Women’s History Is Now!

Women’s history month often invites us to look at women in the past, a valuable exercise that increases our knowledge and perspective. What strikes me about stories I am seeing this year about Catholic women is that they are living – and doing their work – now.

Jeannine Gramick reflects for Lent on the desert years of her ministry to LGBTQ Catholics and the healing that has come from the letters of Pope Francis acknowledging her work. “This was unknown and, at that time, dangerous, parched territory,” she writes. I want to acknowledge the revolution in Catholic thought her work began. She would be the first to say “not alone” but we need to recognize the change her time in the desert accomplished.

In the London Tablet, Joanna Moorhead includes Gramick among fifty women who “are just a tiny fraction of the women who could, in a Church that drew fairly and equally on the gifts of all the faithful, be sharing in its leadership.” Moorhead briefly issues all the caveats: they are living their best lives anyway, doing terrific work, etc., but she recognizes that the structural exclusion from full ministry is a real limit. “Women could – and should – be redesigning the landscape in a Church that, in 2022, is in urgent need of fundamental change.” Officially, she means. I would argue that, like Gramick, they actually are making those fundamental changes, but wouldn’t it be better if they were not forced either to work in a sexist system or to leave it?

Meet them: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helen Alford, Chiara Amirante, Tina Beattie, Myra Brown, Simone Campbell, Noella de Souza, Ingrid Betancourt, Celia Deane-Drummond, Marianne Duddy-Burke, Teresa Forcades, Ephigenia Gachiri, Joan Chittister, Mary John Mananzan, Ivone Gebara, Jeannine Gramick, Mary Haddad, Nontando Hadebe, Hille Haker, Margaret Hebblethwaite, Martha Heizer, Teresia Mbari Hinga, Sheila Hollins, Soline Humbert, Elizabeth Johnson, Colette Joyce, Helena Kennedy, Lucy Kurien, Mary McAleese, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Kate McElwee, Eva Menjivar, Penelope Middelboe, Chidinma Nnoli, Donna Orsuto, Norma Pimentel, Helen Prejean, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Deborah Rose-Milavec, Virginia Saldana, Lucetta Scaraffia, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Anne Soupa, Casey Stanton, Shanon Sterringer, Natalia Teguhputri, Marie-Jo Thiel, Doris Wagner Reisinger, Carolyn Woo, Phyllis Zagano.

Moorhead provides capsule biographies of each, and I’d argue that many are known because of news coverage like that generated by the recent Root and Branch Synod and other events. But so what? This is an international list; women beyond North America and Europe, especially from Africa and India, are noted. I’m sure there are people you would have included or left out. The Tablet welcomes additional names and so do I. For example, I’ve written about change agent NCR editor Heidi Schlumpf before; you can see her on YouTube with Kate McElwee in conversation at Sacred Heart University last week.

The Brooklyn Tablet also published an article to commemorate International Women’s Day. Maybe your local diocesan effort did, too. As the Rome correspondent of the Catholic News Service, Cindy Wooden has limits but she is doing our work as well. This article is “on the one hand, on the other,” but it does include both hands.  

Wooden interviews Carolyn Woo, on Moorhead’s list as former CEO and president of Catholic Relief Services. Woo has a new book, Rising: Learning from Women’s Leadership in Catholic Ministries. “There’s still sort of a lack of real hospitality to women,” Woo says, and I’d say, “to say the least.” Then Wooden summarizes Woo’s thinking: “it is important to counter the notion that women leading Catholic charitable, social service and health care ministries are involved in something less important to the life of the Catholic Church than the priests who celebrate Mass and the sacraments. A career becomes a ministry, Woo said, when ‘the focus is on the other’ and making the lives of others better.”

“Feminine Genius?” Woo admits “I’ve always been a little allergic to that term.” “Platitudes and stereotypes,” she says. It’s important to read that in a diocesan paper, as well as Woo’s opinion that unwelcoming attitudes discourage young women to the point of leaving the church.

“International Women’s Day is a commemoration particularly celebrated in Italy where women are given mimosa flowers and a night out with their female friends,” is a rather lovely note Wooden adds to the detail of Vatican appointments and conferences she also includes.

CNS also reports that Pope Francis spoke to one of these conferences that focused on Sts. Teresa of Ávila, Catherine of Siena, Thérèse of Lisieux and Hildegard of Bingen, who are doctors of the church, and on Sts. Bridget of Sweden, Edith Stein and Catherine of Siena, who are co-patrons of Europe. Another list, not an unworthy group, but generating a “feminine genius” comment from the Pope: these women are examples of “the courage to face difficulties; the capacity for being practical; a natural desire to promote what is most beautiful and human according to God’s plan; and a far-sighted, prophetic vision of the world and of history, that made them sowers of hope and builders of the future.”

He is the one who appoints saints, and we have another good list of people doing just that and capable of much more, courtesy of Joanna Moorhead. The Pope knows who Jeannine Gramick is and what she has done. Maybe she will be the first saint from that list, but like all the others, she has plenty of ministry left! A mimosa for them all!