Maybe We Need A Little More Bombast in Our Lives

“Can Women Save the World?” an author of a recent New York Times article asked. Wow, I thought. I was just hoping they could save the Church! 

Tina Brown, founder of the Women in the World summit, former New Yorker editor-in-chief, and host of a podcast TBD, argues that “a new paradigm of female leadership is emerging”. She means, of course, in the real world, not whatever world the Church represents, but the examples are so encouraging – and I would argue translatable – to our cause.

If women took on the pervasive leadership we are championing, they could change – no, let’s go the whole way – save the Church because their leadership would be so different.

One of Brown’s examples of the difference leadership by women can provide is that of the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern. Initially, Ardern was best known as the first world leader to give birth while in office. That fame, however, was soon overshadowed by her response to the recent massacres at Christchurch mosques where “overnight the gravitas in her angular face beneath a hijab became an iconic image of global humanity.” Women all over New Zealand donned head scarves in solidarity and the Arab world responded by projecting Ardern’s image onto the world’s highest building labeled in English and Arabic with the word, “Peace”.

Brown gives other examples: Chicago’s first black female mayor; Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams dismissing the suggestion of her running for vice president by pronouncing, “You don’t run for second place.”; Nancy Pelosi urging her angry post-Mueller report caucus members to “Be calm. Take a deep breath. Don’t be like them.”

She credits women with having a particularly strong and vibrant “responsibility gene” and an amazing amount of deep wisdom that “comes, in part, from the great juggle of her life.”

During thousands of years of civilization, women have evolved to deal with the intractable perplexities of life and find means of peaceful coexistence where men have traditionally found roads to conflict. Women have accumulated rich ways of knowing that until recently were dismissed in male circles of power.

Unfortunately, in the ‘male circles of power’ we know,  i.e. Church hierarchy, ‘women’s rich ways of knowing’ are still by and large dismissed or relegated to “complimentary” status.

Ironically, however, women may just have the unique qualities to “save” the Church because of their accumulated years of navigating its oppression, of surviving its labeling them as “lesser” and of having to work in the real world  in so many of its underappreciated, undervalued, and certainly underpaid positions, notably as family caregiver. Brown captures this idea with: “Women have learned and taught lessons about how to cope with seeming impossibilities in ways that men traditionally – and to this day – have not.”

A heightened sense of responsibility; a long and rich history of dealing with – and triumphing over – conflicting and complex demands and commands; an accumulated profound knowledge and wisdom forged in real life family and community interactions, can make a magnificent leader of the world, and of the Church.

But then, we know that. Maybe, however, we ought to spend more time proclaiming it, getting it projected across the tallest building of the world for instance, and, yes, of course, Saint Peter’s square. Maybe we’re just not making big enough claims.

I like that Tina Brown concludes with a bombastic proclamation: “In drawing on women’s wisdom without apology and pushing that wisdom forward into positions of power, we can “save our world”. Bombastically, I add, and our Church.