By Marian Ronan

This article was first printed in Vol. XIV, No. 3, the December 2005 - February 2006 issue, of EqualwRrites, the newsletter of the Southeastern WOC.

On two separate occasions within the past year, women’s ordination activists here in Philadelphia have suggested that the oppression of women in the Catholic church is analogous, or even equivalent, to the oppression of black people in society. The first of these was Patricia Fresen, the keynote speaker at the WOC 30th anniversary conference last March. Dr. Fresen had, as a Roman Catholic Sister in South Africa, participated in the anti-apartheid struggle, enrolling black students in the elementary school she directed although such behavior was forbidden. On the basis of this experience, Dr. Friesen, in her talk, drew a very strong analogy between South African apartheid and the refusal of the Catholic church to ordain women.

More recently a SEPA WOC leader related over the listserv that her professor of systematic theology, an African-American, had said that “the oppression of women is exactly the same as the oppression against racial minorities.” She inserted this quote at the end of a post in which she considered with dismay the likelihood that married men will be ordained before women in the Catholic church. She compared such an eventuality to US women being denied the vote until fifty years after men of all races secured it.

I have several thoughts about these two uses of the analogy between racial oppression and the denial of ordination to Catholic women. The first is that this new era, the early 21 st century, is a time of deep discouragement for many in the movement for women’s ordination. We can see the ordination of the Catholic women on the Danube and in Ottawa as causes for rejoicing, but the escalation of rhetoric around the ordination status quo suggests otherwise, or at least also. As our hearts’ desire, that women should be recognized as equals in the ecclesial tradition we love and hate, seems less and less likely to be fulfilled in the foreseeable future, our responses are increasingly full of pain and anger.

A second thought is that the use of analogy is one of the strengths of the Catholic tradition. “The analogical imagination,” as David Tracy calls it, enables the church to include within its doctrine of revelation all of creation made in God’s likeness. This is strikingly different from the notion of God’s absolute transcendence that characterizes the Augustinian-Lutheran-Barthian understanding of revelation. The Catholic analogy between God and creation allows room for beauty and sacraments and environmentalism. Our use of analogy is sometimes a very good thing.

Having said this, I find the recent, fairly un-nuanced assertions of analogy between black people in society and women excluded from Catholic ordination troubling. In evaluating the analogy between Catholic women and black South Africans, it helps to clarify what we’re talking about. Victims of apartheid who filed a claim for reparations in federal court in New York in 2002 listed as characteristics of apartheid, among others, the following: murder, torture, sexual assault, arbitrary detention, and massive imprisonment. On the face of it, however painful and damaging the exclusion of women from Catholic orders may be, it’s only slightly like apartheid.

The use of the analogy with racial oppression on the SEPA WOC listserv was, in some respects, more sophisticated than Patricia Freisen’s claim. The writer didn’t say that the oppression of women (and, in the context of the post, the exclusion of women from Catholic orders) is “just like” racial oppression; she said an African-American expert said it. An African-American theologian has every right to say this, of course.

Whether a white female writer has the right to appropriate this statement to conclude her own argument is another matter. The SEPA WOC member’s earlier invocation of the exclusion of women from the 15 th amendment illustrates my point here: between 1870 and 1920, white suffragists used scandalously racist (and anti-Catholic) language to secure the vote for themselves. For a white American woman to invoke this history in a piece that also argues, indirectly, that racism and sexism are “exactly the same” omits, at the least, some significant details.

Here are a few other details: at the March conference in which Patricia Friesen offered her analogy, as far as this admittedly near-sighted observer could tell, there were four or five Asians and Latinas in attendance out of an audience of 150 , but not one African American. When I served as president of the WOC Board of Directors I reached out to involve Black Catholic women in our movement, meeting with the heads of the Black Sisters’ Conference and the Ladies of St. Peter Claver. Both of these women told me their groups had far more pressing concerns than women’s ordination.

At the WOC national conference in Milwaukee in 2000, one of the keynote speakers was black, and a second keynoter addressed the problem of racism in Catholic feminism. There were no black speakers at the March 2005 conference, however, and a participant in the WOW conference in Ottawa last July estimated that 1-2% of the attendees were people of color. If racial oppression is just like, or even somewhat like, the oppression of women in the Catholic church, why exactly is our movement so white? By definition, women who seek ordination in the Catholic church are highly educated members of the professional managerial class. All of the women ordained on the Danube and in Ottawa were white.

The un-nuanced assertion within WOC of the analogy between racial oppression and (implicitly white) women’s oppression is discouraging, in part, because feminist scholars have been struggling with the similarities and differences between racism and sexism for many years. One of the helpful tools to emerge from this conversation is the notion of “intersectionality,” the compounding overlap between different dimensions of identity. How might a consideration of the uniquely intersectional—raced and gendered—oppression of Black Catholic women shed light on the ordination question?

Another helpful way to come at similarities and differences between the oppression of women and the oppression of black people is that of alliance, addressed to great effect by Janet Jacobsen in her book, Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference (Indiana, 1998). By building alliances instead of asserting identities, we may avoid denying the inevitable interstices between groups which can, nonetheless, be transcended temporarily in the service of a shared goal.

What kind of changes would the women’s ordination movement need to make to build alliances with Black Catholic women and men? Is this something worth doing, or should we stay “focused” on our single issue? If staying focused on our single issue in effect excludes Black Catholics, how analogous are racial oppression in society and the oppression of (some) women within the Catholic church?

Marian Ronan is Associate Professor of Contemporary Theology and Religion at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA.