Enter the Playground
This meeting wasn’t filled with little girls, but rather older women, most of whom had grown adult children. The gathering was what they called a “speak out session” and was sponsored by the diocesan women’s commission. Presumably it was designed for Catholic women to discuss their role in the Church in an open format. And, apparently the discussion would be summarized for the bishop. When the meeting began, I realized that those running it had made up the game and established the rules. There was nothing that we could do but play along.
The rules said that we were going to reflect on experiences, air concerns, and share our vision for the future. In other words, leave objective truth at the door, everything here, and in the minds of most of the participants, is subjective… “What I say is my feeling, my opinion and you can’t say anything about it.” Forget the FACT that what some women were saying was simply untrue. Forget the FACT that Church teaching was being openly contradicted and dismissed. Forget the FACT that history was being ignored or misrepresented. No matter how outrageous the statement, we all had to stand by and accept it. The only way to get the truth written down on the chart paper was to couch it in subjective terms, as in “My concern is that so many women are so wrapped up in being priests that when it doesn’t happen for them, as it surely won’t, they will be very disappointed.”
Many of the women complained about their experiences of being left out by the Church hierarchy, their fear that they would be refused entrance into Church hierarchy, and their ultimate vision that they would be the Church hierarchy. The implication was that if there were women in control we wouldn’t have so many problems in the Church. As I listened to these women some facts come together in my head that I was sure they had forgotten.
A Feminine Paradox
In the beginning of the meeting we were told that the majority of regular practicing Catholics, those at Mass on Sunday, were women. That seemed apparent to most of us. Women were definitely the ones filling the pews in most churches. Good for us! Then we were asked who taught us our prayers. Most people agreed it was their mothers and the Sisters at school, or at the very least a lay teacher, who was also a woman. Good for the women again! Then the first of several paradoxes hit me.
When I thought about the fact that it was women who had “taught us our prayers” and it was those same women who were populating our churches, I realized that these mothers, spiritual and physical mother alike, had failed to fill the pews with their children. These two facts about women in the Catholic Church had pointed to a third truth that I was too embarrassed to say aloud. I realized that this truth revealed the failings of most of the women in the room, with perhaps the exception of the few newer mothers. If women were passing on the faith, why were so many of the younger generations absent from church on Sunday?
Some would say that the Church had failed the absent children by not allowing the female ones into the male dominated leadership positions. Well, if that were true, wouldn’t we be seeing lots of men at Church? After all, they are the favored sex, are they not? It doesn’t make sense that the ones that are so “marginalized”, the women, keep coming back and the ones that are “in control”, the men, keep dwindling in number.
But this was not the only paradox in this “speak out” session. Another was the fact that there were so few women there to “speak out”. Again, if women are so upset about their lack of leadership in the Church, why are they not attending meetings in which they are invited to express their opinions? It often seems that there is a small number, usually of the same “Baby Boomer” age range, that are complaining.
As I sat and listened to the concerns of many of these women, I began to notice that they were concerned about their presence, or lack of presence, in certain rooms of the Catholic family house, so to speak. And this concern revealed a sort of reverse chauvinism — yet another paradox.
Most of us would call anyone who insisted that a woman’s place was in the kitchen a “male chauvinist”. We would let him know that he is limiting the woman to her cooking abilities and not acknowledging her varied gifts and talents.
No woman wants to be limited to one room of the house. And yet these feminists were so narrow-minded they couldn’t get their minds off two of the smallest rooms of the Church, the sanctuary and the rectory. The Catholic (i.e.Universal) Church claims the world as her parish. God’s children are in need spiritually and physically all over the world. There are children, youth, young adults, the newly married and young parents who long for the Truth and can’t see it through the haze of the secular media and their own confused and broken lives. They are in desperate need of spiritual mothering! And yet these women were so busy pounding down the rectory door and rearranging the sanctuary that they couldn’t see where they were truly needed.
The “Heart” of the Family
Our Holy Father, in accord with his predecessors, has articulated quite well the roles of men and women in marriage. Though the man, he says, is the head of the family, the woman is the heart. The woman’s special realm in the world is that of love. We, as women, tend to focus on the subjective, the personal. The man, as the head, tends to focus on the objective, the facts, the truth. But we are not opposed to each other, since, as Fr. John Corapi, S.O.L.T. is fond of saying, the Truth is not a something, but a Somebody, and His Name is Jesus. Which means that we all must focus on both the objective, the doctrines that we can know about Jesus Christ and His plan for us, and the subjective, the Person Himself.
Yet, the feminists in the Church cannot be happy being the heart of the family, they must also be the head. They cannot be happy perfecting the truly feminine side of the Church’s life, they must infiltrate the roles limited to men. As in the secular instances of feminism, equality is seen as sameness, and feminists strive to have all differences erased and to do and be everything men can do and be. In short, they would rather be men.
However, they still cling to a truly feminine trait when they attempt to gain the masculine roles by subjective (feminine) reasoning. The women in our meeting pushed their extreme subjectivism on everyone in an effort to redefine their role in the Church in more masculine terms. This forced the women who wanted to be faithful to the Church’s teachings, in particular the male priesthood, to focus on the objective — namely the Church’s authority to define the priesthood. Due to these facts, the discussions revealed a somewhat confusing paradox. I will try to explain. While the feminists resorted to subjectivism to argue their way into the male roles, the other women tried to bring in objective reasoning to show them that they had distinctly feminine roles to fill. And just because those roles did not include ordination did not mean they were not highly important. As I listened to everyone argue I thought “The women who want to be men in the Church are forcing the women who want to be women to act masculine in order to convince the other women that being a woman in the Church is a wonderful thing.” Another paradox!
Though my experiences at the “speak out” session were frustrating at best, it did not cause me to give up hope. The women who were the most ardent feminists were not the future of the Church. They were older and done with raising families. They were angry and bitter, and therefore not attractive. And they had defined their own Catholicism in terms of rights being given them, or not given them. I know that they will never be ordained, nor will any other woman in the Catholic Church. They will either live out their lives depressed that no Pope will change this teaching, or they will realize that Christ’s choice to grant the priesthood to men is not an insult to them as women. After all, the only person wearing a crown in heaven, who isn’t God Himself, is a woman — the Woman. Can any woman be more elevated than that?
(Carol Kennedy is a Catholic writer with an MA in Theology and Catechesis from Franciscan University of Steubenville. She is the former DRE for the Spiritus Sanctus Academies in Ann Arbor, MI. Carol writes from Northern California where she lives with her husband and infant daughter. You can read more of her writings at www.carolscomments.com)
