COMMENTARY: A genuinely new millennium

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Judith Plaskow is professor of religious studies at Manhattan College and a Jewish feminist theologian. She is a regular contributor to the RNS series Voices of Women in Religion.) UNDATED _ The news that the Roman Catholic church is offering special indulgences for acts of penitence performed during the year […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Judith Plaskow is professor of religious studies at Manhattan College and a Jewish feminist theologian. She is a regular contributor to the RNS series Voices of Women in Religion.)

UNDATED _ The news that the Roman Catholic church is offering special indulgences for acts of penitence performed during the year 2000 raises many questions.


One of the more interesting is just what constitutes appropriate preparation for the millennium. Is the millennium a time to seek release from other-worldly punishment, or to rededicate ourselves to work to be done on earth?

If earth is our primary concern, the same papal document that discusses indulgences has other wisdom to offer.

Catholics should”purify memory,”Pope John Paul II said in the document, by recognizing the past wrongs Christians have done to others, and devote personal time to activities of benefit to the community. With a few adjustments, these two suggestions in combination might produce some changes that would make for a genuinely new millennium.

Rather than focusing on past wrongs, which are relatively easy to regret, the church _ and other religious bodies _ might repent from some present errors perpetuated in the name of tradition. The church could repent of its stance on women’s ordination, for example; it could apologize for fetishing Jesus’ maleness, when it does not make his age, Jewishness or any other trait a criterion for the priesthood.

Many religious groups could atone for their failure to treat women as full persons, for not training or encouraging them to bring their intelligence, energy, and leadership to bear in the religious realm. They could apologize for always invoking the past and the weight of tradition to support unequal power relationships in the present. They could acknowledge that all traditions evolve _ and must continue to evolve to meet the challenges of the new millennium.

This collective penance would be made more real and urgent, moreover, were it combined with personal acts of sacrifice, slightly different from those recommended by the pope for gaining indulgences. Since the church suggests supporting works of a religious or social nature, individuals _ including religious leaders _ might spend some time with a group of women reading the Bible in exciting new ways that lift up women’s presence.

Or they might give a day to working on prayer books or lectionaries that convey the message that women, as well as men, are created in the image of God. Or they could spend a day in a seminary library absorbing the full ugliness and painfulness of the history of religious misogyny.


And while they are at it, religious bodies could repent of another present error _ the error of insisting on narrow and outdated teachings about sexuality that leave people without helpful guidelines for facing the real dilemmas of their lives. The church could repent for opposing condoms in an age of AIDS, or swelling the abortion statistics by maintaining its opposition to contraception.

Almost every religious body could atone for its failure to help young people think through the sexual choices that confront them, its failure to teach them how to say”yes”in ways that honor the self and others.

On the personal level, individuals _ including religious leaders _ could spend a day in a clinic with a heterosexual teenager with AIDS who thought it was a gay disease, and rejected condoms as awkward or wrong. They could devote some time during the holiday season to a gay man or lesbian who can’t go home for Christmas or Hanukkah because the family will have nothing to do with the lover of ten years.

They could sit with a pregnant 15-year-old who felt dirty or cheap when she thought of preparing for having sex by carrying contraception, but was willing to be”swept away”in the excitement of a moment.

Once we think of creative ways of combining personal and collective penance, there are lots of ways to prepare for the year 2000. Some of them might earn Catholics an indulgence, but it may also be that effective penitence will make indulgences less necessary. For, in repenting of present errors and seeking their remedy, we will have brought a bit of heaven to earth _ just in time for the millennium.

IR END PLASKOW

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