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Conversations: Dr. Dorothy Irvin
Participant in the Women’s Ordination Worldwide 1st International Conference in Dublin, Ireland, and member of St. Joan of Arc Parish

M any of us have had conversations with someone and when it was over, we left knowing we had learned a great deal and we had a lot to think about. In early August I had this experience after a wonderful conversation with Dr. Dorothy Irvin. Father George Wertin had a brief article in the July 29th bulletin about the Women’s Ordination Worldwide lst International Conference in Dublin in June of this year. One sentence caught my eye... “ St. Joan of Arc parishioner, Dorothy Irvin, was in attendance at the Dublin Conference” Well, that was all I needed to go looking for Dorothy and with some coaxing, she met with me for a stimulating two hours of iced tea, theology, archaeology, and ecclesiology. Ecclesiology, Dorothy reminded, was the study of the church.

Dorothy Irvin will give the homily on August 26th.

Dorothy Irvin is foremost a scholar. Born in 1939 in Yuma, Arizona and raised in the Florida Everglades, she has impressive credentials. I was introduced to these early in our conversation because she wanted me to understand her emphasis on the historical critical method, with its demands for proof and accuracy. Dorothy Irvin’s doctorate in theology, is from The University of Tubingen, Germany, whose theology faculty is authorized by the Vatican to grant pontifical degrees. Her field is Scripture with supporting studies in the archaeology of the ancient near east. Her professors included the likes of Hans Kung. When asked what she wrote her dissertation on, she said, “The comparison of folk tales from the Old Testament and the literature of the ancient near east.” Her credentials, years of teaching, her on-going work in archeology in the ancient lands, to this day make her a spell-binding conversationalist. Once she was assured that I understood her academic background, she peeked over her glasses and with a hint of smile, said, “I agree with those who are concerned about the shortage of priests today, and I sympathize with those women who are frustrated in their desire to serve in an ordained capacity, but those are not my reasons for supporting the ordination of women. I support it because it is part of our Catholic history and theology, and is called for by the gospel as much as the ordination of men is.”

Joan Chittister Clearly, the church is changing even while it reasserts its changelessness. But static resistance is a far cry from the dynamism of the early church in which Prisca, and Lydia, and Thecla, and Phoebe and hundreds of women like them, opened house churches, walked as disciples of Paul, “constrained him,” the scripture says, to serve a given region, instructed people in the faith and ministered to the fledgling Christian communities with no apology, no argument, no tricky theological shell games about whether they were ministering ‘ in persona Christi’ or ‘in nomine Christi.’ -Joan D. Chittister, OSB - Discipleship for a Priestly People in a Priestless Period., Dublin, Ireland, June 2001

I listened to Dorothy as she shared with me the early Christian roles of women in ministry. All of these intriguing facts are part of her homily that she is scheduled to give at St. Joan of Arc on Sunday, August 26. For those who want to delve deeper into her materials from the early church, she will give a slide lecture Monday night, 7:00 p.m., August 27.

Dorothy Irvin, like many parishioners at St. Joan’s, have been so much a part of the church in its current transitional time. She spoke about growing up in the Florida Everglades, where there were no Catholic schools. “I only learned my religion through catechism classes, but what I was taught was the primacy of conscience, and our responsibility to search for truth.” Out of high school, she headed to Pittsburgh and majored in French at Duquesne University. With a masters she wanted to continue her education but funding was a problem so she went to Germany where the universities were free, and for eight years worked on her doctorate. To support herself she would come back to the United States to teach college courses in theology and scripture. St Teresa’s College in Winona, and St. Catherine’s were just two of the schools that she taught at. She talked about in the early years of her doctoral program the theology studied always used the ’male’ references to God, but slowly they spoke less of God in terms of gender. Then in 1971 a professor at Temple University by the name of Leonard Swidler wrote an article entitled Jesus Was a Feminist and that gradually caused attention to be focused on the roles of women in the New Testament.

Obviously, discipleship is not based on sexism. It’s not based on cultural norms. It’s not based on private piety. On the contrary. Discipleship pits the holy against the mundane. It pits the heart of Christ against the heartlessness of an eminently male-oriented, male-defined and male-controlled world. And that is not the model Scripture gives us of true discipleship. To be a disciple in the model of Judith and Esther, of Deborah and Ruth, of Mary and Mary Magdalene means to find ourselves makers of a world where the weak confound the strong. The true disciple begins like prophet Ruth to shape a world where the rich and the poor share the garden according to their needs. The true disciple sets out like the judge Deborah to forge a world where the last are made first and the first are last - starting with themselves. -Joan D. Chittister, OSB - Discipleship for a Priestly People in a Priestless Period., Dublin, Ireland, June 2001

She admitted that finding employment as a lay woman theologian has been difficult. Dorothy has written articles, lectured widely, published and continued her work in archaeology. When I asked her about how she found out about the women’s international conference she laughed and said actually in a kitchen in Milwaukee. Earlier this summer she participated in the Madaba Plains Project; she has served on the core staff of this archaeological excavation in Jordan for fourteen years. On her way home she attended the Women’s Ordination Worldwide Conference in Dublin. One might say Dorothy Irvin spent the Summer of the year 2001 digging up the past and being on the cutting edge of the future.

We talked about the Women’s Ordination Worldwide lst International Conference. While women were in the majority, there was a strong representation of men. There was only one speaker at a time so everyone heard everything. She talked about some of the women at the conference whose presence had placed them in employment jeopardy or put their professional careers at risk. She doesn’t speak as a militant, she talks as a concerned scholar. “We have to remember to approach things from the historical critical method. Accuracy comes from our attempt to understand evidence in its own time, not projecting today’s ideas on the evidence. We are asking questions they didn’t ask. The teachings of Jesus imply that the early Christian Church was created around a family model. They were brothers and sisters to one another in the Lord. The gender taboos and the top down leadership came later. While we do not have a formal job descriptions of early church leadership, the evidence is clear that both genders carried out the various ministries.”

In fairness to Dorothy Irvin, I cannot quote all of her conversation, she needs to speak at the Sunday liturgies. For those who want a true learning experience she will share some of her work with an evening talk on Monday, August 27th. However, there was one comment that can be shared. Having listened to the story of her intellectual journey, I asked her why she comes to St. Joan of Arc. Again I got that look and a smile. “Because St. Joan’s exemplifies the best of the church; it is what worshiping communities should struggle to be. It thrives on the creative spirit and abilities of the people who go there.” And so what of the future of the church and the role of women? Dorothy Irvin echoed Joan Chittister's call for prayer and honesty.

The discipleship of women is the question that is not going to go away, however much they pray it, will or legislate it into ecclesiastical obscurity. Indeed, the discipleship of the church in regard to women is the question that will, in the long run, prove the church itself. In the woman’s question the church is facing one of its most serious challenges to discipleship since the emergence of the slavery question when we argued then, too, that slavery was the will of God for some people - but not us. The major question facing Christians today, perhaps, is what does discipleship mean in a church that doesn’t want women anywhere except in the pews. If discipleship is reduced to maleness, what does that do to the rest of the Christian dispensation? If only men can really live discipleship to the fullest, what is the use of a woman aspiring to the discipleship baptism implies, demands, demonstrates in the life of Jesus at all? What does it mean for the women themselves who are faced with rejection, devaluation, and a debatable theology based on the remnants of a bad biology theologized? What do we do when a church proclaims the equality of women but builds itself on structures that assure their inequality? What as well does the rejection of women at the highest levels of the church mean for men who claim to be enlightened but continue to support the very system that mocks half the human race? ......And finally, what does it mean for a society badly in need of a cosmic worldview on the morning of a global age? -Joan D. Chittister, OSB - Discipleship for a Priestly People in a Priestless Period., Dublin, Ireland, June 2001

Chuck MacDonald and his wife Beth are parishioners of St. Joan of Arc. Chuck serves on the Board of Open Arms of MN, an AIDS food ministry. He is a new member of the St. Joan of Arc Parish Council. He is actively involved with efforts to help victims of AIDS in South Africa and will take a group to Cape Town and rural South Africa this September. Chuck can be reached at chuckmacdonald@mediaone.net.

Three of the images on this page are courtesy of WOW 2001 website. Please visit it for more information on the proceedings.

Other websites of interest:

• Joan Chittister's talk can be found at Benetvision
• John Wijngaards comprehensive site is www.womenpriests.org
• The "Call to Accountability Campaign" has a site at www.catholicsfor choice.org/international/alert.htm

Peg LaSota is interested in the biographies of parishioners... any suggestions?? She also loves studying piano, recorder, Spanish, and of course...singing in the choir!