catholicPittsburgh.org

by John Houk

”God is pure spirit in which there is no place for the difference between the sexes.” This could easily be one of our “who said this” pieces that we use to stimulate our readers. But since most of our readers are Catholics it would not be fair to infer that they may not know their Catechism. Yes, this statement is from paragraph 370 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Believing that God has no gender, and publishing this teaching in our Catechism has not resulted in wide-spread reception of this teaching. This is easily explained because our language for God (except for a few feminine references in the Sophia/Wisdom tradition) is exclusively male. Someone coming into our Church, and our own children, have no reason to believe that God is not male unless it is specifically pointed out -- which seldom happens. Attempts to change our God language to better reflect our belief has met with vigorous resistance by the hierarchy of the Church.

People who have studied the cognitive dissonance produced by our male God language while believing in a genderless God claim that we got into this situation because we come out of a patriarchal, male normative history, and that continuing to use this language acts to perpetuate this world view. In plain language, women were seen as lacking in male perfections of both body and spirit, and therefore we could not refer to a perfect God with imperfect (feminine) language.

There are many opinions as to why, now that we know better, we don’t change our language to match our belief in God and in the equal perfection of the sexes. One opinion is that we need relational language for God not just functional language. Father, Mother and Parent all seem to fit this need. Another opinion claims that the complexity of the English language requires gender specific pronouns. S/he seems to fix that problem. One highly placed person in the hierarchy has been quoted as saying in harsh tones ”You American women want to change the gender of God!” Pointing out to this highly placed person that they do not know their Catechism surely would not be well received. Perhaps the only fix for this last kind of opinion is time and funerals.