Where can we find her? Searching for women’s identity in the new church

Edited by Marie-Eloise Rosenblatt
published by Paulist Press, 1991.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions

Preface

The essays in this volume grew out of conversations among Roman Catholic women theologians from all over the United States during the past five years, often at professional meetings. Women’s growing presence in religious disciplines and the wider academic community is influencing some of the most groundbreaking work in theology and scripture. The influence of the Christian feminist movement has called for attention to be paid specifically to women’s theological voice. This was the primary inspiration for the foundation of the Mercy Association in Scripture and Theology, a national network of Sisters of Mercy who are scholars, professors and writers in theological fields. Annual meetings of the Association in Gwynedd, Pennsylvania (1987), Detroit (1988), and St. Louis (1989) included, among other topics, discussions about women’s role in the church and addressed church documents dealing with women’s concerns. Evaluations of the first draft of the U.S. bishops’ Partners in Redemption (April 1988) generated concern over many issues which the document helpfully raised but left open to further discussion. Such a discussion was characteristic of concerns raised in many other organizations and women’s groups across the country. The topics of women and their concerns were given wider ecclesial press in October 1988 when the translation of Pope John Paul II’s Mulieris Dignitatem was made available in English as On the Dignity of Women. The document represented the pope’s personal meditation on the theological and scriptural foundations of an understanding of women in relation to men. Unlike the first text offered by the American bishops, evidence of direct consultation with women was not prominent in the papal document.

One noticeable feature in the footnotes of the American bishops’ first draft, however, was the omission of testimony by well-known women theologians whose articles and books shaped feminist theology during the 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, part of the vision of this volume Where Can We Find Her? was a reclaiming of the voices of professional women theologians addressing the church. The inclusion and citation of these spokespersons for theology conceived from a women’s perspective was part of the sisterly collaboration this volume represents. If there was theological “homework” to bequeath to the next decade about women’s theological concerns, it might be suggested in the footnotes and the recommended reading which accompanies each article. It was a way of reminding readers about the important work already done by mainstream feminist theologians. The spirit was meant to be a creative visioning by women of faith, women committed to continuing the conversation among themselves and with men in the church. With this continuation in mind, practical questions which might be a springboard for discussion in study groups are proposed in the last chapter of this volume.

As for the topics of the articles which represent some of women’s theological concerns, the authors, both laywomen and religious women, represent a national sisterhood of theological reflection. Each chose a subject and approach rooted in her area of expertise as well as experience. The authors have certainly been influenced by conversations with men and women in their own locale. However, these essays transcend regional interests because their authors represent a geographical sweep across the United States. In addition, they propose that theological reflection on women’s concerns be undertaken within a variety of disciplines, such as scripture, ethics, philosophy, education, sociology, history, and spirituality.

In the inaugural section on “Searching for Women’s Identity in Scripture,” Dianne Bergant takes up the challenge of beginning again where the theological tradition so often does, with Genesis. She proposes that the creation of man and woman narrated in Genesis can be read as an affirmation of women’s dignity and apatterning for mutuality between men and women. The Genesis account can be seen as a biblically inspired revisioning of the relationship of woman and man to God as images of the divine. She calls attention in “Partners in the Mystery of Creation” to the influence our previously-set interpretive posture has on what we see and understand in any scripture passage. Changing our assumption about what the scriptures “prove” about feminine dignity allows people of faith to see the scriptural possibilities in a new light. Her overall concern is the articulation of a biblical anthropology which is consonant with the image of a God who offers to human beings a relationship of loving mutuality.

Karen Barta grounds her essay, “Paying the Price of Paternalism,” on the thrice-repeated synoptic story of a woman healed of her hemorrhage when she touched the cloak of Jesus. If this woman was healed because of her faith, why have other women of faith continued to bleed for the last twenty centuries? As an analogy, she cites Virginia Woolf’s “Angel of the House” as the phantom of the self-sacrificing woman which must be eliminated if women are to have any life in reality. She offers the hemorrhaging woman as a paradigm both of the costly pain women suffer within a patriarchal church, as well as of the feminine initiative which generates healing for women as well as the paternalistic structure. Reflecting on the role of people’s faith in the raising of Jairus’ daughter, she notes that paternalism keeps both men and women from developing fully as persons. The word of Jesus gives back life to child and family which paternalism itself could not do.

In “Agent or Icon,” Marie-Eloise Rosenblatt questions the usefulness of the trinary paradigm of Eve, Mary, and the bride of Revelation as effective symbols of women’s nature and ecclesial ministry. Theological symbolization of women needs to shift from the passive and mythological to the active and historical. Narratives about vigorously historical women in both O.T. and N.T. are waiting to be retrieved as the basis for a revised symbology. There are a number of interpretive problems in trying to locate a scriptural anthropology of women in creation-fall stories or in Pauline texts about baptism. There is no theological equivalence between “motherhood” and “discipleship” in the gospels when women’s roles throughout the N.T. are reexamined. A biblical anthropology needs to acknowledge the reality of women’s life cycle.

The second section on “Searching for Women’s Identity in Society” raises a number of theologically related concerns. Barbara Moran, taking the rhetorical and literary category of “voice,” poses an interpretive problem applicable to any official ecclesial document: Who is speaking, who is speaking about what, and who is being addressed? In “Let the Women Speak,” she maintains that women must be alert to the social position that any ecclesial document imposes on them. Is someone other than the women who have the concerns claiming to speak on their behalf in “another voice”? Applying the five-part paradigm in Women’s Ways of Knowing by Belenky and associates to the ecclesial situation of women, Moran reviews the process by which women might express their own voice in the church, moving from passive silence to the creation of constructed knowledge.

The theme of “voice” in “Voices Speak out of Fertile Silence” also characterizes Elizabeth McMillan’s ethical and philosophical approach in considering the difference between women’s moral values and those of men. Women’s moral perspective, with its rootedness in family and social connections, is not given the weight it deserves. “Maternal thinking” is broader than woman’s sexual or social role as mother. It affirms values of connectedness, solidarity and non-violence which are relevant for men as well. At the same time, women’s moral virtues are not to be understood as the sort of care, compassion, loyalty and generosity that prevent women from assuming full responsibility for their own lives. Citing the work of Gilligan and Ruddick, she insists that basic categories of social and moral interpretation have to be reexamined in light of women’s experience as moral agents. She calls for church leaders to work with women to rebuild human institutions on a foundation of “authentic mutuality.”

Dolores Greeley acknowledges that this task of rebuilding human institutions is much larger than a denominational or nationalistic mandate. In “Patriarchy: A Global Reality,” she reviews what the term “patriarchy” means as a worldwide social reality, apart from its specifically ecclesial translation. Patriarchy is a social structure which assumes the form of racism and classism as well as clericalism. It is an interpretive posture which controls scriptural and philosophical texts and governs the choices of principles which ground decision-making by men about the place of women in the church. Drawing on her own travel and study experiences abroad, she reminds readers that on a day-to-day basis, patriarchal systems justify the physical suffering and economic hardship endured by women in Pakistan, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, India and Southeast Asia. Working against the centuriesold biases against women through education is essential to the creation of a new society.

From the pressing global issues which exhale women’s attention outward as they share the pain of their sisters, Marilyn Gustin draws a breath inward, as it were, from global spiritual traditions. In “The Receptive Partner,” she suggests that receptivity is a universal, non-denominationally-tied spiritual capacity and contemplative posture that expresses the inner life of both men and women. “Receptive” is not the equivalent of “passive.” A western bias can be diffused by acknowledging the resources of non-Christian spiritual traditions, especially those of India. The heart, in its physiological function, incarnates the taking in and the giving out of blood which makes the whole body live. It symbolizes relations between God and world, and between feminine and masculine principles. The cup holds so it may be poured out. Heart and cup symbolize feminine power, wisdom and creativity, on both divine and human planes. Heart and cup do not symbolize gender-oriented powers, for both men and women are receptive before God’s Spirit.

In the third section, “Searching for Women’s Identity in the Church,” the essays concern both recent and past historical periods of women’s contribution to the church. With the focus on the history of the American church in the last decade, Maryanne Stevens in “How Shall Our Church Teach?” praises the episcopate for its confidence in its American identity and for its engagement of the civic debate on moral issues of militarism, capitalism and sexism. In the process the bishops are enacting a new teaching method, one which changes the meaning of “magisterium” from a model of indoctrination to one of communication. Drawing on her experience as a religious educator, she uses Freire to critique the traditional “banking” educational model by which a teacher “deposits” knowledge into students. Bishops, like midwives, have assisted the church in beginning a shared critical look at the tradition about women. Midwife, birthing, and bonding, which are feminine-oriented metaphors, might today be the most effective description of recent ecclesial history in the discussions about women’s concerns. Those metaphors also describe the ideal role for bishops as teachers and educators in the future church.

The history of the upbuilding of the Catholic Church in America, in its institutional expression, is inseparable from the collaboration of women with men, and the partnership of women’s communities with each other. Janet Ruffing reviews important aspects of this history in “Recovering a History of Partnership: American Sisters in the Nineteenth Century.” She spells out the structures which defined the relationship between bishop and foundress and between clergy and sisterhoods as they exercised separate but parallel spheres of authority and responsibility for the church’s institutional life in schools, hospitals and centers for the socially disadvantaged. Despite their lack of a critique of patriarchal hierarchy, American religious women did not in fact conform to a cultural ideology of domesticity. As communities of women, they exercised real agency in the foundation and independent economic maintenance of institutions on behalf of the church. Such a history is useful to retrieve as women and men seek contemporary expressions of mutuality and ministerial collaboration in the future church.

Ann Marie Caron casts her historical gaze even further back into the ecclesial tradition. “Women Deaconesses: Historical and Contemporary Explorations” makes a useful contribution to the legitimation of women’s ministries in the church. Probing the question of sacramental ordination of women to the diaconate, she examines recent scholarly studies of women’s official ministry in the first centuries of the church, noting that the west suppressed ordained roles for women while they survived in the eastern churches for several centuries. Further noting that the ambiguities about an ordained diaconate for women in early documents are biased in certain directions by male scholars, she calls for a reassessment of the evidence. Ambiguities in the tradition about the liturgical and non-liturgical roles of deaconesses attest to a variety of ministerial roles they carried out in response to a variety of needs which changed from locale to locale. She concludes that historical precedent and contemporary pastoral needs call for restoration of the permanent diaconate for women.

The final chapter, “Future Directions: Continuing the Conversation,” is proposed as a discussion guide for small groups and their leaders. The essays in this volume can provide an outline for a ten-week series of meetings, with each meeting devoted to the questions which are raised by a particular essay. As an alternative structure, the essays in the first section (Scripture), second (Society) or third (Church) might provide the content base for a Saturday workshop or day of theological reflection.

In April of 1990, the American Bishops issued a second draft of a pastoral concerning women, One in Christ Jesus. Its failure to win acceptance was acknowledged by an administrative committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. The committee decided to postpone a vote on the draft, originally scheduled for November, 1990. Instead of a vote, the conference accepted the Vatican’s request to engage in a wider process of consultation about women’s concern’s with bishops in other nations.

This volume of essays, Where Can We Find Her?, is offered as a means of continuing that consultation by listening to women themselves.