Don’t get too ahead of yourself

Did you notice this line in Josepha Madigan’s speech to We Are Church in Ireland? The full sentence is “Yes, we say to our daughters, you can be an altar girl but don’t get too ahead of yourself, you will never be a priest.”

I love that Irish women who have succeeded in politics are willing to speak out about women’s issues in the church. Madigan is Minister for Culture, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht in the Fine Gael government of the Republic of Ireland. She was the coordinator for the party’s Yes campaign to remove the prohibition on abortion in the Irish constitution. The repeal won by over 64%. After that, dealing with women priests must seem easy.

But it’s not. Madigan’s speech is a deeply personal reflection on what her faith means to her as “a member of the Church community, one of millions around the world.” Hers is a big tent church, “big enough to provide a shared pew for the gay couple, the Opus Dei man, the divorced and the newly married couple, the single parent and the large traditional family.” And she affirms that “now in the twenty-first century that many have found the courage to proclaim who they really are out loud. They have found a way to extricate themselves from the dense fog of shame into the light of truth.”

Madigan is an exceptionally well-informed “ordinary” Catholic. I salute We Are Church for inviting her to speak. Of course, the venue had to be changed from Catholic to secular, and there were pro-life protesters outside. But Madigan’s main point is that women are holding the church together, and “if we want our daughters to be there in future generations, we need to open the Church fully to them, as fully equal members in the community of faith.”

Sady Doyle is one of those daughters. Medium is not a spot I expect to read about the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and Lucetta Scaraffia (see “Nuns Too” last week), but here they are. Doyle, a writer, wanted to be a priest from childhood. She phrases the denigration of women in a way I haven’t thought of: “It is a painful question, how much women are worth to God.” And in a way I have: “Catholicism doesn’t just forbid women from being ordained; it requires priests to be unmarried, as if any regular or intimate contact with a woman would corrupt them.”

Doyle addresses the investigation of the LCWR with a wisdom that seems to me so millennial:

Even as the church was wracked with hundreds of sexual abuse cases, the Vatican devoted its resources to scolding nuns who weren’t homophobic enough and raking them over the coals for believing they had the right to disagree with male clergy. Men were not punished for raping, but women were punished for thinking. You can see the problem.

Of course, sexual abuse and misogyny are not unique to the Catholic Church. There are predators and sexists in every congregation and every faith. (In my post-Catholic life, I was briefly a student at Noah Levine’s Dharma Punx, and, well, I sure know how to pick ’em.) I am not an atheist, and I can’t blame anyone who feels closest to God in a Catholic church. Yet the Catholic Church is seemingly unable to clean up its own mess, in part because it refuses to jettison the outdated beliefs about women and sexuality that have empowered its predatory priests.

The reflections of a searcher, so far ahead of herself, and so respectful at the same time. I am sure Madigan wants women like Doyle to find a place in Catholicism, and I am glad that Doyle still cares enough to write about her experience: “I tried to adjust my expectations. I toured convents. But there was a shadow over my faith that never lifted. In time, I discovered feminism.” I like to think that we in WOC combine faith and feminism.

On the other hand, some people don’t worry at all about getting too ahead of themselves, and I wish they would. Tom Roberts, an NCR editor, has a long article, “The Rise of the Catholic Right,” in this month’s Sojourners, a magazine that reaches beyond the Catholic reform audience. This ground has been plowed before, most notably by Catholics for Choice in its “Opposition Notes” series, as well as in NCR by writers like Nicole Sotelo. The ground is the influence of wealthy Catholics with a reactionary (my word) agenda. Timothy Busch and the Napa Institute, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, Steve Bannon, the Knights of Columbus, Legatus and Thomas Monaghan, and the Koch brothers all share their wealth to support theologians and public policy advocacy organizations that do not support gay rights, or contraception, or even Pope Francis’s understanding of Catholic social teaching.

Roberts relies on Stephen Schneck for his most controversial interpretations. Schneck, a Sojourners board member who was director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America, argues that “these groups really are setting themselves up as authorities above the authorities.” They pressure the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to move further and further to the right. They put so much money into the effort that they have developed “deep alliances among the bishops themselves.” That pressure is more than a group of demonstrators with flowers, signs, and music outside a meeting; remember “A Church for Our Daughters” in Huntington Beach? The bishops had all access to the Hyatt Regency blocked.

Roberts does not mention women’s ordination, and his conclusion is really annoying to me:

[Schneck] sees nothing of similar ideological heft or funding on the left. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s because progressives have just given up on the church and aren’t willing to contribute a dime to anything that might go toward it.”

Really? My guess is that our movement is supported by the “mites” of many, many “widows,” so to speak, who have given more of their substance to influence the church toward a more inclusive witness than any of these rich donors, “scribes” who have gotten too ahead of themselves.