ENGAGING THE CULTURE
Signs that the Ecclesiastical Revolution is Over
Catholic feminists are "holding on by their fingernails"
(July/Aug. 2000)

BY DONNA M. STEICHEN

TO GIVE WHATEVER CREDIT is due, Sister Sandra Schneiders was always remarkably frank. Until now, no one could doubt her distaste for the Catholic faith, or her determination to construct a different kind of religion in its place. In her 1991 book, Beyond Patching, she explained:

….[W]e are not talking about how to organize the institution. We are talking about whether the god of Judeo-Christian revelation is true God or just men-writ-large to legitimate their domination; whether Jesus, an historical male, is or can be messiah and savior for those who are not male…

Lest anyone miss the message, she reiterated it in her 1997 address to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious:

For many the God of Christianity seems too small, too violent, and too male; the focus on Jesus Christ seems narrow and exclusive; the resurrection seems mythological if not incredible and, in any case, irrelevant to a world in anguish; the institutional church seems hopelessly medieval, sexist, and clerical; liturgy is alienating; morality is out of touch with reality; and church ministry is a continual battle with male hostility and power dynamics.

In short, she concluded, life for women religious today is "an attempt to develop a spirituality without religion."

Schneiders was this year's star lecturer at a retreat held annually since 1985 at St. Mary's College in South Bend, purportedly to honor the late Sister Madeleva Wolff, college president from 1943 to 1961. Schneiders' address repeated her standard indictment of human history as a cruel plot against women, describing feminism as "a comprehensive ideology, rooted in women's experience of sexually based oppression, which engages in a critique of patriarchy as an essentially dysfunctional system, embraces an alternative vision for humanity and the earth and actively seeks to bring this vision to realization." The usual.

Then, suddenly, she veered off in an entirely unexpected direction. "Gospel feminism," she said, "is inseparable from the gospel of Jesus, whose life and example is now the primary source for the women's movement within the church."

"We need to claim, consciously and publicly, without apology or equivocation, our conviction that the feminist vision is not simply one utopian dream among others, the private cause of some disgruntled women, but a crucial factor in the shaping of the future because it is quintessentially a gospel vision of full humanity for all persons and right relations among all creatures," Schneiders continued.

As professor of New Testament Studies and Christian Spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Schneiders holds a prestigious post in Catholic academia. So do many of the 15 other past Madeleva lecturers who gathered on April 28 to hear her speak and join in composing a 300-word feminist manifesto outlining a "Re-imagined" model of the Church. While the exhortation to "re-imagine" the faith evoked memories of the hair-raising 1993 conference sponsored by the World Council of Churches, the rhetoric of the whole was fairly muted, as feminist pronouncements go. Declaring that the writers represent "gospel feminism," "share in a universal vision that is faithful to our catholic (sic) tradition" and "seek to follow the way of Jesus Christ, who inspires our hope and guides our concerns," the manifesto might lead readers unfamiliar with feminism to suppose, erroneously, that it somehow resembles the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In fact, feminism's chief identifying characteristic is a refusal to take up any crosses and follow Him.

Time may reveal whether an authentic conversion to Christianity is underway among leaders of religious feminism. A more probable explanation for both the muted manifesto and Schneiders' previously unsuspected devotion to the path of Jesus is a general recognition that the ecclesiastical revolution is over.

Several prominent participants mournfully acknowledged defeat. Schneiders said of fellow Madeleva lecturers, "Today, women like Joan Chittister, Denise Carmody and Mary Collins, who are trying to open the institutional church and its ministry to the vocations and gifts of women, are pushing a Sisyphean boulder of nearly 1,800 years’ weight up the greased hill of a fiercely defended male power structure."

Sister Elizabeth Johnson, whose book, She Who Is, demands that God be imagined and addressed as female, said feminists "are hanging on by their fingernails, in deep spiritual distress." She said "we are entering into a particularly dark time, a time to keep hope alive. When morning comes, the banked fire can be flared up again."

The ebullient Sister Chittister lamented, to the National Catholic Reporter, "these are difficult times for progressive Catholics." Rome seems intent on punishing dissent, she said, and even so progressive a man as Archbishop Rembert Weakland predicts "a period of retrenchment in liturgical and pastoral life under an increasingly cautious American episcopacy." Nevertheless, she said, she stakes her hopes on "the certainty of Easter Sunday for a battered, broken and rejected Jesus."

Indeed, we all stake our hopes on Him. And, of course, by our sins we all contributed to His agony. Still, unsympathetic questions naturally spring to mind here. Like: "who has been battering and rejecting Him most recently?"

All in all, though, this news story offers faithful Catholics something to be hopeful about.

[ St. Catherine Review ]