WOC Announces New Latina Outreach Initiative

Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) is pleased to announce the hiring of Lilian Medina-Romero as Outreach Coordinator to lead “Escuchando a las mujeres,” a listening session for Spanish-speaking women in Catholic parishes in the United States. Ms. Medina-Romero is a passionate human rights advocate who developed a career creating and implementing programs to empower Hispanic immigrant women survivors of violence in the United States.

Financially possible through a grant from the JustPax Fund, this position seeks to create safe spaces for Latina women to assess their parish’s pastoral care, spiritual growth, and opportunities, and provide constructive feedback to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The last systemic effort by the Roman Catholic Church to listen to the voices of Catholic women in the U.S. occurred in the 1980s, when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops held listening sessions in which more than 75,000 Catholic women participated. Today the demographics of the U.S. Catholic Church continue to change in a way that reflects the changing U.S. population at large, with 40 percent of U.S. Catholics identifying as Hispanic (V Encuentro 2018).

While the bishops are undertaking an outreach initiative, Encuentro, to seek to better serve the growing Latin American community in the U.S., we believe a dedicated effort to survey the experiences of Latina women is essential. Women are systematically excluded from decision-making, ordination, and leadership roles within Church structures, and experience various cultural and social barriers that marginalize or minimize women’s voices.

Escuchando a las mujeres comes at an opportune cultural moment: The #MeToo (#ChurchToo #CatholicToo) movement has placed a new emphasis on amplifying the narrative of women’s experiences. In the Church, the 2018 Synod called the inclusion of women’s voices “a duty of justice,” and stated: “The absence of women’s voices and points of view impoverishes discussion and the path of the church, subtracting a precious contribution from discernment. The synod recommends making everyone more aware of the urgency of an inescapable change.”

Escuchando a las mujeres is a dedicated project of a larger, five year collaborative effort, Listening To Women, sponsored by the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests, Australian Catholic Coalition for Church Renewal, DignityUSA, FutureChurch, RAPPORT (Renewing a Priestly People, Ordination Reconsidered Today) and Women’s Ordination Conference.

###

Contact:

Kate McElwee, Executive Director
+1 607-725-1364 (USA)
+39 393 692 2100 (Italy)
kmcelwee@womensordination.org