UNITED STATES
Catholics for Choice
By W. David Myers
IT IS WHEN SITTING BEFORE A CLASS full of bright, eager, even devout young university women that the jarring history and current realities of their relationship to Catholicism strike with full force. Honors students all, many among them theology majors, they see in their daily life on campus the work of women—scholars, campus ministers, counselors—whose talents and accomplishments can only inspire to greater heights. They demand every week to hear something of the “woman’s voice” in European history. Every week, I dutifully try to set something out. We talk about St. Teresa of Avila of course, and a host of intelligent, ardent women who led vital, active, and meaningful lives within the church. In return, the hierarchy has variously demanded the images, minds and bodies of these women without giving something in return except the promise of heavenly happiness. Whether women have created mystical music and visions or served uncomplainingly as servants and cooks for priests and monks, the Catholic hierarchy has v iewed them as instruments, useful but second class. And yet women stay. They have always stayed.
The history of Catholicism’s relation to women is a long and tangled one, involving dazzling, beautiful myths based on female sanctity and a more depressing, mundane reality rooted in exploitative labor and exclusion from power. The contrast between the two explains much of the tension in Catholic life and culture, from the beginnings until today. The New Testament displays the tension. Women were among the first and most persistent disciples of Jesus—the last to remain at the cross and the very first to witness to the Resurrection of Christ.
In the culture of early Christianity, women as owners or managers of houses where Christians met were active in welcoming and fostering the community. Over time, wealthy women could have a profound influence in granting land and founding monasteries. This is not to say the early church was any kind of golden age for gender equality in Christianity. It was instead a time of continual crisis, in which Christianity grew at the margins of society, always under threat of persecution and suppression, constantly forced to make concessions to its members in order to survive. The letters of St. Paul are full of greetings and references to women’s activity, and at the same time they admonish women to silence and duty, forbidding them to preach.
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