"The man is the ruler of the family, and the head of the woman”
What the Church no longer teaches about Ephesians 5
The second reading at Mass today is from Ephesians 5, a section of St. Paul’s letter that includes this passage:
“21 Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ. 22 Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body. 24 As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.”
It can feel easy to know what St. Paul is saying here about the roles of husbands and wives, but we must avoid taking this passage out of it’s cultural, historical, and theological context and drawing conclusions about what God has definitively revealed about the structure of marriage and families. To do so—even when it feels so obvious—would be to engage in a kind of Biblical fundamentalism.
The reality is that no passage of Scripture is self-interpreting. God’s revelation is always mediated through human beings who have been wounded by sin and limited by history, language, culture, etc. So to know what God is revealing through Scripture we must have an interpreter.
In Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council’s constitution about Divine Revelation, the Church taught that, “the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church” (DV 10).
In other words, it is the living Magisterium (i.e. the pope and bishops teaching in communion with the pope, not myself, my pastor or my favorite online apologist) who authoritatively interpret Scripture for us so that we know the heart of what God is revealing in any particular passage of the Bible.
With that in mind, it’s important to state that neither the Catechism, nor any other post-Vatican II teaching document (that I’m aware of) uses the language of “headship” when talking about marriage or interpreting Ephesians 5.** In the hundreds of pages the Magisterium has taught about marriage since the Council, not once has she said that husbands have headship over their wives.
[**update, Mike Lewis pointed out to me that Mulieris Dignitatem uses the term “head” when talking about Eph 5, but only to clarify that headship must be understood as mutual submission]
Now, you can find passages from Pope Pius XI in the 1930s, or from Pope Leo XII in the 1880s that talk about how "the man is the ruler of the family, and the head of the woman.” However, to take those passages from historical teaching documents and draw conclusions about what God has definitively revealed about the structure of marriage and families is precisely the same kind of fundamentalism as if we were to do so with a passage of the Bible. Pope Francis explains:
“While it is true that the Divine Revelation is immutable and always binding, the Church must be humble and recognize that she never exhausts its unfathomable richness and needs to grow in her understanding. Consequently, she also matures in her understanding of what she has herself affirmed in her Magisterium. Cultural changes and new challenges in history do not modify Revelation but can stimulate us to express certain aspects of its overflowing richness better, which always offers more. It is inevitable that this can lead to a better expression of some past statements of the Magisterium, and indeed, this has been the case throughout history.
On the one hand, it is true that the Magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but it is also true that both the texts of the Scripture and the testimonies of Tradition require interpretation in order to distinguish their perennial substance from cultural conditioning. This is evident, for example, in biblical texts (such as Exodus 21:20-21) and in some magisterial interventions that tolerated slavery (Cf. Pope Nicholas V, Bull Dum diversas, 1452). This is not a minor issue given its intimate connection with the perennial truth of the inalienable dignity of the human person. These texts need interpretation. The same applies to certain considerations in the New Testament regarding women (1 Corinthians 11:3-10; 1 Timothy 2:11-14) and other texts of Scripture and testimonies of Tradition that cannot be materially repeated today” (2023 response to Dubia).
In other words, the living Magisterium is the interpreter of historical magisterial teaching, not the other way around.
The Church teaches that doctrine is always developing (cf. Dei Verbum 8), and, as St. John Henry Newman indicates, the more developed thing is greater/fuller than the lesser developed thing. And it is precisely through the "frequent repetition" of a doctrine that the Church tells us is a way to judge the importance of a magisterial teaching (Lumen Gentium 25). Therefore, a proper hermeneutic—a proper way of reading magisterial documents—is to interpret historical magisterial texts in light of the newer magisterial teaching.
And what does the current Magisterium teach about Ephesians 5? It avoids the language of headship and centers the line about mutual submission as the heart of what God is revealing through St. Paul’s letter. As we can see from what Pope Francis says about this reading:
“Every form of sexual submission must be clearly rejected. This includes all improper interpretations of the passage in the Letter to the Ephesians where Paul tells women to “be subject to your husbands” (Eph 5:22). This passage mirrors the cultural categories of the time, but our concern is not with its cultural matrix but with the revealed message that it conveys. As Saint John Paul II wisely observed: ‘Love excludes every kind of subjection whereby the wife might become a servant or a slave of the husband… The community or unity which they should establish through marriage is constituted by a reciprocal donation of self, which is also a mutual subjection.’ Hence Paul goes on to say that ‘husbands should love their wives as their own bodies’ (Eph 5:28). The biblical text is actually concerned with encouraging everyone to overcome a complacent individualism and to be constantly mindful of others: ‘Be subject to one another’ (Eph 5:21). In marriage, this reciprocal ‘submission’ takes on a special meaning, and is seen as a freely chosen mutual belonging marked by fidelity, respect and care” (Amoris Laetitia 156).
Plucking historical texts out of their context and presenting them as binding on the faithful is absurd, and that absurdity can be seen if we imagine:
a catechist telling a new convert that "none of those who are outside of the Catholic Church” including “Jews, heretics, and schismatics” can be saved and all of them are damned to Hell (Council of Florence, 1442AD)
a pastor telling his congregation that receiving any interest on a loan is gravely evil (Vix Pervenit, 1745AD) but that slavery "considered in itself and all alone, is by no means repugnant to the natural and divine law" (Instruction of the Holy Office, June 20, 1866)
a Catholic school principal writing a bulletin article asserting that Catholic parents are forbidden to send their kids to public school without the permission of their bishop (Divini Illius Magistri, 1929AD).
Pastors and catechists, we need to stop pretending that we understand what God is saying through Scripture and historical texts better than the living Magisterium. We must avoid reading past magisterial documents the way that fundamentalists read the Bible.