Human
Contemporary Catholic Belief and Action
The mission of ARCC is to bring about substantive structural change within the Catholic Church by seeking to institutionalize a collegial understanding of church where decision making is shared and accountability is realized among Catholics of every kind and conditio n.
Once people start to believe change is possible,
the drive to achieve it accelerates.
- Patrick Sullivan, ARCC President
Not long ago several of us from a church reform group tried to formulate an appropriate public response to the Vatican’s announcement that canon law was to be changed to allow the official installation of women as lectors and acolytes.
What we really wanted to say went something like: “A thousand thanks, dear kind sirs, for your gracious and generous permission to continue performing the little liturgical tasks that women have been doing in many parishes for decades. Thank you for overriding the 1949 law prohibiting women from proximity to the altar under pain of excommunication. Thank you for revoking the provision in the 1969 General Instruction of the Roman Missal allowing clergy to exclude women from the altar space in the event they permitted women to lector at Mass.”
In the end we swallowed hard and drafted a harmless press release commending the Vatican and holding out the hope of continued progress on behalf of women.
Structural misogyny is not dead, not in the Church and not in the world outside the church doors. But misogyny can have deadly consequences, and often does.
In an article entitled “Violent misogyny is a threat to half our population. We need to call it what it is: Terrorism,” published in The Globe and Mail November 30, 2019, Elizabeth Renzetti applies the concept of the ideology of misogyny to a wide range of conventional violence against women. Identifying rage against women as an ideology, and not simply a breakdown in an individual relationship, or a covert prejudice, can help us make sense of the global and historical ubiquity of aggression against women. More importantly it can bring to light the social assumptions that motivate and implicitly justify one-on-one violence against women.
Sexism, as distinguished from misogyny, acts to justify and rationalize a patriarchal social order on the cognitive level, while misogyny is defined as the system that polices and enforces its primary principles and governing norms. Sexism justifies; misogyny enforces, or, in the memorable phrase of philosopher Kate Mannes, “Sexism wears a lab coat. Misogyny conducts witch hunts.”
What causes even greater concern is the demonstrable link between the ideology of misogyny and far-right movements, particularly those built on a platform of forced complementarity of roles and the racist belief that (white) women must be confined to the home to bear more (white) babies. Recent mass murders, Toronto, Parkland, Christchurch, Oslo, and the recent mass shooting of Asian-American victims of whom a majority were women – were carried out by assassins often steeped in far-right ideologies marked by anti-woman screeds and anti-feminist outbursts.
Before the pandemic women were starting to take to the streets to protest discrimination against women in the Church. On March 8, 2020, International Women’s Day, numerous groups of women across the world who were associated with the Catholic Women’s Council mounted street protests in favor of full human rights for women in the Roman Catholic Church. The women’s strike movement that began in a parish in northern Germany in early 2019 spread across the German-speaking world as the Maria 2.0 movement. In February 2021 women in a number of German cities nailed a list of demands to church doors, reminiscent of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, to call for access to all church offices irrespective of sex, distribution of power in the Church, and transparency and justice for victims of sexual violence perpetrated within the Church, to name a few.
So what could this mean for women’s visibility as full equals in Church ministries and governance? What if the Catholic Church could recognize the deep roots of fear of women and women’s bodies in its own theology and history? And perhaps more importantly, who does it? Merely inviting a few token women to contribute “women’s voices” then ignoring them, has come to an end, just as opening a few tiny niches in the all-male Church does not address the deep, all-pervasive failure to affirm the baptismal equality and dignity of all Christians.
Hold onto your hats because the roller coaster ride has begun. The pandemic may have slowed it down a bit, but the momentum is both exhilarating and unstoppable.
Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church
arcc-catholic-rights.net
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Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church, ARCC,
PO Box 6512, Helena, MT 59604-6512