Down the ages men have been perceived to be the sole recipients and transmitters of divine messages. Women on the other hand, have been socialized by patriarchal religious structures and practices to passively accept religious teachings as interpreted by men.
These androcentric and patriarchal interpretations have defined and shaped the social and cultural contexts of women resulting in their disempowerment and second class status.
The key of women’s involvement with religion is hidden in women’s bodies. Women in fundamental ways are locked in their bodies, and their exercise of power is at the pleasure of men, whether in the family or in the religious sphere. Thus, religion is not just about spirituality, beliefs and practices alone, but it is also political. These political practices however, belong to structures of the mind that are not inviolable. They can be broken by recovering the spiritual and humane. It is on this recovery that women’s survival and unfolding as humans hangs. (Extract from Statement of National Consultation, Hyderabad, 2016)
What is your experience of the Roman Catholic Church’s treatment of women?
I went to Catholic School for 12 years, sometimes as a boarder, run by the Holy Family sisters – mostly Irish but their mother house was in Bordeaux, France. I became a feminist when I was at university, but it was only after reading Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father, that I became more aware of the anomalies in the Catholic Church. My working life has been with NGOs working for social justice, and I have many Catholic women friends who feel the same way that I do. We meet together on a regular basis exploring feminist spirituality. They have become my place. It has become very difficult for me to attend church now, where the language is not inclusive and where we seem to have gone back instead of forward. Women should be treated as equals in our church and be able to become priests – there is no good reason why not, and I have so strongly felt this since the 1980s. I also support married priests and that LGBTI people should be welcomed as full members of the church. I love the Mass, and would like to see the church throw off the stranglehold of St Augustine and his attitude to women, read the signs of the times, and change. I also see hypocrisy in my country in the way that the different cultures are treated by the church, again especially with regard to women.
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Raised an Anglican with links to the Quakers, my parents were very surprised when I became a Catholic when I married a Catholic at 23. They objected to what they saw to be low standards of moral development and an unexamined participation in religion which allowed Catholics a free cycle of sin and repentance. Confession was a major indicator – “why not just change your own ways and do the right thing.” Catholics they believed had a childish, external locus of control that allowed a dominant priesthood, they cited examples of priests in their experience who displayed little evidence of developed faith understanding or moral conscience but were oriented towards ritual, “just going through the motions.” Citing Francis’ call in 2013 for the church to study a theology of womanhood, the editors say “such comments reduce women to objects of study, a separate category of reflection.”
I have now spent 45 years actively participating in Catholic religion as wife, parent, grandparent and overall a mystically spiritual person, a reader of theology, a seeker of wisdom and a feminist. By now, I think I can see too well and too much of how the Church became the way it is as popes and the Roman curia historically mediated the Christian message turning on the taps of grace here and turning them off there to channel conformable faith their own way. As a historian recovering less-heard stories of women in the Catholic Church, to some extent I find women have always followed religious codes that were meaningful in their own experience of God. The real sadness is the silencing of other, more apostolic religious codes and the movement of the Holy Spirit in the Sensus fidei in order to preserve the ecclesiocentric ordering. A teaching church, the ordained priesthood obedient to the hierarchical Magisterium insists on dividing itself from a sinful, passive lay people and a secular world they brand the the ‘contamination of the world’ – surely an insult delivered upon God’s creation. Distorted perceptions at the top of the hierarchy of what humanity actually is and what creation is, even what God is have become all too evident.
My research into the history of women in Church history has saved my faith and been my salvation. Feminist theology has been my lifeline to God although I attend Mass weekly and consider the Eucharistic community of my parish and the wider national and global Church essential to my faith too.
I speak with all Catholic women who say they resist any suggestion that the Church needs a theology of ‘Woman’ or ‘womanhood,'” A changed ecclesiology of the Church with more women represented in leadership positions in representative numbers and doctrinal development is urgently required to restore authenticity. Rather than a deeper theology of women, the Church needs a deeper theology of human communities and the religious codes that they live by. The values that stabilise expectations, express Christ’s principle of love and teaching on right-relation and justice are what characterise successful families. The ecclesia should abandon complementarity as a really badly thought out idea that is harmful to human development and encourage a sharing of tasks in the family as they care relationally with others from the cradle to the tomb. The full inclusion of women starts with changed perception at the level of the higher ecclesia through listening, studying and taking informed advice so that a newly rendered theological anthropology can be developed that matches the experiential realities of daily life as hallowed, valued, evolving creation. The Trinitarian and Marian writings of feminist theologians provide us with the necessary continuity on which to base changed doctrine yet they are ignored and scarcely cited, even by their male peers. My research experience is the reason for my enduring Catholic faith.
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We need to involve women in leadership at the highest levels. The church has become less friendly to women than Jesus was. Call on the Spirit to teach us. With women in charge, yes even pope, we will become a much more ecumenical church. Donald J Manson, PhD
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Simple it should be the same as the role of men. This false dichotomy serves neither the people of God nor the Church well.
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I am Catholic and I value my faith (Jesus and the gospel messages) I have studied religion and theology and continue to read widely on matters of faith and religion. I have not always seen eye to eye on all church teachings but have tried to find a way forward and though all the man-made details by focusing on my faith and what is truth to me but… I lost respect for the Pope when he banned discussion on the topic of Women’s ordination. What sort of dictator does that? My opinion was reinforced as faithful people were threatened with excommunication or made to retire from the ordained ministry for discussing it. I lost respect for the then bishop of Australia when he suggested ‘counselling workshops’ for women who were having difficulty coming to terms with the Pope’s decision and the church’s teaching on Women’s ordination and the role of women in the church. As if counselling would help us come to terms with the fact that the church is sexist and out of touch with what it means to be a baptised person of Christ. I have not regained this respect and I no longer respect many of the church’s teachings or teachers (hierarchy) due to this and many other issues in the church that exclude, diminish or threaten the message of love and acceptance that Jesus so obviously gave. Jesus came that all may have life and have it to the full. The way I see it is that if a group of men want to entirely ignore the voice and spirituality of women by following man-made rules, then women have every right to ignore the voice and ‘spirituality’ of the group of men and the rules that they follow. In fact, unless the church speaks of love and inclusiveness and actually models it, I am not interested at all. It may as well blow in the wind.
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