Quotes from John Wijngaards

True loyalty to the Church implies loyalty to the truth. It requires willingness to question rather than readiness to conform. What may seem opposition and dissent at first, will eventually prove to be an active co-operation between the teaching authorities and the theologians towards the one aim of a better-formulated doctrine.

if people are to accept Christianity, it will not be because of our superior institutions, but because Jesus Christ is seen to contribute to primary values — authentic love, selfless service, ruthless honesty.

The presumption that Jesus who had wiped out the ancient bias against women in the common priesthood of the faithful, would reintroduce it in ministerial priesthood defies all logic. The contention that Jesus, who brought worship 'in spirit and in truth' and for whom love and service were the supreme characteristics of his ministry, would then introduce maleness as an essential requirement offends the inner consistency of the Gospel.

Cultural prejudice rather than God's will was responsible for relegating women to a purely passive role in the Church. Through this theological error, enormous damage had been inflicted on the faithful in previous centuries and the harm was still being done today. Cultural bigotry had invaded Christian beliefs and had succeeded in enthroning a pagan prejudice as if it were a genuine Christian practice.

I maintain that opposition to the ordination of women does not come from Christ. It is not God who decreed the exclusion of women, but pagan sexist bigotry which squashed the true Christian tradition of women's call to ministry.

But surely such a thing cannot happen in the Church?' you may argue. 'Surely the magisterium would not make such a colossal mistake?!' If this is what you believe, it will be instructive to study how the magisterium failed in discerning the true Christian teaching regarding slavery. It is the topic of the next chapter.

For, believe it or not, for more than 1500 years Church leaders upheld as Catholic teaching that slavery was a legitimate institution. Worse than that, they argued that slavery was an institution actually willed by God!

Unfortunately, this original Christian vision of universal equality and freedom was soon obscured by Christians themselves. What happened, to cut a long story short, is that Christians almost from the beginning lacked the spiritual enlightenment and will of character to break with the existing social systems. Instead of reaffirming people's new freedom in Christ, they gradually fell back into an acceptance of the pagan world views of their own culture.

Theologians were convinced that slavery belonged to Catholic doctrine. It was manifestly contained, they thought, in the Word of God. "It is certainly a matter of faith that slavery in which a man serves his master as a slave, is altogether lawful. This can be proved from Holy Scripture.

How could such an anomalous, un-Christian practice be tolerated in the Church in the first place? It seems that leaders were not prepared to listen to the prophetic voices raised by conscientious people in the Church.

If all the bishops in the world had been asked, two hundred years ago, whether slavery is allowed by God, 95 per cent of them, including the Pope, would have said, 'Yes, slavery is allowed'. Yet in spite of their number, they would all have been wrong.