A survey of recent
books
By margaret O'brien steinfels
Equality among men and women, the major
goal of the women's movement, is a challenge to Catholic
Church practice. Most significantly, ordination--and
all of the responsibilities for Church governance that follow--is
reserved to male clergy. At present the Church looks beached
on the shoal of intractable official resistance--even
to discussing the ordination of women and/or equality in decision
making. And yet, as this diverse selection of books shows,
that intransigence hasn't stopped Catholics from thinking,
writing, and acting as if the official view is an obstacle
to be worn down, perhaps by words alone.
If there is one book to read on the topic
of women and the Church, let it be Sandra Schneiders's
admirable and very brief (143 pages) With Oil in Their
Lamps: Faith, Feminism, and the Future. Drawn from the
2000 Madeleva Lecture at St. Mary's College, Indiana,
the book is a model of that venerable Catholic format, status
quaestionis. Her sober and knowledgeable analysis of
the complexities, positive and negative, is informed, concise,
and evenhanded.
A sister of the Servants of the Immaculate
Heart of Mary, and a faculty member at the Jesuit School of
Theology in Berkeley, Schneiders marvels at the way women,
in three short decades, have changed cultural ideas about
gender, agency, and self-determination, and believes the focus
should now be on "a redefinition of humanity through
imaginative change." As for Catholics, "the impact
of reproductive issues and the ban on ordination," she
argues, "has done more than anything to clarify and
intensify feminist consciousness among Catholic women."
The ban on ordination, of course, directly excludes women
from important liturgical and ministerial roles. On top of
that, when the Vatican went to work rooting out inclusive
language in liturgical translations, Schneiders concludes
that it was not "theology or dogma" at issue,
but "a political commitment to consolidating patriarchal
domination in the Church against the feminist challenge."
Those are strong words that would seem
to discourage all but the most resolute believers. Schneiders
is obviously one. And that may be due to an often overlooked
fact: the central importance of women's religious communities
as a source for feminism and for continued consciousness-raising
in the Church. What an irony, in fact, that for several generations
American Catholic institutions, usually run by women religious,
prepared so many women for equality. Parish schools and high
schools made Catholic women literate. Catholic colleges and
universities educated women for work in classrooms, hospitals,
social service centers, and the civil service, and still more
recently for careers in academia, medicine, law, and politics--everywhere
but in the official policy-making and governance roles of
the Church.
Rather than lament the impasse between
the Church and women (or at least some women), however, Schneiders
urges that the standard for feminism in the future be the
gospel understanding of justice as the "divine conception
of . . . universal right relationship." For feminism
that means a "commitment to the full personhood of every
human being and right relationships among all creatures."
She offers no predictions about the future or a resolution
of the barriers to right relationships in culture and Church,
but concludes with Matthew 25:1–13, the parable of the
wise and foolish virgins. The five wise women with oil in
their lamps are "a biblical metaphor for eschatological
preparedness, which only makes sense to those whose faith
and hope are undaunted."
The women authors of most of these books
pay relatively little attention to the ordination question.
Is that because Catholic feminists have moved beyond it? Or
do they reserve their energy for other battles in the face
of implacable Vatican opposition? Only John Wijngaards's
The Ordination of Women in the Catholic Church: Unmasking
a Cuckoo's Egg Tradition makes ordination the major
focus of attention. A missionary in India for over a decade
and then vicar general of the Mill Hill Missionaries, Wijngaards
resigned from the priesthood in 1998 to work for the ordination
of women. He is a learned man with sharp rhetorical skills;
the book's polemical style could be read as a mirror
image of the apologetics of pre–Vatican II theology,
as Wijngaards marshals systematic criticism of the arguments
against ordination found in Scripture and tradition.
Wijngaards fancies strong statements,
examples, and metaphors, notably that of the cuckoo bird in
the book's subtitle. Cuckoo birds lay their eggs in
the nests of other birds. On hatching, the baby cuckoo quickly
dispatches its nest mates and consumes the food brought by
the parents that have bonded with the cuckoo as they would
have with their own (now destroyed) nestlings. "One
can therefore see a tiny warbler offering newly caught insects
to a cuckoo fledgling several times its size!" Wijngaards
explains: "The same happens in the Church with cuckoo's
egg traditions. Those with teaching power are often blinded
by the long-standing and seemingly ancient origins of the
tradition, and will seek to defend its authenticity, even
though the incongruity is obvious to impartial observers."
But Wijngaards does not ask us to take
his word for this incongruity. He sets out to prove that "it
is not God who decreed the exclusion of women, but pagan sexist
bigotry which squashed the true Christian tradition of women's
call to ministry." And he goes at it right down to a
five-point refutation of the Vatican's claim that the
prohibition of women's ordination is part of the Church's
universal ordinary magisterium.
In Faithful and Fearless: Moving
Feminist Protest Inside the Church and the Military,
Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, a political scientist at Cornell,
contrasts a Catholic feminist strategy of pressing reform
by changing ideas and language with the judicial and legislative
strategy, "politics as usual," adopted by women
in the U.S. military.
The author argues that the Catholic feminist
strategy has radicalized its advocates into working to reshape
the whole institution in light of their reading of the Gospels.
Thus the poor are as important to their agenda as the ordination
of women. Katzenstein's research took her to the more
progressive outposts of Catholic feminism, so it's little
surprise that she found radical views. Still, the evidence
of the books discussed here is that she is accurate in describing
"discursive activism," or remaking meaning, as
the modus vivendi of Catholic feminists, whether radical,
moderate, or conservative.
For example, the reappropriation of women
saints for feminist ends, and inventing a feminist theological
tradition in the Church are two strategies Catholic women
use in remaking meaning.
Who could be more emblematic in this
task than Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), honored for
her unstinting efforts to reform the Church? She persuaded
Pope Gregory XI to return from Avignon to Rome and preached
peace to a land devastated by the Black Death, corruption,
and incessant warfare. Despite her youthful desire for a contemplative
life, Catherine felt called by God to live publicly, preaching,
counseling, and exhorting popes and peasants alike. In another
Madeleva lecture, Speaking with Authority: Catherine of
Siena and the Voices of Women Today, Mary Catherine Hilkert,
OP, carefully distinguishes Catherine's self-destructive
asceticism from the positive forms of authority that she exercised
in a Church hardly ready to acknowledge them in a woman. The
authority of vocation, of wisdom, and of compassion shaped
and propelled Catherine's remarkable career. Hilkert
highlights these forms of authority as mechanisms of change
for contemporary women angered by resistance to their claims
to influence and equality. Catherine of Siena "embraced
a mission that was not of her making. . . . Amid plague and
wars, poverty and papal politics, hunger for survival and
hunger for the word of God, she heard a call to do what women
did not do." And she heeded it.
Ditto, Joan of Arc (1412–1431),
who during the Hundred Years' War (which began 10 years
before Catherine of Siena was born) did many, many things
that women never did.
In Joan of Arc, Mary Gordon
examines her life through a feminist lens, pointedly asking:
Why was Joan canonized at all--in 1920, almost 500 years
after being burnt at the stake for heresy? Unlike Catherine,
Joan was not recognized as a holy woman in her own time. Devil's
advocates--Vatican officials assigned the task of refuting
claims for her canonization--found good reason to recommend
withholding a saintly crown, including inconsistent and erratic
behavior, disobedience to her parents, refusal to answer the
judges at her trial, and a lack of saintly fortitude, among
other defects. In contrast to the romanticized portrayals
of Joan in movies and drama, Gordon finds the negative assessments
of these officials astute in exploring Joan's contradictions
and questioning her saintliness. But their judgment was rejected,
and it is this irony that Gordon plays upon in questioning
the canonization.
Why is it, she asks, that the pope, in
searching for a symbol to thwart modernism, canonized a "woman,
who insisted upon the primacy of her individual experience,
and has therefore been called by some the first Protestant"?
How is that Joan was seen by the Vatican "as the curb
by which the faithful could be brought to obedient, communal
heel"? For the lesson of Joan of Arc's life, Gordon
argues, is that "she defined the Church on her terms,
not its own." Did the pope canonize more than he understood?
Gordon has worked largely from secondary sources, making papal
motives difficult to assess. Nonetheless, she has devised
a fascinating argument for reappropriating Joan, this time
as a feminist saint.
READING LIST
The Story of Ruth: Twelve Moments in Every Woman's Life.
By Joan Chittister (Eerdmans, 2000, 92 pp.)
Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's
Liberation. By Mary Daly (Beacon, 1985,
second ed., 225 pp.)
Dorothy Day: In My Own Words. By Dorothy
Day; compiled by Phyllis Zagano (Liguori, 2003, 144 pp.)
Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism?: Personal Reflections
on Tradition and Change. Edited by Sally Barr Ebest
and Ron Ebest (Notre Dame, 2003,
304 pp.)
Joan of Arc. By Mary Gordon (Viking, 2000,
176 pp.)
Speaking with Authority: Catherine of Siena and the
Voices of Women Today. By Mary Catherine Hilkert
(Paulist, 2001, 144 pp.)
The Church Women Want: Catholic Women in Dialogue.
Edited by Elizabeth A. Johnson (Crossroad, 2002, 142 pp.)
Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest Inside
the Church and the Military. By Mary Fainsod Katzenstein
(Princeton, 1998, 288 pp.)
The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha,
and the Christian Testament. By Jane Schaberg (Continuum,
2002, 379 pp.)
With Oil in Their Lamps: Faith, Feminism, and
the Future. By Sandra M. Schneiders (Paulist, 2000,
143 pp.)
Prodigal Daughters: Catholic Women Come Home
to the Church. Edited by Donna Steichen (Ignatius,
1999, 400 pp.)
The Ordination of Women in the Catholic Church: Unmasking
a Cuckoo's Egg Tradition. By John Wijngaards (Continuum,
2001, 224 pp.)
Exploiting the past for today's
causes can take other forms: retelling, recalling, recasting.
Joan Chittister, for example, retells The Story of Ruth:
Twelve Moments in Every Woman's Life, drawing on
the Book of Ruth from the Hebrew Scripture to examine 12 themes
of significance for women today, including loss, aging, respect,
recognition, empowerment. Phyllis Zagano, in compiling the
writings of Dorothy Day: In My Own Words, recalls
the words of this not-yet-canonized modern saint on poverty,
community, war and peace, civil rights, and pilgrimage. How
easily Day's ideas of social justice as well as her
independence in founding the Catholic Worker movement fit
into a Catholic feminist perspective, despite the distance
Day herself might have kept from its criticism of the hierarchy
and of Church teaching.
And then there is the invention of tradition--a
practice frowned upon in Catholic theological practice. Mary
Daly's Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy
of Women's Liberation, first published in 1973,
was one of the first efforts at inventing a feminist theological
tradition. A newer paperback edition has an "original
reintroduction" by Daly, who taught in Boston College's
theology department for many years. Since I gave Beyond
God the Father a review critical of its anti-Christian
and elitist polemics when it first appeared, it hardly seems
fair to give it a second one three decades later. So I simply
note that Daly's views, at least as she expressed them
in her 1985 reintroduction, are themselves critical of herself.
She didn't go far enough down the post-God, post-Christian,
post-the-plain-meaning-of-words road in 1973! By 1985 her
linguistic deconstruction and re-creation was quite pronounced:
"Countering the clocks of father time, Raging/Racing
women become Counterclock-Wise, asking Counterclock-Whys.
Boundary-shifting Sibyls become Other-Wise, uttering Other
Whys." That's a good question: "Why?"
And that's my question about Daly's own inventions:
"Why?"
The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene:
Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament by Jane
Schaberg, written some 30 years after Daly, may, in time,
inform and broaden the Catholic tradition. It is a dense,
scholarly examination of texts (and possibly missing texts),
putting forth conjectures and reconstructions that the author
thinks "privilege that tradition of the women at the
tomb [of Jesus] and of the appearance to Mary Magdalene, [who]
had a visionary experience of Jesus which empowered her with
God's spirit." Schaberg's bottom line: Mary
Magdalene may have been the first apostle, and a tradition
of her centrality was erased from history, suppressed in the
formation of the early Church and of the canonical accounts
of Jesus' ministry.
Schaberg, though deeply committed to
her thesis, has the grace to recognize that "my treatment
will not be convincing to everyone." Just in case, she
goes on, "I have failed to present a convincing, comprehensive
reconstruction or reading, I hope I have failed well enough
to destabilize existing ‘authoritative' readings."
However credible these works of reappropriation
and invention prove to be (certainly some will not stand the
test of time), they signal an enormous effort to change the
way Catholics (and others) think about women and Catholicism.
But are they successful? Yes and no. My hunch is that it is
the actual experience of women that sustains the movement
to change the Church (or not). And the final three books offer
some evidence for that.
The Catholic Common Ground Initiative,
organized by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in 1996, has tried
to bring together Catholics with different, even polarizing,
views on a range of issues. It has not been easy. And yet,
here is a book that shows it can be done. The Church Women
Want: Catholic Women in Dialogue is a collection of essays
commissioned by the initiative for a public program at the
College of New Rochelle. (Disclosure: I moderated the sessions.)
Conservatives and liberals, radical and moderate, women spoke
to and with one another before an audience of several hundred
women who agreed in advance to meet on four Sunday afternoons
over a two-year period. The presenters laid out genuine disagreements
on spirituality and worship, equality and complementarity,
and women and society. A fourth session, on race and culture,
was less about disagreement than about the absence of race
and class considerations in the women's movement for
social change. Table discussions and questions followed the
presentations and cross-conversation by the panelists.
Over the two-year period, no agreement
was required and no consensus was reached. Catholic women
disagree about the kind of Church they want in the 21st century,
but they are not going to kill or excommunicate one another
over it. As the moderator of these four dialogue sessions,
I was struck by how irenic and amiable women can be even while
holding sharply divergent views. Susan Muto, who directs the
Epiphany Association, and Miriam Therese Winter, director
of the Women's Leadership Institute at Hartford Seminary,
ended their debate on the spirituality of worship by hugging
each other. And the audience, including many with serious,
practical experience in the Church, in classrooms, and in
social service agencies, was remarkably free--as the
book itself is--of the political correctness and ideological
rigidity that can make dialogue a frustrating, even hopeless,
pursuit.
There are Catholic women, too, who do
not want equality in the Church. Prodigal Daughters: Catholic
Women Come Home to the Church collects the stories of
17 women who are at work building boundaries around the enclave
of the more conservative Church they want in the 21st century.
Such a strategy, they believe, will help protect them from
a culture antithetical to their religious outlook and to the
religious well-being of their children. These women strayed
from the Church in their "prodigal" youth--some
far, some not so far--after what editor Donna Steichen
alludes to as the catechetical disaster following Vatican
II. Now these women are safely back. "Through God's
mercy," Steichen concludes, "the stories included
here end happily. The authors have returned to various points
on the Catholic spectrum--from garden variety Catholic
practice to Tridentine indult communities, homeschool motherhood,
the pro-life apostolate, Medjugorje discipleship, and the
charismatic movement--but all are firmly at home in Holy
Mother Church, who actually does encompass a good deal of
diversity within her strong walls." Indeed, she does.
Steichen is no fan of feminism, Catholic
or otherwise. But reconstructing a Church of the Golden Age,
c. 1950, is almost as radical an act as inventing a new one;
it certainly has the un-Catholic attitude of seeming highly
sectarian. But finally, would these women, or Steichen herself,
enjoy the freedom to speak and to imagine an alternate version
of the Catholic Church if not for the women's revolution?
It is an insidious revolution, when even its opponents depend
upon its achievements.
Another and more familiar form of what
women want is found in Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism?:
Personal Reflections on Tradition and Change. That question
mark underlines the theme: Can the two be reconciled? Many
of the women in this book might be inclined to say no, and
choose feminism. But for the most part they have not. As contributor
Sandra Gilbert remarks in the foreword, these 22 essays are
the stories of "those who claim the Church or at least
those who feel the Church still claims them." That does
not mean they are all practicing Catholics, only that they
wrestle with Catholicism, even having chosen to leave it.
But they also wrestle with feminism.
The editors were astute (and catholic)
to include an international range of experiences of the Church
and feminism. But most of the contributors are Americans who
live with the libertarian feminism of a liberal culture and
with the contradictions of a relatively liberal U.S. Catholic
Church. At this moment in history, the links between Catholicism
and American culture appear more tenuous than they have in
several decades. By and large, these Catholic women reflect
that tension by mediating a view of feminism that is unsatisfactory
to the orthodox in both Church and culture. The
inherent ambiguity in this position can be painful, as many
of the stories attest. Yet it is important. Catholicism and
feminism need each other, if only as necessary correctives.
Feminism needs Catholicism for its communal understanding
of the human person; Catholicism needs feminism for its courage
and persistence in pressing the case for women's equality.
But will Catholic women continue their
feminist struggle? One of the singular marks of the 21st-century
Church is that it is being led in its first decade by women
and men who embraced Vatican II: They understood its great
promise and have lived by its remarkable vision as a community
of intensely committed, if sometimes raucous, thinkers and
activists. Once this generation passes from the scene, as
is happening, will others be ready to follow in its footsteps
while reading the signs of a new century? Steichen and many
right-wingers and restorationists (men as well as women) claim
the next generations of Catholics for their cause. Though
their numbers will be small, they will be powerful if moderates
and liberals abandon the challenges set forth by Vatican II.
In multiple ways, the Catholic women's
movement is at the heart of this struggle. First, it raises
fundamental questions about how we will redefine "humanity
through imaginative change," in Sr. Schneiders's
words. Second, it embodies a new way of understanding gender,
which challenges the kind of community the Catholic Church
is now and proposes (again, in Schneiders's words) "a
gospel imperative" that is committed "to the full
personhood of every human being and right relationships among
all creatures."
Margaret O'Brien Steinfels was editor of Commonweal,
1988-2002; she is now completing "American Catholics in the
Public Square," a joint project of the Commonweal Foundation
and the Faith & Reason Institute.
Photo by Lisa Kessler
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