The Long Haul

Our Joan of Arc is inspiring me again this week (see March 31 post). Emma Gonzalez is quoted by Joan Walsh in The Nation:

About the flurry of inadequate but promising gun-safety measures passed [into law] since Parkland, she says: “It feels like: they tried to take a giant step—and then they tripped. I’m not gonna knock it, it’s a good first start.” That’s the kind of “we’ll get ’em next time” equanimity activists normally take years, or even decades, to perfect.

The movement, Gonzalez tells reporters, “is probably gonna be years, and at this point, I don’t know that I mind. Nothing that’s worth it is easy. We’re going against the largest gun lobby. We could very well die trying to do this. But we could very well die not trying to do this, too. So why not die for something rather than nothing?”

St. Thérèse dressed as St Joan of Arc.

“Nothing that’s worth it is easy.” Roman Catholic women are not literally dying for ordination, but the intransigence and ignorance of some can be soul-crushing. Small steps seem so small after so many years. The Latin American bishops propose a meeting of worldwide bishops to discuss increasing opportunities for women at all levels of church decision-making, at the instigation of Pope Francis. The diaconate will be studied by a papal commission and two books are published in Italian that examine the office; that may foster more discussion in Rome. Quebec bishops consider married priests a better alternative to closing parishes. (The Tablet, April 10, 2018).

I am especially feeling this today (Wednesday, April 18) because of a mini-reunion of four of us from the Core Committee of Southeastern Pennsylvania WOC. Bonded for over thirty years, we’ve been in it for the long haul, but sometimes I feel it’s been easy. We have worked with great people for all of those years. We have had fun. We have stretched our minds and our talents. And we have counted the small steps as we have welcomed new workers to the fold.

As I look at this week’s Catholic press, I think, who has our backs? Who stands up for women? America has a full-out defense of Humane Vitae by a woman professor at a Catholic seminary: back to the contraception debate! Commonweal at least is dealing in this century as a male author presents a rather nuanced approach to how the pro-life movement can appeal to millennials. NCR has too many articles about women to count, but I especially enjoyed editor Dennis Coday’s note in the print edition about “The Pope Francis Shuffle,” (April 20-May3, 2018) which identifies this pattern:

The Francis two-step. We’ve seen this many times with Francis and on many topics. We haven’t seen it when he is talking about the expansiveness of God’s mercy or defending people living in poverty or displaced by war and economic injustice. All that is pretty straightforward.

One of the most vexing issues where we see Francis doing the shuffle is on the issue of women in the church. He invites a broader application in church life of the “feminine genius” (I’m still trying to figure out that phrase), but he holds the door to ordination firmly shut.

I am so glad the Pope is speaking out for the causes Coday mentions, and for many others. I also appreciate the excellent staffing decisions made in recent years by NCR in its editors and reporters and writers. There, women’s ordination is not relegated to the distant future and reproductive issues are not approached as tentatively as in prior years. In “Abortion and the Muddled Middle,” a woman doctoral student in theology presents a less-muddled and more pro-choice position than the Christians described in the book she reviews, which is about those who find difficulty in both absolute pro-choice and pro-life positions.  Acknowledging that this is where most Catholics are is a big step.

Most “practicing” Catholics, that is. I am energized by the radical visions of some of those who comment on this blog. Many women and men have taken the kind of action they recommend by stepping outside the authority structures of the church and being church ourselves. But I cannot leave this big, slow boat without giving it a push in the direction I want it to go.

I have avoided most of the five-year evaluations of Pope Francis, but I want to conclude by commenting on one. Robert Mickens stresses that impatient reformers don’t understand the pope’s interest in the collegiality of bishops, in the synodality of priests and people, or in the margins and not the center. He ends by critiquing “the mutant gene in our Catholic DNA – papolatry.” Yes, guilty as charged, yet spending my time articulating another vision in the recognition that without agitation, the Spirit does not move the waters.

It’s a long haul, but one worth making.