Women in the Church: Comments   

Response to "The Alienation of Millennial Catholic Women" by Patricia Wittberg

Your documentation of the problem is outstanding, Patricia! Point well made ...that Church sanction of the ordination of women is not going to reverse the declining trend in the alienation of millennial Catholic women …given the sacramental "stained glass ceiling" and the potential alienation of conservative Catholic reaction to this move.

What ought to concern the Church more is the finding of the 2007 New Barna Study that "Among young adults who remain Catholic, fewer than a quarter accept the Church’s teaching authority on moral issues such as divorce, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and non-marital sex, divorce, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and nonmarital sex." This finding being made even more ominous, as you say, by the fact that "Millennial women are more likely than male Catholics their age to give the heterodox response to these issues."

Given all the above, do you really think that the Church's "concentrated effort to ameliorate the many problems women face in their day-to-day lives" is going to attract millennial Catholic women back to the Church? Don’t other denominations focus on these issues? Is neglect of women the problem? Or is doctrine the problem?…the whole male god heaven-earth hierarchy perhaps…a problem which isn’t going to change any time soon in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.
Lea Hunter & Consilia Karli, 4Vatican2Rite@gmail.com

Women, Liturgy, and Spirited Whole
Prior to engaging academic theology, my husband and I were members of a Franciscan-styled, lay monastic community. The remarkable, charismatic liturgies of that fifteen-year sojourn—often paralleling those 2-3 hour Latin American celebrations—became indelibly inscribed as the never rediscovered, normative standard of worship in my life. While experiencing the organ- and hymn-filled beauty of higher-church, Cathedral worship as deeply meaningful and compelling, I still feel a far-distant observer to these liturgies. This distance is even greater in the constrained, monochromatic parish liturgies I sometimes endure, or in the superficial exuberance of charismatic liturgies as well. With full rational understanding, and consciously presencing an active liturgical participation, I remain somehow apart from the celebration’s performance, longing to once again find an invitation to become a truly active part of the sacred mysteries.

As a woman, my Christian life has been marked—even without my awareness—by limitations imposed because of my gender, but the participation I speak of is also of a different order than the important need for women’s active ministry and leadership. The spiritual and theological formation I received from the Second Vatican Council’s thought helps me to maintain a deep, intrinsic participation in the liturgy. Nonetheless, this mystical, open disposition would welcome its full, exterior practice. The “stained glass ceiling” notwithstanding, I do not sense this as a matter of visible, ritual involvement. I perceive this as a deeper, somehow existential shift that occurs regardless of one’s gender. For both women and men, how might Catholic liturgies fully restore their integral union of deeply present interior heart; active, thinking mind; and consciously engaged, exterior act? Can they, or is this the Spirit’s action elsewhere?
Neville Ann Kelly, nevkel@gmail.com

Trust in women and the laity
The distrust of women in the church is actually a general distrust of the laity. When there is trust in the laity, the issue of women tends to disappear. For instance, in the Sunday celebrations of the Word with Communion in a Guatemalan parish, both female and male Eucharistic ministers are as likely to preach, celebrate the Sunday communion, and carry the Blessed Sacrament on Corpus Christi, or be elected president, vice-president or treasurer of the neighborhood church. There are 7 or 8 such churches in the parish. Obviously the pastor of the parish trusts them. He has also entrusted an un-employable man who cannot read and write with the spiritual supervision of about 20 prayer groups. That’s trust.

By “trust” I mean the empowerment of people considered incapable and untrustworthy. Jesus selected the lowly, fishermen not doctors of the law, and he empowered them to become doctors in the Spirit. It is the empowerment of the laity that the church needs in the digital age. Empowerment is race and gender blind. It really works, and I have witnessed it.

There is no theological reason why a male lay theologian cannot head the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. The day a lay male theologian will head the CDF, that day a woman may become a cardinal – and also head the CDF. For this to happen trust is needed, and overcoming centuries of clerical sense of superiority. Trust is the key of true community life. Who would disagree?
Pierre Hegy, Pierre.hegy@adelphi.edu
Adelphi University

Everything to crash before gender blindness
My active role as a woman working within the church professionally began with Vatican II and spans the 50 years since. I am theologically educated at the doctoral level at a European University because I sought learning and felt the credential would be important. I have been Director of Communications for a diocese, Director of a now extinct Commissioned Lay Ecclesial Ministry Program, and Director of Prevention Education at one of our leading treatment centers for priests and religious.

Here is what I think about our church and women at the moment in the U.S.: almost everything has to come crashing before we will be able to be truly gender blind. We will have to become figuratively and literally like the churches in Guatamala where it is not possible for a lone priest to do it; so others will be called forth from communities to keep at least Eucharist alive even as the other sacraments begin to disappear.

The biggest temptation for women in the church today is to try to save it as it is. Our presence, then, has to be different from the past. We are called, I think, to stay on the edge where, as Rosemary Radford Reuther said so long ago, our creativity is at its best and sharpest. We do not want to lose that creative edge for our own sakes and the sake of the church to come.

Catholic women have consciously and unconsciously honed a facility to “read themselves” into liturgies, spiritualities and systems conceived by males. That era has ended. And while I take that trust and respect for ALL laity might lead to gender blindness, I rather suspect that it will better happen the other way round–that it will be women who have enormous capacities for embracing spectra of differences who will teach the rest of the church how to be wide awake enough to see. As Ilia Delio has coined it, to become "Christic fractals" all!
Carol Stanton, carol.stanton@earthlink.net

Mary Luke Tobin’s summation of her experience at Vatican II (1986)

When one of the authors asked Rosemary Goldie, “What women have contributed to the church?” Rosemary answered: “All women ask for is that they be recognized as the full human persons they are, and treated accordingly.” Sister Tobin summed up what progress had been made between 1965 and the date of her writing, 1986. "By the 1980's. . . . As women became more conscious of a rigidity and oppressiveness apparent in the clerical state and the inflexibility of patriarchal structures and spirit, they became disaffected and lost their earlier enthusiasm.” Shortly after Vatican II, the L.C.W.R began an important educational program for its members with a view to furthering among U.S. sisters the developments of the council. Tobin summarized the results of a LCWR report: Through the years, the L.C.W.R program has included ways to develop collegiality and solidarity; the promotion of post-Vatican II theology within the orders, and feminist insights and strategies in the church. The growing emphasis on a Gospel spirituality pointed religious women toward further developments in the social order. Concern for the poor and the oppressed led to their risking strong positions. The L. C. W. R. report then lists some of the conditions that could bring about reconciliation. Among them are: 1. Women must make their own decisions and claim responsibility for their lives.
2. New relationships with men must be established.
3. Officials of the church must acknowledge that alienation exists.
4. Structural change must address alienating factors. Sister Tobin then concludes: ‘The momentum created by the emergence of the women's issue shows no sign of slowing down. Indeed, the very love of the church that women profess and manifest urges them on in this difficult and demanding work. Presuming on the good will already evident among some male leaders of the church, women can have a more secure hope that perhaps a new day of mutuality, equality and sharing may be on its way. Since 1986, a conservative backlash halted the promising discussions and practices stimulated by Vatican II. The American bishops have lost their nerve; nothing like the work of the bishops in the 1980s has been forthcoming. The LCWR only recently emerged from a Vatican-inspired witch hunt, called off by Pope Francis, from whom an expectant faithful look for the progress of the 1980s to be validated and resumed.
JIll Raitt (Emeritus), raittj@missouri.edu