Admiring what works
McCarthy, Abigail
OF SEVERAL HIMDS Abigail McCarthy ADMIRING WHAT WORKS THE CHURCH FACES PARTICIPATION Recently I realized with a start that I had a strong affection for my travel alarm. Because it works. It...
...Our disappointments have more to do, as the Commonweal editors say in another context, with the underdevelopment of democratic mechanisms in the church, than with anything else...
...Such a document could be an American gift to the universal church...
...Hope, however, was justified by the process of consultation itself...
...nor was I a participant in the shared reminiscences of the Commonweal symposium a decade later...
...There were no structures for such a commitment...
...The necessary internal mechanisms aren't there...
...This is one reason — only one, but a compelling one — for our growing unease with the church...
...We want things to work...
...74: Commonweal...
...When I was asked later to help in rewriting and editing the final documents, I could find no sign of it...
...As Dolores Curran reminded us, even the issue of women working outside the home was still being hotly debated within the church...
...as a human institution it doesn't seem to be working...
...We expect them to...
...We are slowly beginning to understand that, and that, without the mechanisms, our hopes for an open church of expanding participation on the part of all the baptized will not be realized...
...An affection for that which works — for that whose operation is consonant with the intent of the designer — is supposed to be characteristic of Americans...
...But even as I talked I knew that I was unheard...
...And that the church might espouse that justice and move powerfully for it...
...In its beginning it was much more a limited democracy than anything else...
...They have already been subject to change and growth...
...The expectations simply outran the possibility of their fruition...
...Or was I invited in answerto some protestor's cry that the agenda of the Call, for justice, did not seem to include justice for women...
...My testimony disappeared without a trace...
...We are pleased when they do and frustrated when they do not...
...When it turns up again it is still telling time, winking away at me minute by minute, its mysterious chip-governed mechanism ready to adjust to calling me at any hour...
...I was moved to this reflection by the Commonweal supplement [December 26] marking the tenth anniversary of A Call to Action, the bishops' bicentennial project which "experimented with a process of consultation on an unprecedented scale...
...I am struck now with how similar my peripheral experience of high hope and dashed expectatiqn was to the general experience...
...The evidence I proffered of the exigencies forcing women into the workplace was no match for the fondly held myth of woman, queen of the home...
...Better and easier to give some attention to woman in her relational aspects, her place in the family, or even — on the ordination issue — in the church...
...It is a mere sliver of black plastic...
...Let us begin the great grave process of reflection on what the purpose of the church as a human institution is — the germs of the reflection are already there in the symposium on the Call to Action...
...My memory of the time is somewhat uncertain...
...Women as autonomous beings fit neither the preconceptions of those holding hearings nor into their schema...
...They are not immutable...
...For a Catholic laywoman my credentials for testifying were good at the time...
...Suppose we celebrate the Bicentennial of the Constitution with a constitutional process of our own in which we turn our attention to the structures and mechanisms of church governance and how they work or could work...
...The organization's (i.e., the National Conference of Bishops') capacity to respond to a large reform agenda was distinctly limited," writes David O'Brien, and Cardinal Dearden agrees, "It (the bishops' conference) cannot impose its will on member bishops...
...I labored long and hard on that testimony in my effort to persuade others in the church that woman's struggle was a struggle for justice...
...I note now, too, that I have the same feeling for my car, my old typewriter, for a select number of other useful aids to living...
...My liking for it is instinctual, perhaps 13 February 1987: 73 irrational...
...But neither should it be a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a totalitarian state...
...A wholly admirable object...
...On that there is general agreement...
...A look at the discussion guide and at the resolutions shows that women qua women got little attention...
...Was I on the original list of invited speakers at the first regional hearing here in Washington, D.C., the list which inspired "local protest...
...I was not one of the delegates at Detroit, and, thus, did not share the temporary euphoria of the experience there...
...I was consumed by the hope that the growing divisions in the women's movement and the opposition to it could be healed and lessened if we concentrated on economic and educational justice for women...
...I was a national vice-president of Church Women United, served on the boards of two Catholic women's colleges, was on the advisory boards of the Women's Equity Action League and Women's Campaign Committee, and president of the Washington-based Clearinghouse on Women's Issues...
...I misplace it for weeks at a time — sometimes in a purse into which I dropped it in an absent-minded moment...
...Again and again the efforts to achieve a national Catholic approach to goals and problems are bound to run into the intractable structure of geographical parishes, dioceses with arbitrary boundaries, and bishops responsible to Rome and not to each other...
...We have heard ad nauseam of late that the church is not a democracy...
...But perhaps more important, a commitment <o economic justice for women would- have implied a commitment to a long, wearisome process of dealing with the minutiae of finance and legislation...
...At any rate, I received an invitation to testify on "Women in the Church and Society," and I took it very seriously...
...My own involvement with that effort was intense, hopeful, exhausting, in the end disillusioning, but still peripheral...
...And let us meet eventually to frame a document which would be a foundation for the structures we need...
...they were sub-topics under the sections on family and personhood...
Vol. 114 • February 1987 • No. 3
