Recent popes have used the concept of a “Petrine principle” and a “Marian principle” to explain the vital role ladies and men together play within the Catholic Church, but a biblical scholar writing within the Vatican newspaper said it’s time to talk concerning the discriminatory and stereotypical notions behind it.
The query have to be asked: “Doesn’t the Marian-Petrine principle express an ideology and rhetoric of sexual and gender differentiation that has now been exposed as considered one of the covers for patriarchal privileges?” wrote Marinella Perroni, a retired professor of biblical theology on the Pontifical Atheneum of St. Anselm in Rome.
Her article Dec. 12 in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, was in response to Pope Francis’ most up-to-date use of the twin principle in an interview with the Jesuit-run America magazine in late November.
As he has done ceaselessly when asked concerning the role of girls within the church and the potential of ordaining women deacons or priests, Francis insisted that “the Marian principle, which is the principle of femininity within the church, of the lady within the church, where the church sees a mirror of herself because she is a girl and a spouse” is more vital than the Petrine principle, which refers to ordained ministry in succession to St. Peter and the apostles.
“The church is greater than a ministry. It’s the entire people of God. The church is woman. The church is a spouse. Subsequently, the dignity of girls is mirrored in this manner,” the pope told America magazine. “Why can a girl not enter ordained ministry? It’s since the Petrine principle has no place for that. Yes, one needs to be within the Marian principle, which is more vital.”
Perroni said the Petrine-Marian principle was first formulated by the Swiss theologian Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar within the Seventies to combat an “anti-Roman” sentiment amongst some Catholics and to insist that the hierarchical structure of the church and its living community of believers called to holiness and to bringing Christ to the world must go together.
Sts. Paul VI and John Paul II in addition to retired Pope Benedict XVI and Francis have used the principle “to speak concerning the lifetime of the church and, above all, concerning the participation in it of ladies and men,” Perroni wrote.
Within the formula, she said, “it is instantly intuited that Mary is the prototype of the female and Peter is the prototype of the masculine, and it is evident that when the popes use the formula of the ‘Marian-Petrine principle,’ they wish to affirm that everybody, ladies and men, should feel at home within the church since it is a spot where the connection between masculine and female is considered one of close reciprocity.”
“In the beginning of the third millennium, nevertheless, a reciprocity that assigns to women the charism of affection and to men the exercise of authority should at the least give us pause,” she wrote.
Perroni quoted Pope Paul’s 1974 document on Marian devotion where he explained that with Mary, God “has placed in his family, the church, as in every home, the figure of a girl, who in a hidden manner and in a spirit of service watches over that family and thoroughly takes care of it until the fantastic day of the Lord.”
The popes, including Francis, have insisted that the Marian principle and female role within the church is more vital than the ministerial and authoritative role of St. Peter and his successors, Perroni wrote, even when the Marian principle characterizes the role of girls as “maternal” and “domestic.”
Acknowledging the church needs a more profound “theology of girls,” she said, Francis “struggles to free himself from the patriarchal vision” that reserves authority to men and loving to women.
Using the binary Petrine principle and Marian principle is “seductive” since it is straightforward, Perroni said.
However it is problematic since it stereotypes the differences between men and ladies and provides them a hierarchical value, she said. The female is presented as domestic, interior, welcoming and spiritual, while the masculine is presented as ministerial, authoritative and powerful.
Nonetheless, Perroni wrote, it’s “quite clear that types of the paranormal exaltation of the female are directly proportional to the refusal of public recognition of girls’s authority.”
“The masculine-feminine bipolarity,” she said, featured “obsessively” in Catholic theology when it was “totally androcentric and patriarchal,” but it surely has lost credibility “since women first became the ‘women’s issue’ after which, having shaken off this offensive expression, became full protagonists in social, political and ecclesial life.”