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Books Women want change
Arthur Jones, NCRs editor-at-large, is the author
of a new book, New Catholics for a New Century: The U.S. Church Today and
Where Its Headed, published by Thomas More. The following are excerpts
from his chapter on American Catholic Women.
Half of all new Catholics will be women. If trends continue, 60 to
70 percent of all new Catholics engaged in church activities will be women; and
70 to 80 percent of all the theologians, M.Div.s and the like. Their
expectations are high for a role in the church -- and those expectations meet
barriers.
In what follows -- voices obviously dealing with tensions and
differences of opinion -- a parallel understanding is required. It is that when
presenting tension in the church one must keep in mind that those involved in
the differences are involved because they love the church. They are in, of and
drawn to the Catholic church because it is their means and way, alone and in
community, of meeting God -- suffering Jesus and Risen Christ.
Some quotations -- though gently uttered -- may seem politicized.
If they are regarded instead as an interplay between personal consciences and
beliefs, they are the very stuff of church in the world, and the church in the
church. Even those who appear to have left significant portions of current
Catholic teaching behind ought to be considered to have been impelled into that
position by what they found in their faith, in their Catholicism. A Catholic
church that, after 400 years of misunderstanding, now freely admits it
understands Martin Luther ought to be much more irenic in how it handles its
own.
What were seeing now was missing from earlier Catholic
history, possibly because of how that history was written. There are always
some Catholics who are outside of or ahead of their historical moment. At one
time we called some of them prophets. St. Francis of Assisi is first choice for
an early example. But todays married priests are another. Similarly,
whatever the sum total of the events merits, the African-American priest
George Stallings, who left with part of his congregation to form his own Imani
Temple, was a preaching-teaching moment to the church itself -- if it chose to
listen. Thus, with many of the womens voices.
We will never experience the fully realized church. God seems to
have intended it that way. Our job is simply to work for a fully realized
church, on earth, as it is in heaven, not necessarily to succeed at it.
Seen that way, seen from 2040, the American church of 2,000 might
appear to have rounded the first few curving yards in the process of turning an
inevitable corner.
To the optimist the signs are
threefold: First, despite the stings and harrowings of a church that still
insists that man includes woman but doesnt
include women deacons and priests, American Catholic women, whose connection to
church goes beyond participating in the sacraments, have discovered in
themselves and their groupings a patient, personal ease. This ease enables them
to maintain association with and devotion to Catholicism without relinquishing
the right to expect change and to work for it.
Second, many of these groupings of women (as markedly so among lay
women as women religious) truly try to exemplify the practice of the
inclusive welcoming community. It is as if they draw on a special
patience in a church that shades its welcome and inclusivity to meet its
man-made regulations.
Third, because Catholic women of a certain stride have already
arrived at the place where patience and practice are not adversaries, and they
live their own understandings of celebration -- praise and prayer -- they
indicate just some of the ways new Catholics will respond to or relate to the
church. There is a forerunner to this. Though the future was not laid out after
Vatican II, the U.S. laity was encouraged and propelled forward by women -- the
women religious (in concert with some bishops, priests and brothers).
And finally, the very tempo of church history is on the
womens side now, in this American Epoch in the Catholic church. In the
next epoch, the one that is beginning to overlap with the American Epoch,
history will be on the side of the people of color in the church.
Here, as we look back from four decades ahead, we will see not
only how far women have come since the days when Angelo Roncalli was Pope John
XXIII, but indeed from the time when he was a busy papal diplomat, circa World
War I.
The year before Johns Vatican Council opened, there was a
category of an Ursuline academys summer reading list called
Personality and Conduct of Women. Madelaine Blais wrote in
The Washington Post 37 years later that the titles included The
Rosary and the Soul of Woman, Planning Your Happy Marriage, and Girls,
Youre Important, all written, I cringe to report, by men.
It is becoming almost impossible now that the 20th century has
closed to capture how severe, how ludicrous the Catholic strictures -- and
social strictures -- were that existed on women only a half-century earlier.
(And not just on matters of contraceptive aids in spacing their families.) Now
when one has to turn to the men of radical Islam in the 1990s, the Taliban in
Afghanistan, to make the point, Catholics 40 years from now could reasonably
wonder whether what follows is simply caricature.
Talibans want the women, their women, covered from
head to foot and confined to the house, family and domestic duties. Yet that
has an old Catholic ring to it. In the 1950s, John Charles McQuaid, archbishop
of Dublin, campaigned to have the female mannequins in department store windows
dressed so that they revealed only their ankles and wrists -- if that.
Admittedly, Dublin wasnt Detroit or Duluth, but the attitude of some of
the Irish-American hierarchy and clergy toward women was not necessarily far
removed from that of the Irish clergy it sprang from.
These were the years when Western
Catholic women committed anything from a social gaffe to a venial sin if they
entered church without wearing a hat. These, too, were the years -- as
Irish-born Catholic journalist Gary McEoin recalls in his biography -- when,
once an Irish woman married, if she was employed she was required by the church
to quit her job and stay home lest her work interfere with the begetting and
raising of children.
The most obvious Taliban Catholic case was the nun.
Catholic women religious wore clothing as restricting and as all-covering as
Kabuls women in the 1990s. The nuns habit was not as comfortable as
the loose-fitting Arab-inspired Islamic female garb. In the tropics, nuns often
still had to wear serge (woolen habits) even if white was allowed. Working
somewhere between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the missionary nuns in
their starched white headgear might find their hairpins rusting from the
humidity and their hair falling out as a result. Nuns lost not only their hair
and their names, many orders required sisters to take male names, to become Sr.
Mary Kevin or Sr. Mary Vincent. Womens names werent good
enough.
The equality battle continues in the U.S. society, as in the
church, but the right to battle in society is not contested. And in the society
and the church there have been gains. Nowadays, when the U.S. Catholic
bishops committees issue statements affecting women, it is not on wearing
hats in church, but on the sexual safety of the girl child in the home, or a
condemnation of physical abuse of the woman in the home, or the girl in the
international sex trade. Even Pope John Paul II, though adamant that women
cannot be ordained, is a stalwart defender of women burdened by macho
denigration, or subjected to physical and sexual abuse, or denied legal and
political rights. He has fiercely opposed the use of artificial contraception,
but personally supported and taught natural family planning. He approves of
women eucharistic ministers but not in his presence; allows girl altar servers
but elsewhere.
Seen from a developing world
perspective, this pope has generally stood tall on womens rights and
social justice. In the First World -- where pressing church issues include
shared authority, the Eucharist for the divorced and remarried, a welcome for
the homosexual, the need for an enlightened understanding of sexuality -- many
still feel the church (and the pope) removed from reality.
How far have the bishops and pope moved? Compare the U.S. bishops
in 1919 to John Paul in 1995.
This was a statement from the U.S. bishops in 1919 just as
American women were receiving the right to vote:
In society, as in the home, the influence of woman is
potent. She rules with the power of gentleness and, where men are chivalrous,
her will is the social law. The present tendency in all civilized countries is
to give woman a larger share in pursuits and occupations that formerly were
reserved to men.
So far as she may purify and elevate our political
life, the bishops continued, her use of the franchise will prove an
advantage; and this will be greater if it involves no loss of the qualities in
which woman excels. To reach the hearts of men and take away their bitterness,
that they may henceforth live in fellowship with one another -- this is
womans vocation in respect of public affairs, and the service which she
is by nature best fitted to render.
Contrast that to the tone and wording of Pope John Paul IIs
address to women before the 1995 Beijing U.N. Conference on Women. Inviting
women to become teachers of peace, John Paul said, this invitation,
directed particularly to women, is based on a realization that to them God
entrusts the human being in a special way. This is not, however, to
be understood in an exclusive sense, but rather according to the logic of the
complementary roles present in the common vocation to love, which calls men and
women to seek peace with one accord. ... Nevertheless, many women, especially
as a result of social and cultural conditioning, do not become fully aware of
their dignity. Others are victims of a materialistic and hedonistic outlook,
which views them as mere objects of pleasure. ... Another serious problem is
found in places where the intolerable still exists of discriminating, from the
earliest years, between boys and girls.
(Agreed there is trouble for some with the popes use of the
word complementary in that complementarity is understandably interpreted
as meaning second-class and subordinate. Mary Daly calls complementarity,
half of John Wayne pasted onto Farah Fawcett Major.)
The problem for women the
popes remarks reveal, suggests theologian Mary Hunt, is in the way
in which the power is distributed, such that bishops write about women
not with women. Pope John Paul II has been adamant on not discussing
womens ordination. On the broader issues, as writer Jane Redmont notes,
John Paul wrote a letter to women before Beijing and talked about
the special genius of women. Hes trying. Hes apologized
to women. But she adds, pointedly, I think Beijing showed that the
United States is certainly not the only place in the world where theres a
feminist movement. It showed that theres a womens movement
worldwide, including in the Third World. And anybody who says its just a
white womens thing is full of hooey.
A big friction with Rome, said Redmont, is that women scholars
have developed some good analyses of whats wrong with the situation
of women and men in the church and outside. And Rome doesnt like that.
They regard analysis as Vatican territory.
Papal biographer Tad Szulc, in Pope John Paul II, noted,
Curiously, this highly intelligent pontiff never grasped the reasons for
Catholic womens unhappiness with the church. During the 1979 papal
visit to the United States, Sr. Teresa Kane, president of the Leadership
Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), urged the pope to include half of
humankind in all the ministries of the church.
Papal biographer Jonathan Kwitny, in his book, Man of the
Century, said the pope replied that Mary was the model for women, and she
was never ordained. The pope returned to Rome seething at
Kanes insubordination, alleged Kwitny, and brought the mothers general of
all the womens orders into the Vatican and told them to send a
chastening message to the U.S. womens group, presumably the
Leadership Conference of Women Religious. If so, LCWR never received it.
Increasingly since Vatican II, the American Catholic bishops, and
later Pope John Paul II, have accepted that in society (and church) women have
been (and are) discriminated against, and that in the home they have all too
frequently been abused. The 1996 study Laity, American and Catholic
(Sheed & Ward) states, Womens subordinate position as
laypersons in the church is shared by the men, but there is one important
difference: Men were not born with the doors to the clerical state closed to
them, as are women. This means than men have the opportunity, through
ordination, women do not.
In the American church of 50 years ago, there were laywomen like
Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement, and Patty Crowley of the Christian
Family Movement, and the women of the Grail Movement, all pushing, with
the power of gentleness (or in Days case, nonviolence) toward
something different for Catholics, women included.
National Catholic Reporter, September 8,
2000
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