On being ‘doubly othered’

By Margery Eagan: On Spirituality columnist, Crux

August 12, 2015: Read the Full article on Crux
“Doubly othered.” That is how Gina Messina-Dysert describes her life as a faithful feminist and a faithful Catholic. She is suspect within Catholicism for her feminism. She is suspect among feminists for her Catholicism.

“Doubly othered.”

What a perfect name, really, for those of us like Messina-Dysert who are not quite with the program either. We tread lightly. We speak gingerly, ever aware that too-overt a feminist stance could alienate even friends within our parish. Yet any ardent embrace of Catholicism demands an explanation, a justification, from feminist friends who cannot fathom why we’d ever, ever choose to stay.

Messina-Dysert may be four times “othered,” actually.

She comes from a conservative Catholic family of recent Sicilian immigrants. Her grandmother built a shrine to Mary in the middle of her home. A cousin at a family get-together just asked, not in a particularly welcoming tone, “Why don’t you become an Episcopalian? Why are you trying to ruin our religion?” How could Messina-Dysert support birth control, same-sex marriage, and woman priests and claim membership in a religion that opposes it all?

She’s “othered” as well in academia. Typically the rule there is to keep your faith secret until you’ve got tenure and it’s too late for colleagues to second-guess your brainpower. But Messina-Dysert is a Catholic theologian. She admits keeping what she calls the “f” word on the down low when she was looking for a job. And during her first days at Ursuline College, a Catholic women’s school in Ohio where she’s a dean, a male colleague turned to her and said, “I am highly disturbed to know you identify as a feminist.”

The beleaguered Messina-Dysert is even “othered” at church, the conservative parish she grew up in and where her 6-year-old daughter will receive the sacraments. The priest greets parishioners heartily as they exit Mass. A big handshake, “nice to see you,” enthusiastic high-fives for the kids, she says. For her? “He responds very coolly. ‘Hello.’ That’s it. It’s very noticeable.”

To top it all off, Messina-Dysert gets the suspicious raised eyebrow from fellow feminists. To many, if not most, active participation in a patriarchal church — whether it’s Catholic, Mormon, a Muslim mosque, or an orthodox Jewish temple — is a sellout; a submissive, naive, intellectually dishonest, self-defeating, and even self-loathing knuckling under to the boys who call the shots. The only act of integrity is to leave.

It’s no wonder then that Messina-Dysert co-founded the website “Feminism and Religion,” where other “othereds” share their schizophrenic stories and buck each other up.

Now these stories are the subject of a new anthology, “Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay.” Messina-Dysert edited it with a Muslim woman and a Jewish woman. Inside, 45 women detail their high-wire act: standing up for women’s full equality in religions where women, basically, need not apply.

“Read this book,” says Temple University religion professor Laura Levitt in praise of the anthology, “to plunge immediately into the world of why women bother sticking with the world’s sexist religious traditions.”

One of the Catholic essayists, Kate McElwee, offers the answer she received from famed feminist Catholic theologian Mary Hunt. “We have a responsibility to speak this language. This is what a Catholic looks like,” Hunt told her. And then McElwee understood. “My inheritance of Catholicism came laced with a duty to study, to question, and most of all, to refuse to suspend feminism in the name of the sacred,” she said. “We cannot be spoken for by the patriarchy.”