From immigrants to emigrants:

...Their recent tussles with Vatican officials make it clear that the definition and future of "religious life" are at stake here...

...But, will a new generation of women continue to tolerate this benign exploitation...

...the National Assembly of Religious Women issued a statement in 1983 reiterating their 1977 position in support of equal access of all women to the law and opposing the Hatch Amendment and "any further constitutional amendments aiming at making abortion a crime again...

...They are, by and large, involved in religious education and liturgical ministry, i.e...

...The future of American Catholicism hangs, in part, on how well those tensions are resolved...

...The church in Europe (especially in France) which was identified with the aristocracy, lost its working-class members...

...On the one hand it is an argument between the old and the new, where the old understanding of religion is Durkhcim's and the new one is Rahner's...

...WOMEN & THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN CATHOLICISM From immigrants to emigrants MARY JO WEAVER WHEN WE LOOK at the history of American Catholicism, it is easy to miss the women: they seldom appear in the books, and most American Catholics can name no more than four important women in the history of their church...

...The NCAN statement was not the first to come from a Catholic source: Catholics for a Free Choice and Catholic Alternatives had both been vocal on the subject of abortion for the better part of a decade...

...Many of us remember the neat splits of the pre- Vatican II church: the church and the world, the secular and the sacred, laity and "religious...

...In adopting feminist values of collective learning and collegial process, American Catholic women challenge the very modus operandi traditionally used by Catholics in political situations, viz., decree...

...We can sec the story of our lives written in the struggles of the immigrants...

...Like other feminist organizations within the church, WOC operates on a collegial basis...

...Its essence is not the old-fashioned concept of being set apart in enclosed space, wearing "religious garb," but is understood as life among the marginalized...

...Women under forty are leaving the church in significantly high numbers, and highly disproportionate to men in the same age category...

...The discontent of many women is growing slowly but surely...

...the denial of ordination to women is another way of saying that the American enthusiasm for the post-Vatican II church has gone too far...

...If work is a central category for defining what it means to be human, our immigrant ancestors found their humanity deCommonweal: 12 scribed in low-paying, low-status jobs...

...Since their voice is heard only when it agrees with the status quo, it is hard for church leaders to hear any dissonance...

...The CARA study on "Women and Ministry" sponsored by the Leadership Council of Women Religious found a remarkably high number of laywomcn in parish ministry in the United States...

...More revealing, however, since one picture is worth a thousand words, arc the photographs: of the 60 photographs included in this handsome volume, 30 of them arc men, 7 are women, and the rest are buildings or political cartoons...

...Many women, of course, perceive sexism in the church to be intractable and so they leave the institution in search of alternative communities of support and celebration...

...We are the church" has now been taken up by American Catholic women for the same reasons: as a reaction against the patriarchal model of church, and to express the power women feel as they refuse to be marginalized or squeezed out of the community...

...It was also instructive: of the 540 responses received to the show, 355 (66 percent) were positive and 185 (34 percent) were negative, reflective of Gallup Poll statistics...

...We have an opportunity now to take to heart the gifts of women in the church: their experience with collective process, their abilities to find and celebrate the feminine dimensions of the divine, and their own experience as a clear, first-world locus for understanding the dynamics of liberation theology...

...Like those who came to America in the nineteenth century, they are many, in great need of support, and quite capable of being "lost" to the church unless some special care is taken to identify with them and enter their process of "assimilation" and empowerment...

...Durkheim once defined religion as "having to do with sacred things, that is, things set apart and forbidden...

...As William McCready of the National Opinion Research Center says, "Women are voting with their feet: they're leaving...

...Add this to what they already know from experience of the networking possibilities of community life and we have an extremely volatile situation...

...Laywomen in ministry, sisters in politics, and the Women's Ordination Conference all point to significant and severe tensions within the present framework...

...Sisters in political office are troublesome to church officials because they are less "controllable" through normal channels, and because they have learned dangerous strategies...

...They were in the curious position of being absolutely necessary — to build the Holland Tunnel in New York City, for example — yet were valued and treated as totally useless...

...A spirituality which has no political connections is, to Womanchurch, inadequate: women have seen the prophctic/liberationist message of the Gospel and will not return to the "set-apart," interiorizing piety of yesterday...

...Clio, $29.85]: it includes only 6 essays on women out of 60, and 41 index items out of 431...

...With a heightened consciousness of global injustices they are prepared to engage in boycotts, demonstrations, and lobbying activities...

...Like the labor movement in the nineteenth century, the contemporary women's movement is vilified by conservatives who find that feminist values are "inconsistent" with Catholicism...

...Today, however, thanks to the theoretical work of theologians — Elisabeth Schussler Fiorcn/.a, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Anne Carr, Margaret Farley, and others — and to the networking skills of groups like NCAN, NARW, Network, Chicago Catholic Women, LCWR, WOC, and others, women will not be marginalized...

...In order to support the American labor movement...

...They will also rearrange the gestalt of American Catholic practice so the people will expect, perhaps even demand, that women take more active and more powerful roles...

...Whereas the document from SCRIS says that "religious life" cannot be lived "in the world," American sisters and many American Catholics insist that religion is precisely embodied in the tensions and opportunities of daily existence...

...For Roman officials, "religious life" is set apart from the world, lived in "canonically erected" communities, distinguished by "religious garb'' and presided over by a superior...

...Women in the future will probably make more demands for change and status in the church...

...Sisters, on the other hand, especially those politically active, are in a position to ask major questions about church structures...

...We can ask if today's church leaders are too identified with patriarchal structures to support the women's movement...

...By being where they arc now and beginning to think in different terms, laywomcn are able to ask major questions about women's roles in the church...

...It might be argued that American Catholic history has been written with a clerical bias which misses laypeople in general, but a careful counting of men and women will show that while lay men are few and far between, women are invisible...

...The values adopted by many of these sisters are pluralistic ones and feminist ones which challenge the way religious influence operates in a society...

...The transformative experience for nineteenth-century immigrants was the labor movement...

...When we realize that the competing definitions of "religious life" arc really reflective of competing ecclcsiologics, we can see how important it is to be aware of the controversies between politically active sisters and the Vatican...

...But, Catholics for a Free Choice is made up, for the most part, of laity who cannot be silenced very effectively by Catholic authorities...

...Further, a church which does not enable women's leadership and which operates in a hierarchical way is intolerable...

...but they are really aimed at all of us who have supported the direction of the American Catholic church in the last twenty years...

...Finally, a church which will not permit its women to celebrate the Eucharist makes no sense...

...MANY AMERICAN Catholic sisters have come to read the Gospel primarily as a mandate for social justice which has led them to a different way of looking at "religious life...

...While early feminist activity centered around the issue of ordination, it did not stop there: since WOC began in 1976, American Catholic women have moved to "Womanchurch," a gathering of the "ecclcsia of women" formed to affirm our position in the center of the Jesus traditions...

...Rahner, on the other hand, assessing the impact of Vatican II, said, "we are in a transition from a 'western' church to a 'world' church" in which, presumably, there will be a plurality of proclamations, different conceptual frameworks and contexts, a plurality of theologies, liturgies, ecclesiastical practices, and a plurality of political evaluations based on the Gospel...

...Those who remain within the system do not gloss over the realities of sexism within the church nor do they feel particularly sanguine about them...

...Their usual place of work — the home — is rhetorically valued as being the heart of the country, yet the trivialization of their work in that place treats it and them as useless...

...the "new nuns" are feminists, aware of the need for and value of shared power, while the Vatican is patriarchal, convinced of the need for and value of clearly-defined "superiors...

...As a grass-roots movement, Womanchurch has not yet received the publicity it deserves...

...It could be argued that most of the histories I'm referring to were written before the current wave of the women's movement, therefore, their omissions due to invincible ignorance, ought to be judged mercifully...

...With ecumenically-raised consciousnesses many of us believe that God can be found almost anywhere — in the cries of the poor, the example of the Buddha, and the traditions of the church...

...But it is growing, and its interest in spirituality is both feminist and political...

...Like those whose contributions were ignored in the twentieth century — Hispanics and blacks, for example — women have, by virtue of their unique perspective, important gifts which the church as a whole cannot afford to ignore without seriously impoverishing itself...

...The unflappable logic of oversimplification — "it has never been done, therefore, it never can be done" — has raised a storm of protest from world-class theologians and has exposed the Vatican declaration against the ordination of women as a shabby bit of work...

...It has grown from a small, grass-roots-inspired inquiry about ordination into a national coalition of committed feminists capable of challenging the nature of the priesthood and the future of "traditional" Catholicism...

...Second-class citizenship is experienced by Catholic women in several ways...

...Most of those who wrote were women, and as Ann Patrick Ware pointedly mentioned in her analysis of the responses, "not one mentioned a single case where the church was of any help...

...The best illustration of the media power of American Catholic nuns occurred in 1982 when sisters from the National Coalition of American Nuns not only publicly opposed the Hatch Amendment (in opposition to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops), but went on the Phil Donahue show to publicize their decision...

...The American Catholic church did not lose its working classes because the leaders of the church stood with them, fought for them, and made their struggles an integral part of American Catholic identity...

...church process, and a clear mandate to continue to follow the dynamism of Vatican II...

...1 do not want to argue here about the merits of the study itself: it clearly has problems of design and definition, but they do not impede the points I wish to raise...

...The willingness of the authors of the Vatican declaration to ignore ecumenical dialogue, the sound research of liturgists, and the considered opinion of its major theologians should give us a clue about what Rome thinks of the future of American Catholicism...

...It probably reached no more than several hundred people...

...67 percent of those paid earn less than $5,000 a year...

...I do not think it strains my analogy to predict that if the American Catholic hierarchy does not support its women, it will lose them just as surely as the French church lost its laboring classes...

...The new code of Canon Law, Pope John Paul II's letter to the American bishops (April 3, 1983) and the Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes document "The Essential Elements in the Church's Teaching on Religious Life'' (May 31,1983) show how disturbing these new nuns are to the Vatican...

...they fill the spaces left by sisters and priests...

...There are several ways of understanding the conflict...

...These made it possible to compartmentalize our religion...

...Their places of work were dismal, their services taken-for-granted, and their contributions pushed to the background...

...One organized symbol of this resistance thinking is the Women's Ordination Conference (WOC...

...From another angle, the conflict is the pre-Vatican II church "putting the brakes on" the postVatican II church (to choose a metaphor offered a few years ago by Andrew Grceley...

...Like the immigrants of the twentieth century, women arc consistently treated as auxiliaries rather than given power and an effective voice...

...Can we see the story of our future in the struggles of our women...

...Yet, look at James Hennescy's American Catholics (Oxford, $19.95] and see that fewer than 50 of the nearly 1300 index items refer to women in any way, and in 331 pages of text, the material about women adds up to approximately 10 pages...

...I do want to say, however, that women are in the front lines of a broader struggle...

...The real story might be in the bicentennial volume edited by Robert Tnsco, Catholics in America 1776-1976 [ABC...

...They have embraced the spirit of Vatican II, but they are not usually feminists...

...Willing to find new centers of spiritual expression and ritual, women are gathering together to celebrate the Eucharist themselves in direct disobedience to church regulations...

...The women's movement in the American Catholic church calls us to see the divine as it is present in the struggles of women...

...They are aimed at women because women are perceived as being in the most vulnerable position...

...Vatican displeasure with these women, as with liberation theologians, is rooted in a hierarchical ecclesiology and a fear of losing control...

...Like the Orientals in the photographs of the historic linking of the transcontinental railroad, they were often "erased" before publication, denied recognition for their work...

...Significantly, buildings outnumber the women by a margin of 2 to 1. Women are the "immigrants" of contemporary American Catholicism...

...It is significant, I think, that two-thirds of the women in the sample are over forty: they were reared in the pre-Vatican II church where they were taught subservience and "helping Father" along with arithmetic and geography...

...While there is some evidence that American Catholicism is beginning (jus' beginning) to take its Hispanic population seriously as a source of talent and insight, I suspect our willingness to do that is directly related to the great numbers of Hispanic Catholics now in the United States...

...Finally, it is a profound argument about power: new concepts of religious life are democratic where the Vatican is hierarchical...

...These women are from the middle and upper middle classes...

...In the prc-Vatican II church it may have been possible to marginalize women seeking ordination or alternative ecclesiastical expressions, to stigmatize them by decree, and to silence their voices with clear inquisitorial strategies...

...Many of them, believing in grass-roots 11 January 1985: 13 involvement, have entered the political arena as mayors, state congresspersons, and legal officials...

...Frequently-repeated themes of dependence, authority, obedience, and surrender should disturb us as American Catholics for they signal a clear return to mentalities and policies of yesterday...

...Already in this century the American church has ignored the specific gifts of its black and Hispanic members: our liturgies, processes, and perceptions would be much richer had we not operated in racist, discriminatory ways within the church...

...In doing that, they will change the future of American Catholicism, making it clear, perhaps, that revolutionary political movements themselves are the locus of divine disclosure...

...Since statistics about American Catholics and upward social mobility mask the ways in which American Catholic women experience discrimination, my analogy to the immigrant situation might help to clarify the issues...

...Women in the church can identify with all these things: they have the low-paying, low-status jobs within the church and within the society-at-large...

...yet, the values of Catholic feminists include pluralism of voices, direct participation by women in the governance and celebratory activity of the church, a truly collegia...

...What are these laywomen in ministry doing...

...Since the council, we have reduced if not obliterated the distinctions between the secular and the sacred so that the religious task today has moved from finding God in sacred space to following the example of Jesus in our troubled world...

...They are volunteering their services to a church in need: 92 percent of them work for no pay whatsoever, and of the 8 percent who get paid, precious few earn more than $ 10,000 a year (13 percent...

...European Catholics came to this country a century ago because it was the land of equal opportunity, but they quickly found that the mythology of America far outstripped the realities of their lives...

...WOC challenges traditional Catholicism by its processes, its ability to build effective networks, and its willingness to participate in acts of ecclesiastical disobedience...

...I do not want to debate here about the merits of the case for ordination...

...Catholic bishops sometimes had to fight against Roman officials and for values that were not — so it seemed — compatible with Catholicism...

...their strategy, however, is to remain with the institution as subversives within a corrupt society...

...and NARW's position published in their newsletter, while significant, was not particularly public...

...Whether those values are important to Curial officials or not, they are important to Americans...

...It is becoming increasingly clear that women's groups not only operate differently within themselves, but have been moved, on the basis of their experience, to challenge the hierarchical model as ineffective and illegitimate...

...The NCAN statement, however, coupled with an appearance on a popular national television show, was wildly newsworthy and drew Vatican opprobrium...

...The challenges voiced by American Catholic women put church officials on the horns of a similar dilemma...

...The post-Vatican II slogan of the laity — "We are the church" — expressed both a surge of power felt by the laity in the sixties and a reaction against the ecclesiological model which identified the church with the clergy...

...Similarly, women in the church, told that they arc made in the image of God, with men equally redeemed and valued, discover that biblical promises of equality are "spiritualized," meant to describe heavenly rewards rather than earthly realities...

...I doubt that we will continue to see great numbers of women eager or able to work for low pay and to have no power...

...In the last two decades, through their political activism, sisters have learned to use the power of the media...

...in perceiving the strength and value of the collective, it sees the dangers and divisiveness of the patriarchal model...

...Seeing themselves called to solidarity with the downtrodden, many of them have joined centers which educate, research, and struggle for systemic justice...

...If traditional Catholicism is willing to be political only through the directives of popes and bishops, American Catholic women are constrained to add many more voices to the discussion...

...Women claim the right to gather as "Womanchurch" and to state their aims clearly...

...And they have been erased or ignored in the recountings of the American Catholic story...

...People did tell of receiving comfort and understanding from their women friends, their mothers, their married relatives, but clearly they did not consider these friendly voices 'church.' " If Catholic feminists have one agreed-upon agenda it is to challenge the church's structures...