| 01.04.2006
Moving Toward Wholeness: Women and Religion in the Global World
Plenary Presentation at the Annual Conference of the
International Council of Christians and Jews
Chicago, July 25, 2005
I must confess that the enormity of this topic tempted me to near-despair. How, amidst the sea of words that flows from conferences of this type, to say anything that will lead us into deeper water (or to avoid getting me into deep water?)? Perhaps there are scholars with competence in all of the realities of our topic-women and religion, the nature of wholeness, globalization, and the relation of all of these to each other-but I would not count myself among them. Moreover, neither can I claim to speak on a topic involving the pair "women and religion" in the cool cadences of academic prose. So, I will not, as Nancy Mairs puts it, "establish myself as an authoritative impersonal consciousness capable of generally valid insights drawn with the humanistic equivalent of scientific objectivity (Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, 49).
On the contrary, what I offer here this afternoon might best be called "testimony." Thus, I come before you as a witness, trying as best I can to speak truth, so help me God.
As I testify, I try to keep the image of Planet Earth before me, the awareness that my testimony is but one voice in the vast chorale of women, many of whom live in situations stilling their voice so that they speak barely above a whisper-only in a tremulous voice in the cacophony of their societies. To keep "global world" before us is to remember those many women denied their dignity as human beings, like those many nameless victims of rape in Darfur and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also to keep in mind those incredibly courageous women who speak out for human rights at great cost.
We know, of course, that "religion" added to "global may exacerbate conflict. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his forthcoming book, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility speaks of religions not as the primary cause of conflict but as "fault lines" along which sides divided:
When political conflict is religionized, it is absolutized. What in politics are virtues-compromise, the willingness to listen to both sides and settle for less than one would wish in an idea world-are in religion, vices. Religion can, therefore act not as a form of conflict-resolution but, rather, conflict-intensification" (p.9).
In fact, we gather precisely because we are acutely aware of the troubled, tragic history of our religious communities and committed to reconciliation.
Here we touch upon the immense power of religion in a global world. The religious traditions represented here oblige us to care about the other, both human and non-human. Religion awakens and hones our moral sensibilities, sustains us by rituals, symbols, and texts, and offers systems and structures for the work of justice. Are we not, whatever our differences, here because we know the power of religion in the healing of the world?
Let me speak from and to the particulars of my own tradition. Catholicism provides a vision by which I catch glimpses of the Divine Presence manifest in ever surprising and startling ways. Catholicism gives me language by which I might image and relate to God, practices for a way of life lest I be swallowed up by secular values and quotidian demands, and a worldwide community of over a billion people whose members are drawn from virtually every tribe and tongue (in James Joyce"s phrase, "Here comes everybody.") Catholic tradition is deep and wide, and filled with beauty and wisdom.
I assume that all of us in this assembly can articulate what they find especially compelling about their tradition;in fact, the opportunity to express what we find deepest and most important in our own tradition is a vital dimension of any interreligious dialogue. And since all of our traditions are beset by the finitude of the human condition, we all experience their limits, those difficulties and dilemmas that trouble our hearts and minds.
Women, however, have developed a keener awareness of these limits, given the dominance of patriarchy in the Abrahamic traditions. For most of history, women have been marginal to the way that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have been taught, ritualized, and interpreted.
A new perspective on the marginality of women in the Abrahamic traditions might be discerned in the comment from a doctoral student a number of years ago. Referring to the copious notes I had written on the margins of her dissertation drafts, she said to me, "There"s power in the margins. Only the professors get to write there!" Her observation suggests two clarifications. To say that women are marginal does not mean they are simply victims or without power. It does mean that historically in relation to men, women have exercised less public leadership and authority in their religious traditions. As a consequence, our religious traditions are lesser because of our marginality.
Further, to say that women are marginal does not mean that we are all marginal in the same way As an educated white woman born in the United States, brought up in a stable family, and holding a professional position, whatever marginality I experience is far less than the 584 million women in the world who are illiterate. And far less than the many women and children-perhaps as many as two million-who are trafficked each year for the purposes of sexual exploitation.
But all Catholic women, whatever our class status, race, education, state of life, or sexual orientation among our many differences, share one marginality in common: our voices don"t count as much as men"s voices. And when the official church pays less attention to women"s voices, it is tone deaf to many vital concerns (such as trafficking) as well as unable to hear the authoritarian tone that renders its judgments so difficult for many to accept. As a consequence, Catholic teachings have less depth and speak to fewer persons. The "curriculum" of church life needs women among its writers, not simply among its teachers.
One rubric that might serve as an analytic framework for our consideration this afternoon is the typology of Elliott Eisner who speaks of three curricula: the explicit curriculum, or what is taught; the implicit curriculum, or what is taught implicitly by what is rewarded or punished; and the null curriculum, what is taught by virtue of being ignored (The Educational Imagination, 2nd ed., 87-108),
Women and the Explicit Curriculum of Catholic Life
At the level of the explicit curriculum, we see a dramatic turn away from the misogyny characteristic of centuries of Christian theology-debates about whether women had souls, could exercise authority, or represent Christ at the altar. Women were blamed for the entry of evil into the world, and taught that because they were inferior in creation they were to be subordinate in the order of authority. In the words of Tertullian, women were "each an Eve. The curse of God on this sex of yours lives on even in our times. Guilty, you must beat its hardships. You are the gateway of the devil" (De cultu feminariusm [The Cult of Women]).
In short, the Christian story as it was handed down over the centuries cast men in the leading roles. I won"t rehearse this sorry tale, as much of it has now been exposed for the grave distortion and injustice it is. But I wish men could really feel what it does to us to know that we are nearly invisible on the stage of the church and the world in the Christian narrative-not to mention vilified as the source of evil, and without the capacity of reason.
The dramatic turn in the tale is that we have begun finding roles more in keeping with our gifts. Church documents are for the most part free from the dependence on the natural inferiority of women (see Mary Aquin O"Neill, "The Nature of Women and the Method of Theology," Theological Studies 56/4 (1995).
Yet even then we tend to be stock characters insofar as women are described in essentialist categories. For example, as Pope John Paul II wrote in Mulieris Dignitatem, "Motherhood is linked to the personal structure of the woman." It gives women in general a special capacity ("predisposition") to pay "attention" to other persons, and even a special capacity for love. Both Lisa Sowle Cahill, an ethicist and Margaret O"Brien Steinfels, a journalist (and both mothers), characterize the magisterium"s image of feminine "nurturing, maternal qualities" to be "strangely implausible," and "separated by a chasm from the ordinary experience of an increasing number of women and men" (see Lisa Cahill, Women and Sexuality, 54).
It is salutary that the Vatican speaks of the dignity of women rather than in the more negative depictions of earlier eras. The explicit curriculum is, without doubt, improving. But with so few women writers of this "curriculum," it remains stuck in essentialist categories and oblivious to some key concerns.
The Implicit Curriculum and Catholic Life
The public face of Catholicism is male. Think of the papal entourage. Think of the two meetings in Assisi in which religious leaders gathered together to pray. Think of how few women Vatican officials ever meet as peers-or, as one friend observed, how little those officials know of about buying groceries or changing diapers or dealing with a moody adolescent.
A vivid example of a problem with our implicit curriculum is evident in the wording of a recent report about the Vatican"s removal of 6 priests for sexual abuse:
Joseph G. Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, said Saturday in a phone interview that all six men had lost their pensions and could no longer perform church sacraments. "They are no longer priests, period," he said. "They are reduced to the lay state." Defrocking is the harshest penalty the Roman Catholic Church can impose on a priest. (Damien Cave, "The Vatican Removes 6 Priests," The New York Times, July 10, 2005).
Despite the Second Vatican Council"s inspirational words about the role and mission of the laity-and for all practical purposes, all Catholic women are laity-to be "laicized" is to be punished, yes, "reduced to the lay state." As long as we have this kind of language in church canons, women will remain inferior. The implicit curriculum will trump the explicit curriculum.
The depth of the implicit curriculum of women"s inferiority may be glimpsed in an experience of Eva Fleischner, whom many of you know as one of the world"s most gracious human beings, passionate scholar of the Shoah and Jewish-Christian relations, as well as a serious Catholic. Eva attended the second session of Vatican II (September-December, 1963), credentialed as a journalist for Ecumenical Notes. As a member of the American delegation of journalists (and the only woman at the time), Eva was invited to participate in the Council"s celebration of the Eucharist.
As she approached to receive communion, a Swiss guard blocked her way to the altar. She turned away in tears of rage, the only woman in the U.S. press corps. She felt bitterly disappointed that she had been personally violated by what she had glowingly perceived as the spirit of Vatican II (Herbert S. Heavenrich, In Search of the Sacred, 58).
I called Eva last week to talk about this with her-an event she has never forgotten, as you might well imagine. "Eva," I asked, "Did anyone ever apologize to you?" "No."
Eva has, as many of you know, since served on the Vatican-appointed commission of historians (3 Jewish, 3 Catholic) that investigated the Vatican"s role in the Shoah. But the memory of being physically blocked from the table of communion remains vivid-and is a powerful witness to how deep the problem has been in the past.
The Null Curriculum of Catholic Life
Karl Rahner"s 1979 address on the Second Vatican Council as the first in the church"s history to be truly a world council remains one of the most frequently cited interpretations of Vatican II ("Towards a Fundamental Theological Interpretation of Vatican II," Theological Studies 40 (1979): 716-27). Yet virtually none of those who cite Rahner seem to recognize that the 2500 conciliar fathers were all men. (There were 23 women observers, most at the third and fourth sessions. Note they were auditors, no voice, no vote.) This month in the daily lections for the Eucharist we are hearing anew the story of the Exodus. Yet, strangely, the story of the midwives Shiprah and Puah is skipped. How many times when Catholic teaching or policy is represented, are the delegations all male?
This is the null curriculum: When women are absent from the formulation of Catholic teaching or policy, when women are absent from biblical texts in our liturgy, when women"s voices cannot be heard in interpreting Scripture in liturgical settings, Catholicism is in effect teaching that women are marginal. And in teaching that women are marginal, the church is contradicting its own teaching-the explicit curriculum-that "every type of discrimination, whether societal or cultural, whether based on sex, race, color, social condition, language, or religion, is to be overcome" (Gaudium et Spes)
In the year 2000 I was privileged to gather with 15 other women who had given the Madeleva Lecture at Saint Mary"s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. The college gathered us to write a brief "manifesto" in the spirit of our lectures, which we proclaimed in English and Spanish at a public event on April 29, 2000. I conclude with the final two paragraphs of our manifesto:
We deplore, and hold ourselves morally bound, to protest and resist, in church and society, all actions, customs, laws and structures that treat women or men as less than fully human. We pledge ourselves to carry forth the heritage of biblical justice which mandates that all persons share in right relationship with each other, with the cosmos, and with the Creator.
We hold ourselves responsible to look for the holy in unexpected places and persons, and pledge ourselves to continued energetic dialogue about issues of freedom and responsibility for women. We invite others of all traditions to join us in imagining the great shalom of God.