The Sounds at the Center

Being Catholic and being feminist both constitute my identity.  You might assume there’s a scuffle at the core of my existence.  Rather than hostility, I experience a fruitful tension in how both reveal what it means to be human.

Born into a Catholic family, I grew up in a parish like many in the Chicago area, where the “publics” (kids who went to public schools) were aliens, seen at a distance.  Rosary was celebrated weekly on our block, and daily Mass before school was common.  Not by chance, our Catholic territory did open onto the wider world of solidarity with strangers, civil rights, lay ministry, and the works of charity.  In the mail came the cheap Catholic Worker newspaper and the glossy Maryknoll magazine with pictures of missionaries. Joining them in Africa someday was an early dream.  With the Vatican Council came encouragement to read the signs of the times and carry our faith into the whole of life.  Being Catholic is less cultish than many suspect.  Later, being Catholic meant countless connections to history, both great and infamous.  God was not a substance or principle but a personal being in whose image we are made.  If God seems distant, there are the saints testifying to our motley human beauty.  There are the labor organizers marching under the cross and the union banner.  Being holy takes many forms, but this religion does not abandon thinking to mere obedience for long.  God is truth and embracing this world is central to following Jesus.

I am fortunate to be born in this era.  For all of history, being female meant becoming a woman, what Simone deBeauvoir calls the “second sex,” one whose possibilities are sharply curtailed by sex and gender.  One of history’s great upheavals unfolds as women move into higher education, politics, the professions, public life, and arts in droves.  “It’s a girl” does not have the ring of destiny in many places that it once held.  Passengers on planes are still startled when the pilot speaks as a woman but in some of the most traditional nations on earth women have become leaders.  When the thick fabric and forces of history are on the move, there’s no going back, no matter how good the old days seem to some.  “All that is solid melts into air,” said Marx of capitalism’s power to dissolve and remake the social order.  With rapid change comes the struggle to maintain a humane existence as making money, ecological crisis, and “career comes first” constrict our horizon.

How can intelligent, modern women stay with the Catholic Church?  This question bites when Church leaders gather and the exclusion of women is striking.  Ordinary people have no trouble finding Jesus embodied in women’s lives.  The Catholic imagination, even among its leaders, has not failed for long.  The incarnate God is always out there ahead of our dogmatic pronouncements, a horizon that never deserts us entirely and one we cannot surpass.  Being Catholic and feminist belong together when I ask what is true and what do I love.

Kindly,

Dr. Jeanne Schuler
Associate Philosophy Professor