Francis, to his credit, says again and again that a “deeper theology of women” is needed. I take this to mean that at some level he knows that he doesn’t know what this “feminine genius” is—and nor does anybody else.
Rita Ferrone, “Francis’s Words about Women” (2017)
It is safe to say, at least in the view of the Vatican, that Catholic laywomen are having a moment. Numerous Catholic media sources for the past few years have cautiously noted Vatican efforts to place more laywomen in leadership positions and involve them in decision-making. News stories point to the appointment of two laywomen as undersecretaries in the new Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life, for example. Likewise an article reports (in a tone that may or may not be deliberately sarcastic) that “the Commission for Latin America held a plenary assembly on the issue of women, and, in an exceptional move, invited some 15 women to participate.” What’s more, the often progressive Voices of Faith conference, a gathering of women designed to amplify Catholic laywomen’s voices from around the world, has been held within the Vatican walls for the last four years. Pope Francis himself has repeatedly called on the church both to give women more power and to listen for their voices, most notably appointing three female consultors to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a historic first, and instituting a commission to study the viability of a female diaconate.1
These attempts to include laywomen should be applauded, but let’s look a little closer. Not long after the appointment of the two undersecretaries, the cardinal who heads the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life rejected three of eleven female speakers for the Voices of Faith conference, without any explanation. As it turns out, the cardinal determined each was too outspoken on issues of LGBTQ and women’s rights to be approved, even though Voices of Faith had always been careful to avoid the question of women’s ordination, at the Vatican’s insistence. The conference’s organizers chose to move the gathering outside of the Vatican rather than change their program. Digging through the new Dicastery’s fine print also helps us see the limits of the sudden opening to laywomen’s leadership. In a recent revision of the Dicastery’s statutes, the new Article 9 states: “The Dicastery works to deepen the reflection on the relationship between men and women in their respective specificity, reciprocity, complementarity and equal dignity. Valuing the feminine ‘genius,’ it offers a contribution to ecclesial reflection on the identity and mission of women in the Church and in society, promoting their participation.”2 Written into the governing language of the body that oversees the laity worldwide is a definition of men and women as distinct and complementary. Not surprisingly, “the feminine ‘genius,’” so flattering a phrase, remains undefined. To do so would require a listing of essentialist traits guaranteed to produce some unpleasant headlines for a church already struggling to retain young women.
Pope Francis’s statements on women during his pontificate have been, at times, encouraging, but they are of a piece with the statutes of the Dicastery. He speaks firmly against wage discrimination and calls for more women theologians, for example. He knows that Catholics should have women in the room when vital conversations take place and decisions are made. But Francis has an understanding of gender that is still rooted in the postwar world. In a 2015 general audience he said, “We still have not grasped fully the things that the feminine genius can give us, what society and we can be given by women who know how to see things with another pair of eyes that complement men’s ideas.”3 In other words, laywomen’s importance lies in their essential difference. To question this conception of womanhood is to bring chaos. “Gender theory is an error of the human mind that leads to so much confusion,” Pope Francis has said.4
Despite my deep respect for Pope Francis, I will say frankly as a Catholic and a scholar that I do not believe that gender theory is an error of the human mind. Nor, as is already apparent, do I believe in female essentialism. It has been proved beyond a doubt by historians that the way gender is constructed and performed changes over time and in different contexts; neither “gender” nor “female” is fixed. So where does this leave me, reflecting on my research in sight of the Pope Francis hand puppet my daughter made in her kindergarten class on the first day of his pontificate? (“His name is Francis, Mommy, and he only has one lung!!!”) Here I am, a Catholic laywoman myself, raising a daughter and son in the faith, watching history repeat itself as laywomen are once again flattered and invited to the table, but only if our genius is proved sufficiently feminine. What can we take away from the laywoman project that might help us navigate the gender politics of this moment?
The liturgist Rita Ferrone, in reflecting on Pope Francis and women, has written, that he “evidently feels deeply that women are important and he knows they are undervalued in the church. But when it comes to the point of saying why women are important and what is valuable about women, there is less clarity. The second underlying problem implicit here is that women are not easily ‘defined’ and perhaps should not be.”5 Pope Francis, so forthright on a host of issues, is in a pickle. He likely knows that much of what was written on gender in the church prior to the 1960s is not helpful, steeped as it is in the language of submission and obedience (a language he does not choose to use as it endangers the equality he seems to desire for women). Yet what has been written since the 1960s is heavily influenced by women’s liberation, and therefore jettisons the idea of essentialism. He wants new women theologians who will espouse essentialism, and strong laywomen who will presumably make their voices heard while enforcing their own restriction under complementarity.
The Catholic laywomen in this study would likely find this situation all too familiar. They were also living through a moment when their participation and leadership seemed suddenly welcome. They too heard the flattery, even as the barriers around their participation were erected and enforced. They fielded and even more frequently posed the questions of what a Catholic woman is and what gifts she has to offer this community. But when they responded to those questions—over a decade’s worth of thoughtful reflection—the official church seemed not to hear their answers, or willfully ignored them.
Rather than be disheartened at the continued exclusion of laywomen from positions of authority and the well-worn justifications for that exclusion, as it would be quite easy to be, I prefer to take what lessons we can from the women who have been here before. The first lesson, I think, is that laywomen need to speak fearlessly and relentlessly on questions of their own identity. They must also confront how rigid constructions of gender and the clericalism they support weaken, and in fact threaten, the church entire. Although not all of the laywomen featured here were in agreement, the very fact that they spoke publicly and for so long in an attempt to redefine who they were for a new age challenged the notion that gender was unchanging and only the ordained had a right to define it. Their work was not solely about themselves; they were trying to fix a contradiction at the very heart of the modern church.
The second lesson is that the women who wrote and organized and taught these ideas altered the church, even though it is tempting to believe at times that nothing has changed. I’m not saying that the American Catholic Church is no longer gendered or that it does not discriminate against women. However, the needle has moved in significant ways, and we must acknowledge that. If we don’t, we slight what these women accomplished. My daughter serves at the altar; my son crowned Mary in second grade. Their catechesis is free of the gender essentialism that would have my daughter believe her primary vocation is self-abnegation and my son’s is headship. That outlook did not simply disappear on its own: laywomen and their allies needed to confront it and dismantle it inch by inch.
Third, let us say a word in praise of Catholic women’s organizations, which trained women for leadership and found a home for their talents. More important, however, these organizations served as educational enterprises, and were the means by which curious, committed laywomen disseminated ideas they hoped would transform Catholic culture. All of the communities in this book carried on their projects of transformation within established Catholic structures, often in cooperation with clergy, women religious, and occasionally laymen. With energy and imagination, established organizations as well as new networks of laywomen could serve a similar purpose in the twentieth-first century.
The final lesson, though, is that the laywoman project could only accomplish so much if it could not gain women real power in the church hierarchy. Laywomen spent years attempting to answer the questions now being posed about gender, and as far as the hierarchy is concerned, it’s as if it never happened. At the very least, the official church needs to do more than offer them a chance at the microphone, or a seat on a committee. If laywomen are to be offered a voice, they must also be given the authority to make decisions that have weight, and the power to exercise that authority, even over a man in a roman collar. At a bare minimum, they need the power to speak on their own self-conception, vocation, and identity—in a diversity of voices—and have it be reflected in church teaching. The lived experience of the church changed as a direct result of the work of the laywoman project. This is their legacy. The laywomen of this moment have the power to create a legacy of their own.