Masculinities & Liturgy

​“On the borderline of loneliness, love must become suffering: Your Son has suffered. And now there are two of us in the history of every man: I [Adam] who conceive and bear loneliness and He [Christ] in whom loneliness disappears and children are born anew.”
“A woman knows infinitely more about giving birth than a man. She knows it particularly through the suffering that accompanies childbearing. Still, motherhood is an expression of fatherhood. It must always go back to the father to take from him all that it expresses. In this consists the radiation of fatherhood. One returns to the father through the child. And the child, in turn, restores to us the bridegroom in the father. This is very simple and ordinary. The whole world is full of it.”
– Karol Wojtyla, Radiation of Fatherhood[1]
                Meditating on the refracted fatherhood in created images of God the Father, every Christian man feels the call and the responsibility to embody masculinity in some way. In his teachings on sexuality, John Paul II has associated masculinity to maleness by an “ontological” relation. The body is a revelation of the spirit of every human individual. The body is the primary determinate of the subjectivity of the person, more so than gender or sexuality.[2] The unity of God with human persons precedes (chronologically in Genesis) and transcends (theologically) the union of male with female. The ontological capacity for sexual gift is a response that follows partnership with the divine. “To the eyes of faith, it is obvious that the supreme example of this sincere gift of self is not sexual union, but rather Christ crucified in his body in order to redeem the world, a total self-gift whose presence is constantly renewed in the Eucharist.”[3] The perichoresis between the divine Persons models the subsistent relations between human persons. The spousal love of the human soul with Christ is simultaneously, but not identically, the spousal love of man and woman, of the individual with his or her neighbor. “In the account of Jacob's ladder, the Fathers of the Church saw this inseparable connection between ascending and descending love, between eros which seeks God and agape which passes on the gift received, symbolized in various ways.”[4] Nowhere is this bridge between heaven and earth more literal and more complete than in the Divine Liturgy. This paper will labor to show that masculinity is a complex an amorphous category which can only loosely, though certainly, be associated with the male body-soul as such. Through a brief examination of modern psychological theory of this essay suggests that Christian masculinity fits easily into a neo-Jungian model of archetypes, which can greatly assist the Church in understanding its own theology of paternity, in the Trinitarian Father, in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, in the ministerial Priesthood, and in the priesthood of all believers.
Modern Psychology of Masculinity
In her study of Metaphor and Masculinity in Hosea, Susan Haddox asserts the pertinence of cognitive anthropology to the hermeneutics of Biblical theology grounded in the fact that gender imagery was a major component in the social identity of ancient Jews. In particular, the eight century B.C.E. was deeply concerned with the rhetoric of masculinity.[5] With Assyria in power and Israel and Judah as its vassals during the time of Hosea, the political tensions between the two cultures are couched in the language and theory of masculinity. Hosea attacks the public masculinity of its day because of the way it was being used to violate a treaty sworn in the name of YHWH       for the sake of Israel’s political ambitions.[6] Moreover, the audience was primarily elite males. In the ancient Greek context, women and feminine-men were considered more easily penetrated or ruled by stronger men, thus, being female tended to imply a loss of power or prestige. “Hegemonic masculinity” creates a “straw-woman femininity” that is really a mere inversion of itself, and not true femininity as it exists in its own space.  “Masculinity studies examine the ways in which masculine elements and ideals pervade the scaffolding of society as a whole. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne observe:  interpretations of maleness, manhood or masculinity are not neutral, but rather all such attributions and labels have political entailments…the processes of gendering produce difference and inequality: and nowhere more obviously than in the versions of masculinity associated with (masculinized) notions of power.”[7]
The metaphor of spousal love between God and Israel takes on various forms in this book. Theologically, YHWH is presented as a loving husband to Israel, a position which some feminists fear justifies domestic abuse against women. Religiously, the nuptial metaphor is set against the fertility cult of Baal, and Israel is described as a whore when it follows this idolatry – the Baal cult is polytheist and polygamous while the Jews were supposed to be monotheistic and monogamous. Hosea attacks the leaders’ of his day for presuming their own positions of dominance, and offers alternative perspectives through the metaphors of their relationships to God.
If Ephraim recognizes that his proper position is subordinate to YHWH, he can act with power and goodness. Rebelling against YHWH, as Israel has done by breaking the treaty, however, leads to a crushing of the leaders’ masculinity. The imagery itself shows subversive elements, however, which, especially when used with YHWH, serve to destabilize the norms of hegemonic masculinity. The gender imagery shows some degree of slippage, blurring the boundaries of male and female. When used with humans, the slippage seems to serve the purpose of identifying the audience with the female character in the marriage metaphor. [8]
The misuse of masculinity by elite Jewish males, in this case to claim unsanctioned political authority, and the sexually-attentive responses of Hosea offer a quintessential example of the “gender wars” that will proliferate in Western society through the present age. Because this struggle is embedded in the context of the Old Testament faith it becomes ever more relevant to the discussion of ecclesial masculinity in the Judeo-Christian context. Masculinity can be used as prophetic rhetoric to persuade through metaphor certain behaviors in its hearers. Hosea enforces a non-optimal masculinity in relation to YHWH, manipulating “space” to setup God as the most masculine of beings. Hosea’s conscription of male language “uses terminology relating to several generally masculine characteristics, including strength, vigor, potency, and military might, to mock the audience, showing that they do not actually have the attributes they think they do. Hosea shows their bows as slack and broken, their vigor as iniquitous, and their actions as dishonest,” thus realigning true masculinity with righteousness and virtue. Hegemonic masculinity, then, can be recognized as a bogus construction, invented to serve disordered ends. The role of true masculinity, secular and Christian, will be to stand as the antithetical and heroic archetype against the concupiscent tendency of male’s toward hegemony. First, one must survey the field of secular gender psychology.
 “Nowadays we are more likely to understand that gender identity development is not a linear, continuous trajectory, and that a boy’s (and later, a man’s) experience of the ambiguities of his gender are continually being reworked across differing developmental junctions (see Diamond, 1997, 1998, 2004a, 2004b, 2006, 2007, 2009). Moreover, in bridging the polarities between social constructionism and biological essentialism, a more complicated, and ambiguous, understanding of gender identity ensues that is constructed largely out of early, preoedipal identifications with each parent (in addition to being influenced by biological variables). A healthy sense of masculinity requires incorporating the multitude of these early identifications (as well as subsequent ones) and inevitably demands a psychic achievement in the integrative-synthetic sphere.”[9]
Sigmund Freud equated masculinity with action and femininity with passivity, referring to the male’s struggle “against his passive or feminine attitude toward another male.” This so-called “masculine protest,” a form of “castration anxiety,” was considered a biological fact, making no distinction between psychodynamics and physiology – hence the notorious phrase ‘anatomy is destiny.’ “Nonetheless, on the basis of clinical evidence, the biological givens in gender identity formation are significantly counterbalanced by what psychoanalysis emphasises: the early imprinting of the boy’s actual interactions with his primary attachment figures; his internalised object relations; the prevailing socio-cultural determinants; and most important, his unique psychodynamically determined reactions to each of these influences, particularly as they interact with his basic biological development (cf. Blos, 1984; Stoller, 1976).”[10] In large part, masculinity is constructed by one’s complex psychological development. In psychoanalytical practice, male patients often exhibit disordered masculine identities, manifested as inhibited initiative and imbalanced passivity or as a negligence of emotions and fear of being ‘penetrated’.[11] Healthy maturation can occur without adjudication only when familial and environmental factors are optimal, which is a very rare occurrence. For the growing male, the actual and archetypal father will play the most essential rule in self-identification, particularly the father’s exercise of authority, skill in work, and emotional fortitude. To the contrary, a heritage of fear-inducing castration anxiety will inhibit sexual maturation by refusing to hold together one’s emotional dependency and the emotional needs of the other.
                The opposition of eros and thanatos, desire and death, always cohabit in the human psyche as do the feminine and masculine, in an indissoluble relationship.[12] The male’s perception of himself is formed both by his father’s and his mother’s recognition of his masculinity. Furthermore, the communication of gender passes through the language of engendered bodies. The social paradigm is assigned its meanings through the initial experiences of family life. “The lack of symmetry between the sexes implies different forms of desire, suffering, and loving in human development. It opposes the mythical idea of self, of the narcissistic wishes of lovers” to love their own reflections.[13] Undifferentiated sexual identity falls into this pathological egotism when it persists beyond the initial stages of empathy for the ‘other’.
The human subject, from a psychoanalytic perspective, is constituted bearing in mind a permanent conquest of differentiation at different levels: between the generations, between the sexes, between psychic applications. The difference of sex is the first of these differences, paradigmatic of all differences. It is how we enter the world. It is because of sexual difference that the other looks questioningly at the newborn baby. Every difference orders, controls. The sexual difference also points to that. The child, from his perception of sexual difference, will begin to elaborate sexual theories in order to elaborate the first difference that violates his ego and his narcissism. Psycho-sexual identification is being constructed. Sexual difference invites us to think again of origins, the primary, the cause.[14]
Attachment to sexual “undifferentiation” sometimes functions as a defense mechanism against the fear of difference. The recognition of dissimilarity occurs naturally through the mother, who brings about the first satiation of the eros-thanatos tension. She also introduces the son to the father and to the ‘other’. When this does not unfold normally the child is prone to homosexual or bisexual narcissism, a response to the empty promise of sexual omnipotence or a return to pregenital freedom.[15] The emergence of sexuality brings about a new, perhaps surprising or frightening, sense of self during human development, in the process of ‘adolescing’ usually around the time of puberty. Sexual difference is made conscious through the acknowledgment of the difference of minds. The typical projection of one’s ideals onto others is tested and chastened by experience, encountering the reality of the other person or situation brings into stark release the anxieties of the child’s often exaggerated psychic projections. Genuine relationship with the other (reciprocal knowledge) naturally translates into the realization of possibilities in a relationship with the opposite sex. The discontinuity between self and the other, in thought and emotion, opens one to the prospect of authentically novel experiences.
Nevertheless, immaturity is a precious and essential element of health in adolescence; if adults force abdication too strongly, the child becomes prematurely adult through a false and forced process. Robust development of sexual identity involves discovering the stranger in one’s self and the stranger in the other, that is, the differing masculine and feminine interactions within each person. This is sometimes felt as the awareness of an ‘invading presence’ or the ‘concrete presence of absence’. One’s experience of his or her parents’ masculinity and femininity (whether present or absent) will thus greatly influence perceptions of the opposite sex.[16] Relationship with the other sex in turn will heal the false images of the other sex ‘within’ the subject. Moreover, the degree to which an individual develops the analytic function of the complementary mode, whether the feminine in a male or the masculine in a female, will determine the tools which the individual can use to mediate this development in others.[17]
However, “the mother’s attitude and her capacity to allow her child to go from a dyadic relationship to the triadic one with the father and herself, must have a correspondence in the container function, by the father, of the mother-baby relationship. The developmental child perceives not only the representation which he has in the father’s mind but, specially, the representation the father has of the child-in-relationship-with-the mother (Fonagy & Target, 1995; Target & Fonagy, 2002).”[18] “This meaning, as I said before, is based, in turn, on the parents’ memories and mental images of the triadic relationships with their own parents and their understanding of the generational difference. The same happens, at an analogous level, in the analytic relationship.”[19]
Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos reflect on the Christian psychology of male spirituality in their book, From Wild Man to Wise Man.[20] It is right to acknowledge that God is both wild and wise. The prophet and the priest, the evangelist and the catechist, must coexist and both avoid the trap of a business modeled faith life. Anne Wilson Schaef is a psychologist who specializes in addictions and codependence, especially those caused by social and philosophical systems, examining how they affect human psychology in ways similar to drugs. The ideological fixation of the West is the myth of (white) male supremacy. Many male’s people believe this system is completely rational, rigorously scientific, and the only way to achieve true objectivity and progress. Because this system has been in place for so long, it must be superior and it must understand everything.[21] In pointed contrast to this male delusion is the example of Joseph. The fear of not understanding led Joseph not to irrational bullheadedness or desperate grasping for security, rather it brought him to repentance, recognition of his dependence on God and a quite listening heart (cf. Mt 1:20). If masculinity is associated with initiative, it is an initiative in humility no less than in authority. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,  in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word,  so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish” (Eph 5:26-27).
Biblical manliness contradicts the myth that intuition is illogical, or positively, it affirms the validity of emotions to express truth. As the mother acquaints the son and father in the pregenital phase, so the assimilation of emotional life becomes a rite-of-passage into post-adolescent masculinity. “In classic ‘salvation stories’ and mythic journeys men typically move through several levels of consciousness: from (1) simple to (2) complex to (3) enlightened.”[22] These stages parallel the Salesian school of youth psychology: identify, separate, and transcend. The second step of differentiation from the feminine-other is the most difficult and painful part of male ‘initiation,’ for the encounter with asymmetrical difference requires a third power to reconcile; it cannot be conquered precisely because of its truly alien nature. This power can come only from the divine. Each human story is the scriptural story: the fall from grace, the wandering in the desert, the return to life in the Spirit.
Sons are most hungry for fathers. Conrad Baars’ work in treating emotional depravation reveals the important distinction between an initiated and elective love from a father figure versus the expected and natural love from a mother. Without making any judgment as to which type of emotional affirmation might be more or less essential to the male or female child, it is clear that each mode of emotional connection is necessary to a healthy development. Suffice it to say that the father will be more prominent in teaching the mode of elective emotion to the male child. By analogy, in so far as every human person is a ‘son [of God] in the Son [of the Trinity],’ the revelation of God as Father may be appropriately primary without exhausting all other analogies. As all human beings are analogically sons in the universal priesthood of all believers, The trinitarian Father is both father and mother in the development of the soul. For this reason also, Mary cannot substitute for the femininity of God, though she possesses the unique position of archetype of the Church and as bride of God. The ubiquity of the father wound is co-evidenced by the lack of emotional intelligence in contemporary American youth.[23] From extensive counseling experience, Rohr and Martos stress the point that women cannot teach the masculine form of emotional expression; only men can send other men on mission. “The father wound is so deep and so all-pervasive in so many parts of the world that its healing could well be the most radical social reform conceivable. I am convinced that this distortion lies at the bottom of much crime, militarism, competitive greed, pathological need for leaders and family instability.”[24] Healing begins in the acknowledgement of the sorrow:
Much of early men’s work is teaching men how to trust their time in the belly of the whale, how to stay there without needing to fix, to control or even to fully understand it, and to wait until God spits you up on a new shore. It is called “liminal space,” and I believe all in-depth transformation takes place inside of liminal space. To hope too quickly is to hope for the wrong thing. The belly of the whale is the great teaching space, and thus it is no surprise that Jesus said that “the sign of Jonah was the only sign he was going to give” (Luke 11:30). In fact, it would be an “adulterous” generation that would seek any other sign. Men must learn how to grieve, or they are inevitably angry and controlling, and they don’t even know why.[25]
Bl. John Duns Scotus taught that the perfection of the moral act was in the balance between the inward and outward focus of the intention. In other words, a rightly ordered self-love is necessary to perform rightly ordered acts of charity. One must be self-possessed enough to be free with one’s gift. A balance between the eternal boy (eucharistic sonship) and the old man (eucharistic provider) together build a balanced masculinity. Often men reject the eternal boy within to become a despot instead. Contrarily, the rejection of the old man turns one into a passion ruled ‘artist.’ Appropriating Carl Jung, the male psyche can be described by four ‘faces’ that should be utilized equitably to preserve homeostasis: the king, the magician, the warrior, and the lover. These facets couple respectively with the pastoral, intellectual, human, and spiritual dimensions of seminary formation. The king represents leadership, confidence, and autonomy. The magician symbolizes self-knowledge, awareness, and wisdom. The warrior images courage, strength, and loyalty. The lover shows joy, romance, and freedom. Balanced masculinity moves freely and evenly among the four types, or else falls into the ‘shadow’ of the over-accentuated face. The king’s shadow is the tyrant; the magician’s is the deceiver; the warrior’s is the misogynist; and the lover’s is the addict. The father forces the son to become conscious of his shadows and Jesus makes the balance possible. It takes a wise man to call a wild man to become wise:
What is good and necessary for the young man is often deadening for the older man. Black-and-white worldviews, heroic willfulness, get the young man started and rightly directed so he will one day be secure enough and strong enough to understand the true meaning of the cross. If we try to give the young man the full doctrine of “the cross,” it will either go over his head, he will see it as a mere Christian logo, or he will create artificial “crosses” (paralysis, analysis, neurosis) to advance his spiritual ego.[26]
Suzanne Boys has also explored four different masculinities in Roman Catholicism through a psycho-social lens. “The first masculinity, consensual submission, is enacted as leaders manage contradictory issues of power. The second masculinity, hierarchical brotherhood, emerges at the nexus of catholic and episcopal structuring. The third masculinity, hermaphroditic asexuality, is seen as priests confront paradoxes of Catholic sexuality. The fourth, constrained public presence, is evident where Roman Catholic priests manage visibility, or the public-private continuum. A postmodern deconstruction of extant masculinity typologies creates a space in which such masculinities can emerge and be analyzed.”[27] Kerfoot and Knights’ have suggested that managerial masculinity is now the historical successor of paternalistic masculinity. While paternalistic masculinity sought linear subordination to avoid the over-democratization of decision making, managerial masculinity encourages democratic disagreement in order to ‘conquer’ through risk and conflict.[28] The Roman Catholic Church, however, fits in neither of these molds. It is mainly paternalistic, persuasive rather than coercive, but also allows doctrinal ambiguity so that some degree of healthy disunity can exist passively and non-publicly for the sake of theological development. The Church also holds an ironic tension between careerism and loyalty, self-advancement and collegiality, but again its paternalism largely governs its careerism. Boys describes four Roman Catholic masculinities in tension within its institutional structure: The “hierarchal brotherhood” represents the sense in which the Church is both communal and governing, promoting the brotherhood of priests within a strongly layered hierarchy.[29] The second tension is in the authoritarian aspect of the Church, wherein the hierarchy must balance its appeal to ‘fatherhood’ with a humility of service. “Consensual submission” is Boys’ mediating phrase for this kingly facet of the Church.[30] A third masculinity emerges in the framework of Christian sexuality. The tension between masculine and feminine is also a tension between theory and praxis. Priests especially mark this liminal state of “hermaphroditic asexuality” as they are both signs of Christ’s headship and brides of Christ’s Spirit. Priests both supervise and counsel and are required to sublimate their sexuality through a variety of relatively ‘asexual’ channels of love. Priesthood, then, in a unique way embodies the way that Christ took on the human nature of both men and women, father and mother.[31] Finally, the Church’s visibility imprints its fourth masculinity on the world in the tension between public versus private presence. Masculine functions of exclusive definition (kataphaticism) weigh against feminine functions of inclusive listening (apophaticism). In this sense, the Church’s masculinity is expressed in a “constrained public presence,” as it makes itself transparent to the world by sharing its teachings, yet simultaneously reserves its pearls for the less combative faithful.[32] The Church exercises prudence in her vulnerability to the world.
 
Masculinity in the Liturgy
Reflections on the masculine are necessarily reflections on the complementarity of human sexuality, as it relates to the Divine desire for persons and the human desire for God realized through ascending and descending layers of family and community. In the Canticle of Canticles the lover and beloved cannot be isolated to any single ideal equivalence:
They are God and Israel, Christ and the church, Christ and the soul, but also human marriage partners (given the Pauline notion that these signify Christ and the church) as the supreme model of interhuman love, and so by extension they also represent any human loving relationship. We can see a pattern here: a sensory image elevates us, but does so because of and not despite the fact that it is a sensory image. It can further elevate us only if it is constantly returned to, just as we can grow in love for God only if we are constantly reconfronted with the challenge of our human neighbor.[33]
In the liturgy, all the members of these relationships meet to share a sacred place of worship, a sacred time of rest, and the sacred signs and symbols that give praise and adoration to the Father.[34] Vatican II and the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium) intended to bring about a gentle revision of the Latin Rite of the Mass in order to facilitate this meeting of lovers, to foster equal participation and devotion from clergy and laity each in due measure. Unfortunately, many of the Second Vatican Council’s pronouncements were construed to suit a “spirit of the world” rather than the “letter of the Council.”
In a 2013 article, Fr. Richard G. Cipolla lamented the “Devirilization of the Liturgy in the Novus Ordo Mass.”[35] He gives several instances of this post-conciliar phenomenon. Firstly, the masculinity of the Mass is opposed to sentimentality, though not to sentiment. The former can lead to the disintegration of religion into mere feelings or into the cult of clerical personalities. In the Traditional rite, sentiment abounds in the succinct and beautiful language of the prayers and collects, but sentimentality and (human) personality is avoided. This point was made in Sacrosanctum Concilium 34, which summarized the goal of the Latin rite as “noble simplicity.” As Romano Guardini stated in his short masterpiece, Spirit of the Liturgy, unbalanced or forced emotions can never be the foundation of liturgical prayer: “The restraint characteristic of the liturgy is at times very pronounced--so much so as to make this form of prayer appear at first as a frigid intellectual production, until we gradually grow familiar with it and realize what vitality pulsates in the clear, measured forms.”[36]
Secondly, “active participation” in the Mass is primarily a contemplative union with the words and work of the Liturgy. “This is the silence of Moses before the burning bush, the silence of the Desert Fathers, the silence entered into by St. Benedict in the cave, the Sacro Speco.”[37] Sacrosanctum Concilium limits the verbal participation of the congregation to songs and responses (SC 30). Another perhaps neglected aspect of masculinity in the liturgy is the required submission to form. The Mass is “The Divine Liturgy,” inspired and designed by God. One can enter into it but never impose upon it. Because it is God’s pure gift to humanity, “it demands the suppression of self-actualization” in order to be received.[38] The cosmic and transcendent dimension of the liturgy requires true detachment, for it sets the premises of belief itself, lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. “The Catholic liturgy is the supreme example of an objectively established rule of spiritual life. It has been able to develop ‘kata tou holou,’ that is to say, in every direction, and in accordance with all places, times, and types of human culture.”[39] Finally, the liturgy represents virility through the aloneness of the priest. The priest is alone within and for the community; he stands alone with God as a martyr for the flock.
Connected to the de-masculinization of the liturgy is the de-masculinization of the priest. “There can be no more powerful force for the devirilization of the priest than the modern custom of saying Mass facing the people.”[40] Although his language is rather sharp, Cipolla’s position that saying the Mass facing the people has little support in the Catholic tradition is supported by several theologians including Pope emeritus Benedict XVI and Dr. Brant Pitre.[41] Nevertheless, this issue is still highly contentious.[42] Cipolla, however, sees the ad populum orientation as a primary cause in the devirilization of the Mass. “Celebrating Mass with the priest facing the people, has transformed the priest’s role at the Mass from the father who leads his people to offer Sacrifice to the Father, to the mother whose eye contact and liturgical patter-banter with the people and whose sometimes deliberately silly behavior, as if the people are infants, reduces his role as priest to that of the mother of an infant.”[43] This motherly aspect of the priest, Cipolla thinks over-emphases the horizontal dimension of the Mass. In Cipolla’s view, the job of the priest during Mass is not to lead the people into understanding the mysteries so much as to lead them to the sacrifice. This is an aquadah model of liturgical fatherhood: like Abraham and Isaac, the priest and the people walk up the mountain together to make their respective sacrifices, communicating with brief but intense words, facing the same direction, contemplative and full with the awe of death (cf. Gen 22:1-19).
This functionalistic error confuses worship with catechesis and is evident in the shift of modern liturgical music and priestly attire. “From the functionalist point of view, the traditional chant of the Church must be set aside absolutely, for it goes far beyond mere function in its distinct, given form whose purpose is the elevation of the human spirit to God.”[44] It is often replaced by banal and sentimental music following the metrosexual trends of popular culture. The abandonment of the cassock as the normal dress of the priest outside the Mass is another instance, for Cipolla, of the devirilization of the Mass, shedding the liminality of the priest who stands in a threshold between heaven and earth when offering the Mass.
The cassock is an affirmation of the manliness and the virility of the priest. This is in contrast to the world’s notion of manliness as a grunting football player or an unshaven model for Armani in tight jeans, or some sort of “stud” that exudes sexual power. The wearing of the cassock is the priest’s taking on the mantle of the prophet; it is the outward sign of his taking on of that aloneness and detachment that is such an integral part of what it means for a man, vir, to be a priest. The cassock is a symbol of that detachment that marks the relationship between the priest and his people.[45]
Cipolla ends his highly critical article with the assessment that the Novus Ordo Mass is so discontinuous with the Catholic tradition that it alienates many who came before the change, as well as making the “Extraordinary Form” into a foreign and exotic experience for all who came after Vatican II. This he says is “a newness that did not grow organically from the Tradition but rather from a specific strain of liturgical theology that was founded upon and infected by post-Enlightenment rationalism.”[46] In this way, modernism and post-modernism have stripped away the autonomy of the Sacred by over-asserting the value of the secular. There is here a double sense in which Catholicism uses paternity to defend the Holy, through the preservation of the mystery of Sacrificial Love, lived and relived in the Divine Liturgy, and through the unique mediation of the priest in persona Christi capitis, preserved in the doctrine of an all-male ministerial priesthood.
                Cipolla’s arguments, though coarse, do in some cases echo the gentler more poetic expressions of Romano Guardini during the early twentieth-century liturgical movement. In different words, Guardini articulates that the feminine face of worship should be veiled and hidden:
The liturgy is wonderfully reserved. It scarcely expresses, even, certain aspects of spiritual surrender and submission, or else it veils them in such rich imagery that the soul still feels that it is hidden and secure. The prayer of the Church does not probe and lay bare the heart's secrets; it is as restrained in thought as in imagery; it does, it is true, awaken very profound and very tender emotions and impulses, but it leaves them hidden. There are certain feelings of surrender, certain aspects of interior candor which cannot be publicly proclaimed, at any rate in their entirety, without danger to spiritual modesty. The liturgy has perfected a masterly instrument which has made it possible for us to express our inner life in all its fullness and depth, without divulging our secrets—“secretum meum mihi.” We can pour out our hearts, and still feel that nothing has been dragged to light that should remain hidden.
Preempting a misogynistic reading of Guardini (or Cipolla) is the language of playfulness and seriousness in the liturgy, representing a complementarity between masculine and feminine temperaments, as with the affinity toward symbols versus the affinity for the invisible. Sacrament unites symbol and grace precisely in this way, creating a humbled and restrained material expression alongside a transcendent and free supernatural reality. “The liturgy has laid down the serious rules of the sacred game which the soul plays before God. And, if we are desirous of touching bottom in this mystery, it is the Spirit of fire and of holy discipline ‘who has knowledge of the world’ (the Holy Ghost) who has ordained the game which the Eternal Wisdom plays before the Heavenly Father in the Church, its kingdom on earth. And ‘its delight is in this way’ to be with the children of men.”[47] Beauty, truth, and love belong together in this dance of worship, but the work is primarily God’s to do and the Church’s to participate in. Guardini too recognized the danger in modern philosophy’s influences upon liturgical theology to elevate action above contemplation and to emphasize the importance of charisma over worship. In the Mass, the human soul should relax, the struggle of life be quieted, desire silenced, and the spirit rest in wonder:
The liturgy has something in itself reminiscent of the stars, of their eternally fixed and even course, of their inflexible order, of their profound silence, and of the infinite space in which they are poised. It is only in appearance, however, that the liturgy is so detached and untroubled by the actions and strivings and moral position of men. For in reality it knows that those who live by it will be true and spiritually sound, and at peace to the depths of their being; and that when they leave its sacred confines to enter life they will be men of courage.[48]
To substantiate the claim that gender differences are relevant to liturgical history, and have been unfortunately written out of liturgical historiography, Teresa Berger has provided an intensely academic study on the gendered aspects in the making of the liturgy.[49] In 1114 AD, at a church in Menat, Robert of Arbrissel preached against a ban that had been made against allowing women into the church building, a custom supposedly adopted from the rule of a dead saint – though women still attended Mass and received communion without entering the building. Robert marched his own female companions into the sanctuary and converted the church from their clearly unsustainable practice.[50] Berger uses this example to set the stage for her study into the gendered layers of liturgical history. “Gender had marked liturgical life in Menat as long as gendered bodies had gathered there for worship, whether male (clerical and lay) bodies alone or women together with lay men. What Robert of Arbrissel and his female companions did that day was to render visible, to question, and to contest the gender-specific ground rules of this sanctuary, which by A.D. 1114 had become a saintly tradition, set in stone. In so doing, they created space for a different future.”[51]
The underrepresentation of female space in liturgical history is superbly illustrated by the story of ‘Egeria’s Travels.’ Egeria’s journal provides an extremely rare account of the female experience of liturgy. It is written by a consecrated woman to other religious women about a pilgrimage to the shrine of a female saint (Hagia Thecla and the cult of Saint Thecla). The community at Hagia Thecla also consisted mostly of female ascetics governed by a female deaconess, Marthana. “This is a quite different story from the one usually told in narratives of the development of liturgical space. The conventional storyline, especially for the fourth century, typically focuses on the emergence of urban basilicas as the centers of Christian liturgical practice. With such a focus, what remains invisible are the many other sanctuary spaces, for example house chapels, relic shrines, cemetery churches, and estate churches, that continued to exist alongside the rising urban basilicas.”[52] In all these realms, including those of household, public, and ecclesial gatherings, the division of space would have been largely sexualized. Many household religious practices especially would have been under the special dominion of women, for example, birth and pregnancy traditions, circumcision and child-care, as well as prayer rituals intended to influence political affairs, though externally the province of males.[53] Regarding the role of women in the house-churches of early Christianity, Proverbs 9:1-5 was adopted to images Lady Wisdom hosting the meal:
Wisdom has built her house,
she has hewn her seven pillars,
she has prepared her meat,
she has spiced her wine,
she has laid out her festive table.
She has sent out her servant girls
to call from the town’s highest places:
“You who are simple-minded, turn to me!”
To those lacking insight she says:
“Come, eat my festive meal and drink my spiced wine.”[54]
When domestic space became sanctuary space, with the spread of Christianity through the empire, it is argued that gender roles in the home would have been greatly affected and even embodied in the liturgical practices. It is possible that Paul’s exhortations on gender in 1 Corinthians 11-14 were not unrelated to the sexual pressures within the domestic sphere of worship.[55] Similarly, the Didascalia Apostolorum records a liturgy marked by gender separation were women’s space was assigned behind that of the men, who faced the altar. In other instances, women stood on the left and men on the right side of the nave, a more common practice. In the Ordo Romanus I (700 AD), there is also specified a gender-specific offertory and communion reception, again with women on the left (sinister) and men on the right (dexter).[56] Cyril of Jerusalem taught this gender separation based on a popular spiritual-moral reading of Noah’s ark:
And when the Exorcism is made, until the rest who are exorcised be come, let the men stay with the men, and the women with the women. Here I would allude to Noah's ark; in which were Noah and his sons, and his wife and their wives; and though the ark was one, and the door was shut, yet had things been arranged suitably. And though the Church be shut, and all of you within it, yet let there be a distinction, of men with men and women with women. Let not the ground of your salvation become a means of destruction. Even though there be good ground for your sitting near each other, yet let passions be away.[57]
                Perhaps more important than this social positioning within the liturgy is the ancient traditions of female associations to the Eucharist. In the early Church, the making of the eucharistic bread would have been an essential and intensive female labor. Even more interesting is the fact that only the female body had the symbolic power to represent a food source that is literally one’s own body, that is, the mother’s milk – in ancient times breast-milk was thought to be a form of the mother’s actual blood. This metaphorical potential was not underappreciated by the early Church, as is clear in the profusion of milk and honey language associated with the Eucharist: “the use of milk and breastfeeding imagery in some early Christian eucharistic reflections should cause no surprise. Johannes Betz, in a 1984 essay, analyzed in detail this image and its possible liturgical implications.18 He suggested that the image of the Eucharist as God’s milk was not only echoed, but underlay, the blessing of a cup with milk and honey in the baptismal Eucharist.”[58] Clement of Alexandria, the Odes of Solomon, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Augustine all developed the image of Christ as the breast of the ‘Maternal-Father.’
These fragments have largely remained under the table of tradition, that is, hidden not only from most believers but also from the perceived image of eucharistic history and tradition. These fragments also have gender inscribed into their very being, in this case various constructions of femininity, including the maternal and the ascetic. As we take these fragments into account as parts of the (necessarily incomplete) mosaic of eucharistic origins, our view of this ancient mosaic can only be enhanced.[59]
Around the time of the Apostolic Church Order (fourth-century), the typically recognized ordering of Church hierarchy was becoming solidified, with the three-fold distinction of bishop, presbyter, and deacon. With this development, a new form of priestly masculinity comes to replace the Roman markers of manliness such as political power, military prowess, and the authority of the pater familias. These new characteristics included a spirit of martyrdom, sexual asceticism, and priestly (especially the Bishopric) ministry.[60] Masculine prowess could be better exhibited in feats of sexual self-control and self-renunciation to such extremes as attempting to control nocturnal emissions. In this way, perfect celibacy or continence became the public expectations of the priesthood. The fourth century Council of Elvira showed that: “Marital sex and priestly masculinity, in other words, cannot cohabit.”[61] Yet, this did not yet mean that marriage and priesthood could not be reconciled, as was evidenced in the practice of spiritual marriage or sexual continence within marriage. The pressure of this social zeitgeist led some Christian men to self-castration. Though renounced by the mainstream Christian tradition, it occurred not unfrequently in the ancient Church, as men sought to imitate this high masculine ideal. But non-self-inflicted castration (for medical or punitive reasons) was in not a hindrance to orthodox priestly ministry. Thus, “priestly masculinity came to carry its own specific gender particularity, clearly distinguished from worldly masculinities. Here, gender is writ very large indeed into liturgical life.”[62]
                From the tradition of close association between the Eucharist and the incarnate body of Christ, came a subsequent tradition the “priestly womb” and “priestly breasts.” Naturally, this analogy was related tightly to the virgin Mary and the idea of Mary as priest. “Both positions – women cannot receive priestly ordination, since even Mary was not ordained a priest; and, Mary was a priest in that she first offered to the world the body of Christ – become part of the theological repertoire of the following centuries.”[63] Mary delivers Christ to the world in a womb, as the priest does on the altar. Mary’s ‘priesthood’ however was carefully distanced from that of the ordained minister, namely through the distinction between insemination and fertilization. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) said it in these words:
A woman conceives a child not by herself but through a man, as the ground is plowed not by itself but by a farmer. Therefore, just as the earth cannot plow itself, a woman must not be a priest and do the work of consecrating the body and blood of My [God’s] Son; though she can sing the praise of her creator, as the earth can receive rain to water its fruits.[64]
The priest’s masculinity is generative on the altar precisely because of his chastity; his reproductive energy moves exclusively in the direction of the divine. Masculine potency, then, is derived precisely from the renunciation of normal sexual behavior. Following this logic, female virginity could unite a woman to priesthood in a unique way. “For consecrated virgins, as opposed to women in general, Hildegard does envision ‘the priesthood and all the ministry of My altar’ despite their passivity. The reason is that consecrated virgins receive ‘the High Priest as Bridegroom.’ Female virginity, in other words, receives a form of priestly ordination in that the virgin’s body is penetrated by the High Priest.”[65] In a different study, one might speculate on the effects which this theology exercised in the phenomenon of “spiritual marriage” between Bishops and abbesses, cohabiting priests and virgins, and continent married couples. The devotion to Mary as Virgo Sacerdos – sometimes expressed artistically by shrine Madonnas and Madonna monstrances holding the Eucharistic specied – was a authoritatively withdrawn from orthodoxy in 1913.
Berger ends her excellent study by accentuating the role of liturgy in retelling the truth about the past. The law of prayer and worship, of course, is often taken as a measure of the normative aspects in Christian tradition and doctrine. Berger’s contention is that this theological influence, which liturgical historiography wields, must not ignore the gendered elements in this history:
Liturgy’s past offers – for the construal of the church’s lex orandi – is not without its own deeply gendered problems. The voices of the past are mostly male, elite male. To put it in musical language, professionally-trained tenor and bass dominate. The liturgical tradition as we know it took shape in centuries when women, in worship, were to be mostly passive and receptive, especially to the seminal pronouncements of priestly men. Eunuchs and castrati were all but forgotten in the construal of liturgy’s past, although they died as martyrs, served as bishops and archbishops, lived saintly lives, and sang in the Sistine Chapel Choir until just a hundred years ago.[66]
Berger argues convincingly for greater scholarly attentiveness to the rich variety and frequent ambiguity of liturgical history. Even if the ‘full’ truth about liturgy’s past is inaccessible in this life, the unveiling of half-truths and the clarification of idiosyncrasies in this development, particularly those related to gender issues, will be of crucial importance to the discernment of the Church’s future.[67] This methodology may itself be feminine in its attention to personal uniqueness, an essential balance to the masculine tendency to over-simplify and categorize abstractly. This development in method “is good news for the very visible struggles around gender issues in ecclesial life today, be they continuing questions about women’s ministries, issues surrounding the full ecclesial life of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex Christians, popular discussions of the need for a more ‘muscular’ Christianity in an otherwise ‘impotent’ because ‘feminized’ church, reflections on gender in liturgy today, or discussions of ‘queer worship’… We may be grateful that the liturgical past also contains its own manifold subversions of established gender arrangements. A fascinating task for liturgical history writing would be to uncover how liturgical subversions have genealogies and form a tradition that also can be claimed.”[68]
                C.J.C. Pickstock has written a fascinating article on the relationship of embodiment to liturgical practice. “Human beings are mixed creatures – part beast and part angel, as Pascal expressed it. This apparently grotesque hybridity is our miniature dignity. Unlike angels, we combine in our persons every level of the created order from the inorganic, through the organic, through the animally psychic, to the angelically intellectual.”[69] Sacramental signs are an extension of the human hybridization of spirit and matter and therefore have a heuristic function that is logically difficult, and so often overlooked. The elevation of Christ’s human nature through the incarnation and paschal mystery, body and sensuality, into the Godhead raises all human sensation to a prelapsarian and potentially resurrected state of dignity. Moreover, there follows of necessity a kind of fusion between political, mystical, and philosophical life. All human action transforms, at least potentially, into an active contemplation and cooperation between God’s work and human work. “Sensation, in a liturgical context, has both a passive and an active dimension, in accordance with the principle that liturgy is a divine-human work because it is a Christological work. In liturgy the participants undergo sensory experiences, but they collectively produce this sensory experience, along with the natural materials they deploy. In liturgy the spectators are also the actors or the other way around, while the roles of acting and spectating keep alternating.”[70] This is not to say that human sensuality transfers into a spiritual sense, as in a step-by-step process, but rather “’sensing’ has a dual aspect, outer and inner, from the very outset, in accordance with the double biblical meaning of heart.”[71]
It is along this line of reasoning that marriage is understood to be the primordial sacrament. The apex of human sensation and communion need also be the consummating act of covenantal union with God. Thus, as the source and summit of Christian life, the Eucharist has a special relationship to the sacrament of marriage by its ritual form and visceral consummation.[72] The human body stands as gatekeeper between lovers, whether two individual souls or the Christ and his bride the Church. “The parts of these bodies and their sensations have spiritual aspects as the ‘spiritual senses.’ Thereby, as we have seen, Christianity diversified the unity of the soul. And yet bodies and their sensations, following Paul, represent offices in the church, since the latter, more emphatically than the soul, is taken to be the bride of the Canticles. And so Christianity unified the human social community in a very specific manner.”[73] The hierarchy of the Church thus functions in a special way to unite the individual and the collective. These offices are bestowed liturgically thereby reinforcing the material aspect of the sacramentality of the Church, and they involved both the Bishop the laity and the doubly liminal candidate for priesthood.  Just as the spiritual and bodily senses flow together in the ‘sacrament’ of human body-soul unity, so the charisms of the Church are dynamic and in many ways interchangeable swaying with the needs of the body as a whole. Venerable Bede answered this confusing mixture of diversity and unity by stating that the differentiation of offices must be distinguished from the way those offices are fulfilled.[74] Hence, a pastor who takes council from his parish laity is not thereby less a leader to those whose council he takes.
                This inherent multivalence is the reality of the resurrected presence of Christ.[75] Following Pope Pius XII’s liturgical encyclical Mediator Dei, the Vatican II constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium discussed the real presence of Christ in a variety of modes (SC 7):
To accomplish so great a work, Christ is always present to his Church, especially in its liturgical celebrations. [1] He is present in the sacrifice of the Mass, not only in the person of his minister, "the same now offering, through the ministry of priests, who formerly offered himself on the cross" [Council of Trent, sess. 22, 17 Sept. 1562, Doctr. De ss. Missae sacrif. cap 2: CT 8, Actorum pt. 5, 960], [2] but especially under the eucharistic elements. [3] By his power he is present in the sacraments, so that when a man baptizes it is really Christ himself who baptizes [see Augustine, In Ioannis Evangelium Tractatus 6, cp. 1, n. 7: PL 35, 1428]. [4] He is present in his word, since it is he himself who speaks when the holy Scriptures are read in the Church. [5] He is present, lastly, when the Church prays and sings, for he promised: "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them" [Mt. 18:20].[76]
Witczak’s numbering in the above quote represents the ‘order’ of the presences: 1) Eucharist, 2) priest, 3) sacraments, 4) Scripture, and 5) assembly. The ordering presented here was a contested issue in the schemas of the document, reworking previous orderings to emphasize a particular eucharistic and sacramental theology. While the eucharistic species is generally regarded as possessing the highest ‘intensity of personal presence,’ some argue the relative importance of the priest versus the assembly in terms of their respective representations of Christ. “Personalism has allowed theologians to complement the more static ontology of the Tridentine and neo-Scholastic tradition with a more dynamic sense of the Eucharist as personal, reciprocal presence.”[77] In this way, the presence of Christ can be seen as uniting the whole human community to God, in the Eucharist to the Father, in the priest to His own human nature, in the assembly as Himself in the world, and as individual ‘temples’ to the Spirit.
                As Archbishop Weakland has pointed out in his analysis of post-conciliar implementations of the liturgy, the identity of the priesthood and the real presence of the Eucharist are central factors in the preservation of correct doctrine.[78] Though the debates over liturgical ‘renewal’ and liturgical ‘restoration’ can be very charged, one might see in them an affirmation of the paradox of presence. The tension among the differing catechetical, historical, theological, and sociological claims on the liturgy recalls the diverse facets of Christian masculinity. One might call these the different presences or types of fatherhood. The first side seeks to hand-on the deposit in the clearest and most accessible fashion, another side wants to emphasize the historically pluralistic strands of liturgy, a third side is fighting the complex and perilous battle for doctrinal consistency, and a final side wishes to evolve the Church’s understanding of cultural constructionism. All of these approaches have their respective masculine values and each in turn should be given voice. The question at hand is whether any reconciliation of these ‘faces’ can be made. Brian McGrath Davis, in an article entitled “Apophatic Theology and Masculinities” proposes: “For a moment, I want to think specifically about gender in a way that is informed by apophatic theology, the tradition in Christian theological discourse that privileges most the limitations of language. I want to know what ameliorating work can be done on behalf of gendered bodies when the tool of apophatic theology is used—here, for masculinities studies—to dislodge, undo, and unsay what we mean when we say words such as male, man, and masculinity.”[79]
                      As Davis notes, apophatic theology always comes after kataphatic theology and ends in action, a saying and unsaying that together makes a positive movement toward the divine, but either of which would be heretical if isolated from the other. Most Christian theologians would agree that the primary concern of doctrinal development today is avoiding kataphatic hegemony. This is true both for liturgical theology and for gender theory. In discussions on the meaning of masculinity, one must be prepared to embrace perpetual “correction-liberal,” as Foucault phrased it. This is the never-ending process of “desubjectivation and resubjectivation.”[80] “No bodily signification of gender is ever totally complete…  an apophatic approach functions to dislodge the meaning of the human person and the human body, especially as it bares the imago Dei. An apophatic anthropology, like its theological counterpart, privileges the ultimate mysterious nature of the body and its desires.”[81] Yet, without being overly dogmatic about dogma, the Christian tradition still affirms the ontological signification of masculinity in the male body. Thus, personal and theological experience necessarily brings at least part of the substance to the transcendent step of apophatic silence and rethinking. Here the author wishes to suggest that this kataphatic redefining can occur within Christian parameters by the adoption of the fourfold “presences” of fatherhood, as the space in which the deconstruction and reconstruction of masculinity occurs.
                In response to the contemporary crises in both priesthood and paternity, Jose Granados refers to the Catholic priesthood as a “sacrament of the Father.”[82] Developing the theology of fatherhood, Granados recognizes that the identity of the father and the son are in particular tension, as the biological man is distanced in time and space from his son, so the priest stands in a separate space from his spiritual children. Always the father’s death is overcome by the son; the Father God, the father priest, and the fathers of flesh are fulfilled in their own masculinity by the very act of passing it on through different forms of sacrifice. “Precisely because of the distance between father and child, and of the necessity to break the maternal circle that surrounds the child from the beginning of his life, the image of the father has been linked to the symbol of the wound.”[83] The Father’s relationship to his child takes place in the context of the love for his wife, to the point sometimes of conflating the two. In a very similar way, the Virgin Mary creates the space for relationship between the laity and the hierarchy of the Church. Mother and father represent complementary experiences of time: the father embodies the beginning and end while the mother stands for the radius of the present moment. Mary lives in the dense ambit of the present while the Christian child journeys to and fro from father to Father. Paternity, then, forges the link between the family and society and between society and Heaven, connecting the ends of life through mediation and never without the help of motherhood. But the father figure initiates the child into covenant with God through the wound of separation that opens new horizons by breaking the comfort of maternity, which is the security of personal union and individual identity.
                “In light of Christ’s fatherhood man can now be fully defined, with Ignatius of Antioch, as someone who is ‘from the Father’ and ‘toward the Father’.”[84] Christ implants the seed of the Father, which is the Holy Spirit in the human person and human community.   Christ, as a father himself, gives his body to the children of the world so as to empower them to conquer death through him and to be his ultimate glory. Christ makes the Father present to history through the sacrament of the Church. Priesthood, then, is a sacrament of Christ as Father. “In the New Testament the priest is someone who has received the commission of representing the self-offering of Jesus Christ for the world. St. Paul says, for example, that God has entrusted to him the word of reconciliation and that he acts as an ambassador of Christ (2 Cor 5:19–20). Thomas Aquinas makes frequent reference to this Pauline text to substantiate his claim that the priest acts in persona Christi.”[85] The priest embodies Christ’s “for us,” a servant of servants, the truest meaning of in persona Christi capitis. This corporate personality is the created image of the Trinity, the body of Christ, and the body of the family.
…in the light of the “from whom,” in the light of the Father, the “for whom” is transformed: love becomes possible by being liberated from the trap of its circularity and becoming open to others, toward fruitfulness. By being a mediator of this “from whom,” by becoming a father who discloses the origin of love in God’s eternity, the priest makes present also the ultimate “for whom” that really frees man and enables him to grow beyond himself, toward perfect communion in the final embrace of the Father.[86]
Rev. Carter H. Griffin in his doctoral thesis Supernatural Fatherhood through Priestly Celibacy: Fulfillment in Masculinity asserts that priestly celibacy is the privileged mode of living supernatural masculinity.[87] In an attempt to reconnect manhood and fatherhood, he argues convincingly that masculinity is a true human perfection and that celibacy is a positive form of masculine generativity. From a purely biological perspective sexuality can be reduced to the most efficient means of genetic replication for a human animal. From the psychoanalytic point of view, in general, the biological imperative is not necessarily contradicted but carries with it a psychological need to actualize the potential of one’s unconscious archetypes (associated with the opposite sex) as a part of healthy development (psychological generativity). This has often led to an androgynous view of sexuality, as was not uncommon in the early Church, with its neo-Platonic anthropology. Today, they are similar camps of opinion on the nature of sex:
Essentialists in this debate, while admitting some cultural influence on the way in which they are understood and expressed, lay primary emphasis on the biological givenness of sex differences.  The complex biological interplay of genital sex, biochemical sex, and genetic sex are the primary determinants of a person’s sexual makeup.  Constructionists, while admitting some impact on the part of biology, see both gender and sexuality as largely shaped and constructed out of cultural assumptions and influence.  On these terms it follows that sexuality can be deconstructed and understood far more individually.  Gender too can be redefined to embrace new possibilities on the basis of alternative forms of sexual orientation and expression.[88]
Sexual differentiation as a human perfection begins with the belief that such difference will persist in the resurrection of the body, a view first disseminated by Augustine of Hippo. Taking this concept further, Thomas Aquinas saw sexual complementarity as a greater perfection than either sex alone. Aquinas’ notorious presentation of the male as providing the active element of procreation and the female the passive element was not to support the (unknowingly faulty) biology of his day, but rather to use the science of his time to reinforce the theological truths of revelation about sexuality. However, “it is true, as Dietrich von Hildebrand has pointed out, that masculinity and femininity are not themselves ‘qualities’ or ‘traits’ to be pursued; rather the individual is to strive for his own perfection, and the masculine and feminine differences and perfections will emerge on their own. Masculinity itself, then, is not the goal. One does not grow in male perfection by ‘trying to be more masculine.’ Rather one grows in perfection as a male by doing things which perfect masculinity.”[89]
Moreover, since God provides the esse of the rational soul, man and woman are secondary causes of human generation, providing the form and matter, and thus equally active in their receptivity to God’s generative power. Married spouses participate in God’s creative work like no other creature can, not even the angels. This image of God’s fruitfulness is expressed in St. Paul’s description of Christ’s nuptial love for the Church. “It may be argued that the fruitfulness of marriage is a sharing in the very fruitfulness of Christ’s marriage to the Church, beginning with the self-gift of Jesus on the Cross. ‘Christ’s Eucharistic self-surrender on the cross,’ writes Antonio Lopez, ‘is absolutely unreserved, and so is able to introduce a new fruitfulness into history. Christ’s virginal fecundity introduces a new meaning of bodily human generation.’”[90] Here is perfection through relation and gift of self. In his existential personalism John Paul II especially emphasized that the embodied human person actively creates his or her identity in the ‘gift of the self to another.’
                Griffin goes on to define what the masculine self-gift means as distinct from the feminine. It is truly the father that makes the mother pregnant and never vice versa. The sperm is in a real sense the more ‘active’ gamete, at least in motion. “The man is primarily the ‘giver’ in marital union, while the female is primarily the ‘receiver,’ but by giving himself the man must also receive the woman, and by receiving the man she is uniquely able to give herself to him. The man therefore gives in a receiving kind of way while the woman receives in a giving kind of way.”[91] Thus, the father is more outward, active, and initiating in his generative modality. The father’s agency also extends to being provider of life-sustaining goods and defender of the child’s fulfillment. “Empirical research has repeatedly confirmed that paternity contributes to personal growth and development by showing fathers to be more stable, selfless, emotionally mature, morally conscious, physically healthier, and more involved in their families and communities.”[92] In Jungian psychology, the four archetypes (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover) are actualized most synthetically by fatherhood. He is king of the household, magician in the world, warrior in his work, and lover of his family. Fatherhood also counterbalances the tendency of men to masculine abuses through weakness or cowardice by this homeostatic integration of the four types.
Natural masculinity perfected in biological fatherhood is analogous to the Fatherhood of God. Just as natural fatherhood is biological and developmental providing, guiding, and protecting for offspring to become perfected themselves, supernatural fatherhood comparably affects the way a child will understand God the Father. Yet, a human man is capable of spiritual fatherhood only in so far as his fatherhood becomes God’s and not his own. Priestly fatherhood involves being both head and bridegroom, head through sacramental configuration to Christ and bridegroom through a mediated spousal bond with God. “St. Thomas argues that ‘since this is the sacrament of our Lord’s passion, it contains in itself the Christ who suffered. Thus, whatever is an effect of our Lord’s passion is also an effect of this sacrament. For this sacrament is nothing other than the application of our Lord’s passion to us.’ Since the priest’s instrumental paternity consists in the application of the grace of the Paschal Mystery, it follows that the entire ministry of priests is ordered to and culminates in the celebration of the Eucharist where they ‘enact and so make present the life-giving activity, the begetting activity, of Jesus’ death and resurrection.’”
Among the five sacraments that are ordered to supernatural generativity in the individual, St. Thomas and the tradition of the Church accord a certain primacy to the Eucharist. Aquinas shows that the Eucharist is the greatest of the sacraments because all the other sacraments are ordained to the Eucharist, and because it alone contains Christ substantially rather than a share of His power. Commenting on the Bread of Life Discourse, St. Thomas argues that “since this is the sacrament of our Lord’s passion, it contains in itself the Christ who suffered. Thus, whatever is an effect of our Lord’s passion is also an effect of this sacrament. For this sacrament is nothing other than the application of our Lord’s passion to us.” Since the priest’s instrumental paternity consists in the application of the grace of the Paschal Mystery, it follows that the entire ministry of priests is ordered to and culminates in the celebration of the Eucharist where they “enact and so make present the life-giving activity, the begetting activity, of Jesus’ death and resurrection.”[93]
Eucharistic Love vivifies and renews priestly paternity. In the liturgy of the Eucharist, the priest ‘generates’ Jesus Christ in profound analogy to the eternal generation of the Word. Also, in the preaching of the Gospel, in the role of prophet, the priest also executes a truly generative act of supernatural paternity, giving birth to new faith in its hearers. He is head of his parish body, provider of prayer, guide in spiritual life, teacher of the faith, and protector against theological error. In these ways, priestly celibacy exercises a genuinely life-generating love. Since human perfection requires the experience of spousal love, celibacy rightly understood must be a yes to some form of committed love, and never as a means to mere ‘autonomy.’ Griffin closes with reflections on the paternity of Joseph of Nazareth, who perfectly models non-ministerial supernatural fatherhood. As John Paul II said, there exists a singular covenant of paternity between Joseph and God the Father. Like Mary, Joseph became a necessary element in the life of Jesus by God’s desire, and he is a true father to Jesus in the moral order. Pope Benedict XVI also observed that all fatherhood shares in the one paternity of God and “Saint Joseph is a striking case of this, since he is a father, without fatherhood according to the flesh. He is not the biological father of Jesus, whose Father is God alone, and yet he lives his fatherhood fully and completely. To be a father means above all to be at the service of life and growth.”[94]
In generating children through the power of the Holy Spirit, the priest imitates Joseph, who became a father in his marriage to Mary, who herself conceived Christ by the Holy Spirit’s power. In protecting the Church, defending the Eucharist, preserving and cherishing the deposit of faith, standing in readiness even to give his life if necessary to defend them, the priest imitates the guardianship of St. Joseph, who assuredly would not have hesitated to lay down his life for his two most precious treasures, Jesus and Mary.[95]
                In “Liturgy, Nuptiality and the Integrity of the Cosmic Order,” David L. Schindler discusses how “our understanding of the cosmos becomes abstract in the objectionable sense insofar as it is inadequately integrated into what may be called the liturgical and indeed nuptial and Marian dimension of the mystery of being.[96] Because secularism rejects the idea of man as homo adorans, worshiping man, the mystical and symbolic are often considered mutually exclusive. Opposing this dialectic, Schindler argues that the constitution of humankind is sacramental by nature and therefore contains cosmic, historical, and eschatological dimensions. Worship as such should be understood, therefore, as an all-encompassing worldview, a transcendent premise.[97] The liturgy is an extension of the nuptial mystery, which is the all-embracing mystery of being that reveals man as a sacrament of divine love. Recovering this sacramental and ontological relation of God and world through nuptiality requires a sexually-grounded ontological reciprocal asymmetry, archetypally reified in the person of Mary (as well as in the receptive-response aspects of liturgy and covenant) and complementary to the masculine filiality of the person of Jesus.[98] Nuptial being-as-gift only avoids abstraction through its instantiation in woman and the human aspect of the liturgy as ontologically maternal or bridal.
                This understanding redefines initiative and autonomy in the Magnificat of humanity, a “masculine” creative, active, willful response to the universal annunciation through the initiative and proclamation of the Church. “The paradox, then, consists in the fact that the ‘self-centeredness’ implied in individual autonomy and freedom, self-determination, self-love, and creativity remains in place, but with a transformed meaning, such that it is at its core—also and more profoundly ontologically—an Other-centeredness.”[99] This allows creaturely initiative to share in the generativity of God, who in the diffusion of his Love extends beyond the law of non-contradiction, revealing the perichoresis of the Trinity. Divine action and human action together are “little” in the sense of always being oriented to the mutual ends of the other and transfiguring the individual into a nuptial gift. Kenosis and humility thus mark the creaturely initiative and its ontologically masculine face. By this same praxis, paternal power finds its place through living in the poverty of God, who fights and suffers to stay ‘under’ the ‘other’ and raise her up, that is, to ‘toil’ constantly for the liberation of the earth and its inhabitants.[100] This is strongly analogous to the spiritual nourishment provided by the paternal-masculine aspect of the Eucharist as food. Thus, the priesthood also represents, in one essential way, that all human beings are first children before they are father or mother.[101]
Finally, we need to recuperate the sense in which the symbolic-nuptial structure of the creature in relation to God holds also, in an intrinsic-analogical sense, for cosmic (i.e., non-rational) entities in their original nature and relations to each other. Such a recuperation indicates, for example, a transformation of Newton’s (abstract) space and time, of Descartes’s (mechanistic) body, and of Francis Bacon’s (primarily external-forceful) causality (physical power); and it indicates also a transformation of the modern science, medicine, and technology that are (insofar as they are) mediated by these notions. The point here of course is not that the mechanical aspects of physical reality are not of fundamental and ineliminable significance; but only that these aspects are themselves, precisely in their mechanical functioning, best understood in terms of the integration into the love, beauty, and drama indicated in the (destined) recapitulation of all things in Christ [through the liturgy].[102]
It follows from this reflection that to democratize sexuality is to potentially destroy the complementarity, the sacramentality, and the fruitfulness of personal communion, since without an ontological sexual ‘orientation’ to either spiritual maternity or spiritual paternity (obviously realized in a vast multiplicity of charisms) there can be no guardian of freedom for obedience, which is the freedom to worship as one believes God desires (for the sake of the other/world). In effect, this is the “contraception” of spiritual children and thus of the Holy Spirit himself![103] The sacramental nature of the universe and the spousal meaning of the human body, actualized in the sacraments of the Church, presupposes the understanding that some symbols are truly ontological, that is, they are genuine participations in the life of God, a life which propagates in proportion to the ‘obedience of faith.’[104] Likewise, the dissolution of clerical authority into “democratic” authority, inevitably results in the non-sensical exchange of sacramental authority for authority by popularity.
As with many modern feminists, it is not uncommon for contemporary men to react negatively to any social pressure, and/or religious responsibility, to be an ontologically privileged sign of masculinity in the world. Nevertheless, the conflation of masculine and feminine does not assuage the very combative dichotomies of authority/autonomy and obedience/subordination. Rather such androgynous confusions miss the point and instead preclude the very possibility of sacrament, assuming (even if unconsciously) an unbridgeable dialectic between God and the cosmic order.[105] Perhaps the very realistic concern is for the abuse of ‘ontologically’ situated masculine authority can only be healed through a proper exercise of masculinity (as opposed to its deconstruction) precisely by the male magnification of the female in her autonomous realm, the priestly veneration of Mary as hyper-dulia, and equally the Marian self-subordination to the Eucharist/child of God. In every case, the feminine transcends its female symbol, yet remains ontologically related to her and by interconnectedness to the child, biologically and psychologically in general and archetypically in Mary. Here one sees a glimpse of the intimacy between the feminine and the Holy Spirit, both of which destabilize the masculine tendency toward clear delineation, as Granados and John Paul II also recognized.[106] What is certain is that the male must always be at the service of both the above (even the feminine in himself), and this is one sense of what it means to become priestly or to become eucharistic in the masculine and providential sense, to feed the growth of that superior Being of Love that transcends and transfigures into new life by its intrinsic Trinitarian power, but nevertheless chooses to rely upon the nuptial cooperation of man and woman and of liturgy of society to participate in His creative work.
                In closing, there is a feminine form of participation in eucharistic masculinity, again unsaying what has been said about the ‘definitions’ of Christian masculinity. Woman no doubt is a fleshly Temple, a crossroad of sacrament and custom in her empathetic personalism and ritual menstruation. She gives a monthly liturgy of blood in the prospect of new spirogenetic life.[107] Woman realizes a Eucharistic orientation of her life in a different and similar way to the typified man. Instead of needing to work to be ‘under’ the other, she, in an ontological but non-definitive sense ‘becomes’ the other. This is so clearly illustrated by pregnancy, in the amorphous boundaries between her own body and the bodies of her children, a bond which extends into spiritual-psychological union more or less unconstrained by time and space. This is a very feminine experience which can be closely related to Eucharistic communion. Women are ‘eucharistic’ in their generally automatic empathy, which images God’s desire to be equal with humankind, to feel along with every single beautiful individual. As women give children their own bodies as food from the breast, so God feeds the Church with his own body and blood, hence the long held tradition of maternal language for the Eucharist, as Teresa Berger recounts. Umbilical sustenance and breast feeding are every human being’s first form of communion.
                As a neglected figure in the theology of the saints, Saint Joseph signifies a particular absence in the spirituality of masculinity. Saint Joseph has often been called the “shadow of the Father.”[108] This expression was derived from the Biblical references to the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit and the cloud of the presence of God. “Why clouds? Because they cast a shadow, and the shadow – this is the theology of the first 40 chapters of Exodus (cf. Exod 40:36-38) – symbolizes the maternal and protective presence of God, a presence that reveals itself by hiding and this is hidden by revealing itself.”[109] The paradox of all essentialist language as well the single greatest “sign of contradiction” are especially reminiscent of the cloud of the presence (cf. Lk 2:34-35). Boff contends that God the Father is present in Joseph, as the Word dwelt in a human body (Jn 1:14), and as the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary (cf. Lk 1:35).[110] Joseph is the “personification of the Father,” though the heavenly Father remains hidden with him. The human father of Jesus has also been called “silent Joseph, but “this silence is loaded with a message, the meaning of which must be decoded. Saint Joseph is an artisan and not a rabbi. His hands are more meaningful than his mouth, his work more meaningful than his words.”[111]
               

From Eucharistic to Family
To conclude, Christian masculinity, spoken of meaningfully though not dogmatically, could be systematized according to a neo-Jungian characterization of liturgical ‘presences.’ The Liturgical presence is primarily a kingly presence, the presence of God the Father and the paternity of the whole Trinity. At the same time, the Eucharist embodies the paternity of Christ, a presence of warlike sacrificial love. Thirdly, the priest stands in the place of the shaman or ‘hermaphrodite’ in ancient cultures, the liminal figure who mediates with God through his psychological flexibility and in Catholicism through his sacramental generativity. Finally, the masculine lover is the Father’s Spirit in every Christian soul, the universal priesthood of all believers. The poles of ‘king’ and ‘lover’ can be represented in God as Father and Saint Joseph respectively. The Father’s personal property is his mysterious ability to empty himself into other ‘men.’ For human persons this especially means the kenosis of male ego for the sake of ‘sons in the son.’ The hidden strength of Joseph teaches Christ to be eucharistic in this way, as both the bread of active-contemplation and the bread of particularized-divinization. As sorrow is sweet and joy is painful on the Christian path, so in both faces and their antipodes does one see the face of the fatherhood reflected anew. Likewise, in both Mary and Joseph one sees the face of Christ, and in both maternity and paternity one encounters the fullness of divine Fatherhood. In the liturgy, one encounters the essential gravity of right worship. For example, between Protestant and Catholic worship and its relation to masculinity there are extreme differences. Being in the real substantial and particular presence of God allows for the emptying of human intellect and human emotion into a concrete and therefore viable ‘source and summit.’ Remaining in the presence requires a humble courage and faithful perseverance that cannot be imitated. This is why Catholic liturgy has always been and must always remain focused on God and not on the priest or the community. As Christians become ‘small’ before their own food, in the liturgy before the Eucharist, they simultaneously are becoming bread for the world, spiritual and embodied.
The nuptial analogy has some degree of univocity with the Triune Community. There is an infinite possible approach to the Triune Father through sexual complementarity. The infinitude is the univocal aspect of the analogy. “In the Eucharist, the foundation (the Trinity), which is perennially lavished on us in the offering of the Lamb who was slain, gives itself to freedom and calls it to a physical involvement. The Eucharist thus sheds light on the sacramental logic implied in nuptial testimony, which is normally called upon to actuate itself in the sacrament of marriage.”[112]
Precisely in the radical difference between the dead and risen Jesus Christ and the species of the bread and wine – a difference that replicates the “hiatus” between the Father and the crucified Son, which, in its turn, takes place within the space of perfect difference between the Persons of the Trinity – pure and sacrificial love calls the believer's free act of faith to a deeply fruitful exchange. The event of Jesus Christ addresses itself unmistakably to the act of my freedom in the Eucharist. The three dimensions of the nuptial mystery at work in the eucharistic event shed further katalogical light on the nuptial mystery: they show that nuptial testimony is totally sacramental.[113]
Thus, every man seeking the human perfection of masculinity must reflect deeply on the poorest and weakest of the world, the majority of whom happen to be women and children. For the responsibility of every man is to guard the Marian dignity and holy freedom of every woman and, through her embodiment, every child. Without female empathy, man is uninspired. Her countertransference from the suffering children of the world draws male passion through her to the service of these little ones and through the children back to the Father of Lights. This is the ballet of the Holy Family, transubstantiated in the ballet of the Liturgy, transfigured by the perichoresis of the Trinity. Thus, to imitate Christian and Josephite masculinity is to turn the formulaic descriptions of male relations into familial praxes. With the aid and guidance of Marian femininity, the concrete, the secular, and the personal become the focus of male energy, driving man to provide for the needs of his immediate community. In this way, he is bread to the hungry and wine to the hopeless. In the nuptial realm of the nuclear family, masculine spirituality is one that decreases, first so that his bride may be continually exalted, and secondly so that his children will proportionately increase. In his relationship to the Liturgy, the son of woman worships the son of Mary, and exalts the Church as he exalts his wife. Priests represent the children of the world in their liminality, yet they are richly paternal as they live to protect and serve spiritually, even as the Church serves and protects them spiritually, together they reciprocally teach each other and the world of the Holy Father. Like John the Baptist, John the Apostle, Saint Paul and Saint Peter, each Christian man models masculinity in a different way, by preaching, contemplating, defending, and living the priesthood of Christ, which in turn and in unison performs the mysterious work of the Liturgy.


[1] Karol Wojtyla, “The Radiation of Fatherhood: A Mystery,” In Karol Wojtyła: The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 5, 6.

[2] Augustine Roberts, “Spousal Meaning: John Paul II's Anthropology for Monks and Nuns,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 44, no. 2 (May 2009): 205.

[3] Roberts, “Spousal Meaning,” 209.

[4] Benedict XVI’s Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, 7.

[5] Susan E. Haddox, Metaphor and Masculinity in Hosea (New York : Peter Lang, 2011), 159.

[6] Haddox, Metaphor and Masculinity, 4.

[7] Haddox, Metaphor and Masculinity, 33.

[8] Haddox, Metaphor and Masculinity, 162.

[9] Ester Palerm Marí and Frances Thomson Salo, Masculinity and Femininity Today (London: Karnac, 2013), 2.

[10] Marí and Salo, Masculinity and Femininity, 4.

[11] Marí and Salo, Masculinity and Femininity, 9.

[12] Marí and Salo, Masculinity and Femininity, 104.

[13] Marí and Salo, Masculinity and Femininity, 79.

[14] Marí and Salo, Masculinity and Femininity, 80.

[15] Marí and Salo, Masculinity and Femininity, 83.

[16] Marí and Salo, Masculinity and Femininity, 48.

[17] Marí and Salo, Masculinity and Femininity, 49.

[18] Marí and Salo, Masculinity and Femininity, 53.

[19] Marí and Salo, Masculinity and Femininity, 60.

[20] Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality (Cincinnati, Ohio: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2005),

[21] Rohr and Martos, Wild Man to Wise Man, 19.

[22] Rohr and Martos, Wild Man to Wise Man, 32.

[23] Rohr and Martos, Wild Man to Wise Man, 73.

[24] Rohr and Martos, Wild Man to Wise Man, 76.

[25] Rohr and Martos, Wild Man to Wise Man, 86.

[26] Rohr and Martos, Wild Man to Wise Man, 163.

[27] Suzanne Boys, “Father, Brother, Bride: An Exploration of Roman Catholic Masculinities,” Conference Papers -- International Communication Association (2004 Annual Meeting 2004): 3, Communication & Mass Media Complete, EBSCOhost.

[28] Boys, “Father, Brother, Bride,” 8.

[29] Boys, “Father, Brother, Bride,” 16.

[30] Boys, “Father, Brother, Bride,” 15.

[31] Boys, “Father, Brother, Bride,” 17-20.

[32] Boys, “Father, Brother, Bride,” 20-21.

[33] C. J. C. Pickstock, “Liturgy and the Senses,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 732.

[34] Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy (see Pitre outline)

[35] Richard G. Cipolla, “The Devirilization of the Liturgy in the Novus Ordo Mass,” Rorate Cæli, June 26, 2013, http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-devirilization-of-liturgy-in-novus.html.

[36] Romano Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Chapter 1, para. 24.

[37] Cipolla, “Devirilization,” para. 8.

[38] Cipolla, “Devirilization,” para. 10.

[39] Guardini, Spirit of Liturgy, Chapter 1, para 4.

[40] Cipolla, “Devirilization,” para. 15.

[41] See Brant Pitre, The Bible and the Mass: the Jewish Roots of Christian Liturgy, Audio CD Course.

[42] See Johannes H. Emminghaus and Theodor Maas-Ewerd, The Eucharist: Essence, Form, Celebration (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997).

[43] Cipolla, “Devirilization,” para. 17.

[44] Cipolla, “Devirilization,” para. 24.

[45] Cipolla, “Devirilization,” para. 26.

[46] Cipolla, “Devirilization,” para. 32.

[47] Guardini, Spirit of the Liturgy, Chapter 5, para. 23.

[48] Guardini, Spirit of the Liturgy, Chapter 7, para. 27.

[49] Teresa Berger, Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting a Veil on Liturgy's Past (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2011).

[50] Berger, Gender Differences, 1.

[51] Berger, Gender Differences, 20.

[52] Berger, Gender Differences, 39.

[53] Berger, Gender Differences, 45.

[54] As quoted by Berger, Gender Differences, 46.

[55] Berger, Gender Differences, 50.

[56] Berger, Gender Differences, 55-56.

[57] Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis 14, as quoted by Berger, Gender Differences, 58-59.

[58] Berger, Gender Differences, 73.

[59] Berger, Gender Differences, 93.

[60] Berger, Gender Differences, 141.

[61] Berger, Gender Differences, 143.

[62] Berger, Gender Differences, 144.

[63] Berger, Gender Differences, 148.

[64] Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, 2.6.76, as quoted by, Berger, Gender Differences, 150.

[65] Berger, Gender Differences, 151.

[66] Berger, Gender Differences, 171.

[67] Berger, Gender Differences, 172.

[68] Berger, Gender Differences, 180.

[69] C. J. C. Pickstock, “Liturgy and the Senses,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 721.

[70] Pickstock, “Liturgy and the Senses,” 725.

[71] Pickstock, “Liturgy and the Senses,” 727.

[72] Pickstock, “Liturgy and the Senses,” 729.

[73] Pickstock, “Liturgy and the Senses,” 732.

[74] Pickstock, “Liturgy and the Senses,” 736.

[75] Michael G. Witczak, “The Manifold Presence of Christ,” Ministry & Liturgy 29, no. 6 (August 2002): 680-702.

[76] Witczak, “Manifold Presence,” 681.

[77] Witczak, “Manifold Presence,” 699.

[78] Weakland, Rembert. “The Liturgy as Battlefield.” Commonweal 129, no. 1 (January 11, 2002): 10-15.

[79] Brian McGrath Davis, “Apophatic Theology and Masculinities,” Crosscurrents 61, no. 4 (December 2011): 503.

[80] Davis, “Apophatic Theology,” 509.

[81] Davis, “Apophatic Theology,” 511.

[82] José Granados, “Priesthood: A Sacrament of the Father,” Communio 36, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 186-218.

[83] Granados, “Sacrament of the Father,” 195.

[84] Granados, “Sacrament of the Father,” 203.

[85] Granados, “Sacrament of the Father,” 204.

[86] Granados, “Sacrament of the Father,” 218.

[87] Carter Harrell Griffin, Supernatural Fatherhood through Priestly Celibacy: Fulfillment in Masculinity: A Thomistic Study (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2011).

[88] Griffin, Supernatural Fatherhood, 1.2.6.

[89] Griffin, Supernatural Fatherhood, 1.3.1.

[90] Griffin, Supernatural Fatherhood, 1.3.3.2.

[91] Griffin, Supernatural Fatherhood, 1.3.5.2.

[92] Griffin, Supernatural Fatherhood, 1.3.6.

[93] Griffin, Supernatural Fatherhood, 4.5.2.

[94] Griffin, Supernatural Fatherhood, 5.7.2.

[95] Griffin, Supernatural Fatherhood, 5.7.3.

[96] David L. Schindler, “Creation and Nuptiality: A Reflection on Feminism in Light of Schmemann's Liturgical Theology,” Communio 28, no. 2 (June 1, 2001): 265-66.

[97] Schindler, Creation and Nuptiality,” 270.

[98] Schindler, Creation and Nuptiality,” 275.

[99] Schindler, Creation and Nuptiality,” 278.

[100] Schindler, Creation and Nuptiality,” 281.

[101] Schindler, Creation and Nuptiality,” 283.

[102] Schindler, Creation and Nuptiality,” 284.

[103] See Angelo Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery: A Perspective for Systematic Theology?.” Communio 30, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 209-233.

[104] Schindler, Creation and Nuptiality,” 291.

[105] Schindler, Creation and Nuptiality,” 294.

[106] See Gavin D'Costa, Sexing the Trinity: Gender, Culture and the Divine (London: SCM, 2000).

[107] Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer, “The Eucharist and the Feminine Body: Real Presence, Transubstantiation, Communion,” Modern Theology 30, no. 2 (April 2014): 371-72. “Spirogenetic” refers to the mix of spiritual and genetic elements in the human person.

[108] Doze & others See Boff 104-05.

[109] Boff, Saint Joseph, 105.

[110] Boff, Saint Joseph,” 106.

[111] Boff 7.

[112] Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery,” 229.

[113] Scola, “The Nuptial Mystery,” 230.