Are Confraternities Essential to the Church?

Yesterday, I watched a video by Anthony Stine.

The title was Formerly Catholic Country Forces Monks To Accept A LadyMonk In Monastery. This next day, he has still not corrected the clickbait.

There is an image, venerated in a Church that belongs to a convent. However, as Queen Sofia has visited it, the Church is not inside the enclosure of the convent brothers, and also not inside a male visitors only enclosure. In Le Barroux, I was outside the enclosure of the monks proper, on a retreat, but within an enclosure for male guests only, however, during mass, there were female visitors as well, so the Church (except the Choir) was open to the public.

There is also a lay fraternity that comes to venerate the image, and which hitherto has been closed to women. Please note, the fraternity does not live in the place, it has arranged to visit it on specific feast days. Or perhaps even to keep up a perpetual adoration (it's an image of Christ, so it would be relative adoration, not just relative veneration of a saint). But anyway, it is a fraternity of laymen. It's statutes are ancient, approved by Popes and Kings of Spain. It was back in the time when acting publically was basically a thing that just men did.

In Spain and Portugal, there are confraternities, which are basically equivalent to, say, Knights of Columbus or Knights of St. Patrick. Or for that matter, Order of Malta. Now, the Order of Malta actually has a female branch. Dames of Malta — see wikipedia. They should not be confused with Nuns of the order.

Now, such things, like Freemasonry (which is outside the Church) actually does have purported lofty goals, like helping the poor or defending priests or venerating, in this case an image. Nevertheless, there are also fringe benefits, like contacts with important people. Someone who wanted to join these things exclusively for the lofty objectives would be a noble soul indeed, I think most have at least some kind of regard for the fringe benefits, even if they would say that is subordinate.

Suppose the female applicant had founded a lay confraternity for the same image, but for ladies. It would be new, and therefore vastly more marginal. She, as well as the already extant male members, is a layman, and as such needs to have some kind of income. It would seem, since women are doing business, these days, they should not be excluded. However, María Teresita Laborda Sanz, the lady mentioned in the News Story, seems to be identic to the María Teresita Laborda Sanz who is a nurse, in the region of Tenerife, which is in the Canary Islands and therefore where the news story belongs. As employee of the state, in Hospital Universitario de N^ra S^ra de Candelaria, HUNSC for short, she is arguably not too dependent for her own livelihood on being able to make contacts. Or as she is interested in JV PAREDES, the fringe benefits could concern that company.

This information is accessible from LinkedIn. I did not hire some secret mole.

There could be sth other at stake, when they wanted to exclude her, perhaps some conflict (understandable enough) about mask wearing during the recent pandemic and its extraordinary measures, or but as the confraternity is not at present holding a parallel female one, on roughly equal terms, and as it is laymen, they aren't sharing the same showers as monks or nuns are, I see no religious reason for the Confraternity to refuse the application. Wait, when checking, there could obviously be sth if she intended to carry the Christ statue along with other porters of the fraternity. Antony Stine did not seem to get that this was (apart from that) a purely lay affair. He certainly left some viewers with the impression that a male only monastery was forced to take female applicants, as if Mount Athos were forced, not to accept a female monastery, but to accept a nun in a monks' monastery. However, the porters are standing very close, and probably it is not a good idea to have a woman among men, there. But porters are a smaller part of the confraternity. Possibly there is some kind of drawing of lots, open to members, and if so, that could be a problem.

Now, Anthony Stine mentioned that the sexes, according to the Church, are complementary. True. One part of that has traditionally been that women are not breadwinners and are therefore practically (as well as legally), or were back then, able to marry at puberty, that is according to Church law at age 12 (like men could legally, for some rarer cases even practically, at 14). However, this legislation, which was that of Spain back in 1910 or sth, since Dummrath published a book with this info in 1914 has been repudiated. Now, the normal age of marriage in Spain is 18/18, and exceptions need both a judge's verdict and minimum age for both sexes 14. The older legislation definitely was useful to avoid both promiscuity and abortion. However, there is more silence on this topic, a bit as if the idea of a man past twenty (since a breadwinner, typically not a teen) marrying a girl of twelve gave some even in Spain the kind of vibes it gives Feminists in Scandinavia or the former Soviet.*

So, I ask if he's giving this show just out of incompetence, or out of a plot to make online info unreliable, so that the recent role of internet in information diffusion can be circumvented, or to test someone's capacity of critical thinking, or to please that confraternity, with getting them some international support in facing up to Spain. In the last case, I'd like to know what his relations to for instance Knights of Columbus are.

A wider question is of course, are confraternities and similar a permanent part of the Church or an ephemeral one?

Knights of Columbus ... was founded on March 29, 1882 as a mutual benefit society for working-class and immigrant Catholics in the United States.
Esclavitud del Cristo de La Laguna / Pontificia, Real y Venerable Esclavitud del Santísimo Cristo de La Laguna, the confraternity of the news story, has two roots (like the Spanish Falange), first Cofradía del Santísimo Cristo de La Laguna, founded when the Christ image arrived in the city, 1520, it was later subsumed by la Venerable Esclavitud, founded the 6th of September in 1659. It is a Holy Week confraternity. It's a Gothic Crucifix, with a highly suffering Christ.
Francis founded the Third Order, originally called the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, in 1221, to accommodate men and women who, either from already being in consecrated life as hermits, or from being married, were ineligible to join the Franciscan First or Second Orders, respectively.

This predates the rule for the Dominican Tertiaries, 1285.

I don't think I can find anything older. Obviously, statues can be carried by parishioners, chosen by the priest. People needing to do a life of penance in widowhood or widowerhood or for other reasons can do so without Tertiary orders, under the direction of their parish priest. Catholic workers can join Catholic trade unions. Confraternities and similar are obviously a kind of extra. A plus, if anything. Not a necessary part of the Church, unlike consecrated chastity (the Church's earliest nuns were Church widows, for which St. Paul gave rules in I Timothy 5).

So, confraternities and similar are not essential. They are ephemeral. The Constitutional Court in Spain has hereby violated nothing that is truly essential to the Church, and one cannot consider the verdict an Anti-Christian action. Unless, obviously, there be some kind of obligation to receive her among the porters. She's elderly, but as a precedent it is somewhat grave, since carrying a heavy statue of Christ in Holy Week is not the best occasion to be standing very close to a lady if you are a man, or next to a man, if you are a lady.

Now, Rafael Palomino Lozano, expert of ecclesiastical law, considered this as bad news. In a way it is, it takes away self government of a private association. But even so, it is a very far cry from allowing members to cross-enter monasteries for the opposite gender.

Now, it seems, my analysis of why he could consider it bad news, and my analysis of the reasoning of the court are in fact supported by his comments, on LinkedIn, he stated:

Acaba la jornada académica de hoy con una mala noticia. A falta de leer la STC más despacio, me temo que sus señorías no entienden ni la autonomía asociativa ni la autonomía religiosa.

In other words, the respect for religious and associational autonomy is shrinking.

In the pdf he linked under it, from the court, it is stated:

La sentencia aprecia que esto es lo que ocurre en el supuesto de la Esclavitud del Santísimo Cristo de La Laguna, porque si bien las actividades que realiza, y de las que se excluye a la recurrente, son actos de culto religioso y ajenos a toda connotación económica, profesional o laboral, ello no excluye que estos actos puedan tener también una proyección social o cultural, dado que la cultura y la religión, siendo elementos distintos, no son compartimentos estancos, y un gran número de manifestaciones religiosas en España forman parte de la historia y cultura social de nuestro país.

En consecuencia, atendiendo al factor cultural, social e histórico de los actos de culto que realiza la Esclavitud, cuya finalidad es promover el incremento de la devoción y culto a la Sagrada Imagen del Cristo de La Laguna, una imagen católica que data de finales del siglo XVI, y que constituye una de las imágenes más veneradas en la isla de Tenerife, la Sala Segunda concluye que la demandante no tiene posibilidad de ejercer esa misma actividad de culto de dicha Imagen en otra hermandad o cofradía del municipio.

In other words, while the acts of the confraternity as such are religious, there are fringe benefits, and this confraternity being the most prestigious, excluding her because she is a woman means sex discrimination for a great opportunity.

What is really bad is, that the court considers that this would not be exercising the same religious act in another confraternity of the town. As if the nature of the act were modified in consequence of the fringe benefits. That's about the secularism which imposed priestesses on the Church of England and the Church of Sweden. Unfortunately, that's not exactly how Mr. Stine presented it.

That said, there is also a danger that confraternities and similar could start to become clubs that rise to more importance in Church life than the clergy and the other interactions of lay people. In the Catholic Church, a priest is supposed to be kind of a single person chief in the parish, with other clergy, and not to have his Church politics heavily influenced by special associations of some of the laymen. We do not hold to a council of elders, like in Presbyterian Church Polity. Wiki says: There are two types of elder; the teaching elder (see Minister below) and the ruling elder. The latter are essentially laymen (only the "teaching elder" or "minister" is ordained in any remote sense of the word, invalid also), who tell the "teaching elder" how to handle things. Jews also have a similar polity, as I discovered when re-making acquaintance with Rabbi Small. The trouble in 1905 in France was partly that the French régime back then was requiring that Catholic parishes conform to this model. Which Pope St. Pius X obviously refused, even if it meant economic and actually also bloody martyrdom for faithful Catholics, back then.

So, my fear about confraternities and similar is, they could in some cases turn into unofficial equivalents of the "bench of elders" mentioned by Miller in the wiki.** Or, in some parishes, in order to have a decent chance of marriage and of business associations (and yes, to a Catholic writer, the most natural business associates would be specifically Catholic publishers, being excluded from the company of for instance Bergeron or editors on Via Romana cannot be compensated by not being excluded from applying to heavily secularist Harmattan or Flammarion) could work via being part of sth like the type of men that would be considered typical of a confraternity in Spain or Portugal. When I was a parishioner in St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, I was however just a parishioner, seen as undesirable by that type of people, who were (it would seem to me) not corrected by the priests.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Josaphat of Polotsk
14.XI.2024

Sancti Josaphat, e sancti Basilii Ordine, Episcopi Polocensis et Martyris, cujus dies natalis recensetur pridie Idus Novembris.

* Scandinavia, especially Sweden, has an organisation called RFSU. They were even in my teens giving the kind of sex education that Americans would find creepy (out in schools) and rightly oppose. Part of their origins was the Soviet diplomat Aleksandra Kollontay, prior to that a leader of Komsomol, who bragged about her openness in this matter. This has also come to stamp age difference (or relative age) rather than pre-puberal absolute underage of the female partner, as the essence of paedophilia.

** Here is the extract:

An excerpt from Miller (1831) expands this.[12]: Chapter 1 

In every Church completely organized, that is, furnished with all the officers which Christ has instituted and which are necessary for carrying into full effect the laws of his kingdom, there ought to be three classes of officers, viz: at least one Teaching Elder, Bishop, or Pastor — a bench of Ruling Elders — and Deacons. The first to "minister in the Word and Doctrine", and to dispense the sacraments; — the second to assist in the inspection and government of the Church; — and the third to "serve tables"; that is, to take care of the Church's funds destined for the support of the poor, and sometimes to manage whatever relates to the temporal support of the gospel and its ministers.

Footnote 12 refers to:
Miller, Samuel (1842). An essay on the warrant, nature, and duties of the office of the ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church. Edinburgh: Robert Ogle.