Madrid archdiocese vetoes female theologian for ecumenical service

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
New York

A prominent female Catholic theologian in Spain has been vetoed by the Madrid archdiocese as a representative in an exchange of pulpits with Protestants for the Jan. 18-25 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, according to a report in today’s El Pais, the country’s leading daily.

Nevertheless, the Spanish Evangelical Church has announced that it will not rescind its invitation for Margarita Pintos, an expert in inter-faith relations and a member of a liberal Spanish Catholic reform group known as the “John XXIII Association,” to preach in a Protestant church in Madrid on Jan. 24.

Esther Ruiz, President of the Presbyterate of the Iglesia Evangélica Española, said that Pintos was invited by the Protestant body as part of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, an international observance jointly organized by Catholics and other Christian denominations. According to Ruiz, after the invitation was issued by the Protestants and accepted by Pintos, the ecumenical officer for the Madrid archdiocese called to say that Pintos did not represent the Catholic Church.

“I told him it’s not up to the archdiocese,” Ruiz said.

Ruiz said that the invitation would not be withdrawn, but that an ecumenical service outside the official program will be held on Jan. 24 in the Church of Jesus, a Protestant facility, in Madrid.

“The Catholic Church should not impose its representative during these days,” Ruiz said. “What kind of week of unity would that be? It’s a question of uniting, not imposing. It’s the church that welcomes what the preacher proposes.”

A spokesperson for the Madrid archdiocese declined comment this morning.

Pintos told reporters that she does not believe she was vetoed because she’s a woman, noting that women have represented the Catholic Church before in ecumenical encounters. Instead, she said, she believes the decision was due to her membership in the John XXIII Association, which has a profile in Spain somewhat similar to that of “Call to Action” in the United States as the country’s leading forum for liberal Catholic criticism of the hierarchy and the institutional church.

Pintos teaches at the German school in Madrid, as well as the University of Carlos III and the Institute for Feminist Research at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her specializations include women in the monotheistic religions, violence against women, feminist theology, and inter-faith dialogue. Among her books is The Presence of Women in the Spanish Catholic Church.

“I’m accustomed to participating in dialogue with Buddhists and Muslims,” she told El Pais. “That I am now excluded from a day of dialogue by the authorities of my own confession … that’s painful.”

Pintos has a history of being at odds with church authorities.

Last September, in the wake of Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial remarks on Islam at the University of Regensburg, Pintos was critical.

“Sometimes we Westerners suffer from ethnocentrism, and Benedict XVI is no exception,” she said.

In 2004, Pintos was part of a group of 35 Catholic theologians who called upon the church to renounce its historical “privileges” received from the Spanish state, including a wide range of public financing. The declaration came at an especially sensitive time for the Spanish hierarchy, which was involved in a standoff with the new Socialist government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero over what the bishops saw as Zapatero’s “exaggerated secularism.”

Pintos said that the mentality of the bishops reminded her of the Franco era, and “smelled of repression,” according to an interview with the German Press Agency.

In 1998, Pintos was among a group of Catholics who signed a petition calling on the Spanish church request pardon for its support of the regime of Francisco Franco on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the close of the Spanish Civil War in 1989.

In 1991, when the Spanish bishops published a strong document on abortion amid national debates about a relaxation in the country’s abortion law, Pintos said it was inconceivable that “a group of celibate males continue to decide questions which concern only women.”