches before the whole notion of religion and spirituality is discredited in the West and much of humanity is doomed to a world without hope.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Who Am I? The Second Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Where Am I? The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival
