MargeryKempeGal

All essays written by Donata Lewandowski Guerra Questions? Email me at OldWilmington@nc.rr.com

This essay is the reflection written for the April Sustained Learning Seminar meeting of The Learned Clergy Initiative at Duke Divinity School, Women's Vocations: Leadership, Power, and Constraint in the Christian Tradition with Dr. Teresa Berger.

A VIEW FROM THE CATHOLIC ARCHIPELAGO*

Kathleen Bliss’1952 “Life and Work of Women in the Church”, a study of Protestant women of that period, makes several statements that have a particular resonance with regard to Catholic women in 2004. At the same time, the Duke Divinity School Pulpit and Pew report, Edward C. Lehman, Jr.’s “ Women’s Path into Ministry: Six Major Studies”, has not been able to include Catholic women in its survey. It appears that Catholicism itself lags a good half-century behind Protestantism in its use of women’s full gifts, as evidenced by the Vatican’s refusal to affirm the Holy Spirit’s call to Catholic women for ordination.

Bliss’ 1952 churchwomen were found to “live a very different life from their grandparents” and to “think differently about themselves”. Non-Catholic women of that epoch were “seldom stimulated to use their varied gifts” while those of “independent cast of mind” found it “difficult to be at home in the church”. Bliss insisted on “the uselessness of theoretical arguments about what women can or ought to do”, quoting Simone de Beauvoir’s call to woman to “display her possibilities, not stand and argue”.

Recognizing that the immigrant Catholic Church no longer exists in America, that women of this epoch are educated for professions on a par with men, and that abilities to lead are not limited by sex, American Catholic women need not adjust their perceptions of themselves, their natures, and their gifts to those of European men of Vatican City nor to Americans whose clerical careers depend on the formers’ goodwill. However, in the face of theological intransigence on the part of the hierarchy, it is still left for many of us who call ourselves “practicing Catholics” to recommit ourselves to what some may consider an institution with doors firmly closed against some of us.

While my own moderation of a small faith group/house church in my Catholic Diocese is the most satisfying lay activity I have known, it is particularly unsettling to have again witnessed in Eastern Europe, as I did last year, a 1950s’ style of Catholicism in which religious women peel potatoes and organize dining for priests and seminarians while the latter engage in the “manly” work of church administration, sacramental ministry, and church building. I viewed this situation from the vantage point of a guest at the Diocese of ------ while visiting my priest cousin, and, also, while dining as a guest of another cousin who serves in the convent attached to the ......... Seminary in the Diocese of ...... While the latter, a group of nuns, was gracious, loving, and devoted, I wonder at the extent to which their many gifts may be unduly limited to stereotypical “women’s work”. This year, I sensed that these nuns, due to the strenous expectation placed upon them at Easter Week, were far more tired than usual. The fact that my cousin, suffering from a disc problem, was placed on “lighter duty” means, no doubt, that she will carry fewer bowls and dishes to refectory tables for young seminarians.

As witness to this aspect of the “European Catholic Church”, at least in Eastern Europe, I have come to agreement with Lutheran Pastor J. Elise Brown that we “would be well served as a church if we would focus more on the practice of Jesus than on the practices of our own Judeo-Christian heritage”. And if the “world turned upside-down by Jesus Christ”, proclaimed by Presbyterian minister Mary Jane Hitt, is indeed that of the Kingdom of Heaven said to exist now on earth, should not some of the clerics I encountered prepare and serve their own meals rather than have women wait upon them like servants?

I truly am at the point where I must find ways to laugh lest I weep inconsolably.

*The celebrated Italian novelist, Laura Bosio (Annuncianzione, I dimenticati), recently told me she considers the Catholic Church less “country” than a formation of islands inhabited by diverse groups within its system. Between some of these islands there may or may not be bridges. I concur.

MEASURING UP IN GOD’S IMAGE
Copyright 2004 MargeyKempeGal

(This essay is the reflection written for the February Sustained Learning Seminar meeting of The Learned Clergy Initiative at Duke Divinity School, Women's Vocations: Leadership, Power, and Constraint in the Christian Tradition with Dr. Teresa Berger. Readings used as a basis for my reflection are listed below. )

In telling fashion Judylyn S. Ryan’s essay Spirituality and/as Ideology in Black Women’s Literature, The Preaching of Maria W. Stewart and Baby Suggs, Holy states that “Western theology seeks to identify the rights and responsibilities of the human person through an assessment of God, the prototype of righteousness” and consequently that “racial and physical variations within the human family have been construed as degrees to which specific groups ‘resemble’ the invisible God.”

Immediately the workings of this kind of “Western theology” are evident in Unitarian pastor George W. Burnap’s 1840’s The Sphere and Duties of Woman. His exhortation that woman embrace the formation of character called for in motherly vocation, thus enabling her to partner with Providence in overcoming physical and intellectual shortcomings and the “narrowness of her sphere of action”, is no doubt a left-handed compliment that women themselves, like Catherine Beecher, might have accepted only too readily had not strongly competing voices arisen from other women who took both offense and exception to Burnap’s kind of prodding. Beecher’s 1837 An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism – predicting violent consequences for women if they participated in public forums involving Congressional debate – traded Burnap’s insulting unctuousness for a poetic fantasy of “romantic gallantry” and “chivalry”. As there truly is no romance or chivalry in war, we who look back at this ante Bellum caution with all our knowledge of the carnage to come, know that women’s (and men’s) arguments on behalf of enslaved human beings made a clamor far preferable to the alternate means by which the disagreement was resolved.

However, Beecher, an educator, and the outspoken Grimke sisters, both anti-slavery speakers, were,
by race and economic status, initially able to access and exert far greater power than women of color, like Mother Leaf Anderson and Maria W. Stewart, or of working class backgroud, like that of Salvation Army co-founder Catherine Booth. When God is imaged as a powerful white man with European features (and stiff upper lip), it is only too difficult for those not meeting these descriptives to “measure up”. Thus, Stewart antagonized even Black churchgoers with her “unladylike” stridency, while Mother Leaf vindicated this kind of resistance with a widespread (and lucrative) early Twentieth Century spiritualist ministry – but one several degrees removed from conventional church models. Likewise Catherine Booth drifted from Methodism with her spouse to employ another model of church in the Salvation Army. As Pamela J. Walker’s A Chaste and Fervid Eloquence, Catherine Booth and the Ministry of Women in the Salvation Army describes, the usurping of urban theatrical and publicizing conventions by Booth’s Hallelujah Lasses enabled these women to employ their voices in evangelizing activity that also taught them grass-roots’ economics.

While unctuous and old-fashioned disapproval has mitigated today (and may be easier to dismiss), many hierarchical churches still view female sex as viable hindrance. This viewpoint deserves the same bold contempt of a Catherine Booth who faced down Reverend Arthur A. Rees’ attempts to silence women and, figuratively speaking, fulfilled her intention all the more “determined that fellow shall not go unthrashed.”, but when will we truly see an end to others using their intrepretations of scripture and tradition to treat woman as though she is not made in God’s image?

Copyright 2004 MargeryKempeGal


(This essay is the reflection written for the February Sustained Learning Seminar meeting of The Learned Clergy Initiative at Duke Divinity School, Women's Vocations: Leadership, Power, and Constraint in the Christian Tradition with Dr. Teresa Berger. Readings used as a basis for my reflection are listed below. )

Like Peter and the other fishers in Luke’s Gospel (5:1-11), we find our lives changing even as we set out from shore to cast nets into unknown waters. A former Brazilian missionary* suggested that anyone heeding the Gospel challenge does not so much answer an invitation as consent to become a new creation of God’s.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel , Oleanna, the wife of a rigid Baptist proselytizer whose single-minded pursuit of righteousness for himself, family, and Congolese congregation brings tragedy to their lives, reflects: “To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story.” Human nature carries in itself a desire to explore and to exploit. One person’s or nation’s or religion’s “mission” can become nightmare for the target of enlightenment. In the end, only the Gospel can endure, penetrating and changing believers’ hearts – and their own stories – in spite of the follies and farces history might witness.

Late eighteenth century Friend Patience Brayton traveled arduous distances to share her experience of the sweetness of God’s presence. The Boston Female Society for Missionary Purposes enabled early nineteenth century women to pool financial resources to train women whose poor choices had brought them to physical desperation. Mid-nineteenth century Baptist women enabled women physicians to practice medicine for women in cultures where any medical care (from men) was denied them due to the “restricted conditions of their lives”.

Amanda Berry Smith, step by physical step, followed her call to evangelize late nineteenth century African-Americans because “the spirit of the Lord touched my heart”. In the resolution at the heart of Kingsolver’s story, the wife and daughters of a man who failed miserably to approach life in fully human fashion incorporated their truths into the stories of their lives in order to help the world as they helped themselves -- striving for American Civil Rights, world health, and African agrarian improvement.

Many of us, as young girls, might have seen a story of this same kind of lesson from the well-loved movie version of Pollyanna. A fire and brimstone preacher repents his righteousness and cries “God, what have I done?” while Aunt Polly literally “takes down her hair” to be loved and to love, changing herself, and, in the process, the very story of her world.

*Rev. George Ribeiro, S.A., Parochial Vicar, St. Andrew the Apostle Catholic Church, Apex, NC

Readings:

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998)

Readings in Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition, ed. Barbara J. MacHaffie (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), nos. 42, 48-53.

Copyright 2004 MargeryKempeGal


(This essay is the reflection written for the January Sustained Learning Seminar meeting of The Learned Clergy Initiative at Duke Divinity School, Women's Vocations: Leadership, Power, and Constraint in the Christian Tradition with Dr. Teresa Berger. Readings used as a basis for my reflection are listed below. )


Did the Reformation – both Protestant and Catholic – ease restrictions on women’s activities in fulfilling the Christian mission? Luther’s commentary on female preaching for his “Misuse of the Mass” insists on maintaining women’s silence in “mixed” gatherings to serve “order”, “discipline”, and “respect”; his words evoke the same rigidity he no doubt had known as monk immersed in the Catholic ethos. Calvin, in his Institutes, makes a more reasonable acknowledgement to changes he sees as fitting adaptations to time and place (an argument seemingly not recognized in Catholicism until the mid-1960s), but is the duty he insists on from “free conscience… without superstition yet with a pious and ready inclination to obey” but a milder version of the authoritarian and controlling pressures one would have known before eschewing Rome? Is the liberation Jesus preached in the Scriptures shortly upon these followers or do they trade one form of control for another?

Women of this era who were attempting to deepen faith in community – for Christianity is nothing if not group endeavor, where adherents “apprentice” with one another, learning the faith in joint pilgrimage – faced greater obstacles than barriers constructed upon sex. Life itself was at risk from zealots of either stripe. The hostility endured by Jeanne du Jussie’s Catholic nuns in Geneva and the torture inflicted on Anabaptist Elizabeth of Leeuwarden in 1549 demonstrate that credal extremism, just as in post-modern times, is the bane of human experience. In the words of Elie Wiesel, religious fanaticism “makes of God an accomplice” to the worst human nature can effect.

And so all of us are left to pray for relatively peaceful times when one might make gentle headway like Katharina Schutz Zell whose maternal imagery in her reflections on the Our Father show us the underpinning of the Christian heritage is the God who loves His earthly family. What stark contrast to the dissent lived out between Christian blood sisters, one Catholic, one Calvinist, in Jeanne du Jussie’s account!

Even though her god-image reflects Europe’s Catholic monarchical hierarchies, Teresa of Avila continues to foster her friendship with the Divine in relational terms. Soliciting the aid of co-religionists, despite the risk of their own obtuseness, possible jealousy, lack of discretion, and the very real possibility that some of her scrupulosity amounts more often than not to an unhealthy obsessive-compulsion, Teresa demonstrates that in the end one’s “freed” conscience, aided by intellect, reflection, and a good measure of intuition, remains the ultimate determinant of the path that leads to God.

Readings:

Readings in Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition, ed. Barbara J. MacHaffie (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), nos. 29-31,33

Teresa of Avila, Book of Her Life, chs. 8, 9, 10, 23, 24.

Elsie Anne McKee, "Katharina Schutz Zell and the 'Our Father' in Oratio, ed. Emidio Campi et al. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999) 239-247.

Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity. ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 199-211

All essays written by Donata Lewandowski Guerra

(This essay is the reflection written for the November Sustained Learning Seminar meeting of The Learned Clergy Initiative at Duke Divinity School, Women's Vocations: Leadership, Power, and Constraint in the Christian Tradition with Dr. Teresa Berger. Readings used as a basis for my reflection are listed below.)

copyright MargeryKempeGal 2003

In our mid-1980s Chicago Catholic parish, George Kane, the pastor, sponsored a weekly “Search for Faith” morning meeting. Refusing to “nickel and dime people to death”, this irascible 60 year-old priest hired a sitter for our small children. Consequently, the group included mostly young mothers. We were, in a sense, the daughters George never had, even as he envisioned a movement of women who could support our local faith community. His reflective idealism mirrored Christine de Pizan’s high purpose in summoning up a Christian women’s assemblage in her early 15th century The Book of the City of Ladies George’s was the only voice that ever said, “You can’t leave the Church, because we need you.” (and first railed “Don’t dare call me ‘Father George’! How would you like me to call you ‘Mother M----’?”)

Since that time, women have become overwhelmingly visible in Catholic ministry. The seminarian who assisted George in Chicago decided against the priesthood one semester before ordination. The young man whose 1991 ordination I attended in Boston (and who was part of the small group I helped found at my parish in that city) is on permanent leave of absence. A Jesuit I befriended in the Raleigh diocese in the mid-1990s has left that calling for marriage.

Like the communities that Saint Clare and others founded, the women’s circle around me continues, no longer meeting in rectory living room or kitchen, as in Chicago or Boston, but in each other’s houses; my North Carolina pastor terms us a “house church”. In contrast to the “food asceticism” referenced in Dr. Teresa Berger’s Of Clare and Clairol, Imaging Radiance and Resistance, our group is characterized by many shared meals (and recipes) as we gather to reflect on the Sunday scriptures and look for ways to implement their call.

In comparing Clare’s life to other women saints’ vignettes from a childhood book, Rosalie Mary Levy’s 1956 Heavenly Friends,A Saint for Each Day, the one common feature I detect in these stories is concern for the poor. Hagiologies vary -- not all were Medieval consecrated virgins living communal lives, Roman era virgin-martyrs, spouses vowed to chastity in marriage, royalty/nobility struggling with families, or teachers of young women. Most held in common a call to serve those in need. No doubt, the poverty of their technologically inferior times was far more physically unendurable than today’s; modern conveniences and “social nets” ameliorate the kind of misery that had existed in Europe prior to the Modern Age. Although advanced education and economic opportunities enable today’s women to “give” more, an accelerated lack of time characterizes our Post-Modern epoch -- one also marked by obsession with celebrity and affluent lifestyle trappings -- and demands that women continue prayerfully in serving ministry, even in patriarchal settings as harsh and corrupt as those unveiled for us by the Medieval era-women Margery de Kempe and Catherine of Siena.

Just as Roberto Rusconi’s essay Women’s Sermons at the End of the Middle Ages, Texts from the Blessed and Images of the Saints shows women preaching and teaching, the November 6th The Dialog, the newspaper of my childhood Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, Delaware, pictures contemporary women sending us their own messages: Benedictine Sr. Patricia Gamgort (page 2) serving battered women on Maryland’s Eastern Shore for 20 years; retreat director Sr. Rose Mary Dougherty (page 4) exhorting women: “True contemplation leads to charity, slow down, pray right, and discover union with others”; Franciscan nun Andrea Likovich (page 5) bringing us her music ministry, and her fellow religious Celeste Crine (page 8) reminding us that “religious life is vital to the local church.” Frequently this publication highlights lay women as well.

Where are the men in this same issue? On page 7, three priests strut the catwalk in fashionable mufti for a women’s charity fashion show under the caption “Why are these priests out of uniform?” All of page 12 is taken up with a Catholic News Service article “Some Minnesota priests urge discussion on optional celibacy”.

Medieval art images women who “voiced” their faith. Recent photos of two young North Carolina Catholic laywomen have jarred us in obituaries. Garner Religious Educator Kathy Hardy smiles radiantly from the NC Catholic, a Raleigh publication that had previously featured a “farewell story” on terminally ill migrant-activist Sr. Evelyn Mattern. It was the Cary (N.C.) News that pictured young chemist and mother Lisa Ann Benkowski, who donated “time and talent for the advancement of faith and education”. How dispiriting that the Diocese of Raleigh publication rarely recognizes the activity of local laywomen except in tragic circumstances!

These are perhaps the very images my friend George had in mind -- and the voices that did speak -- when he sought so strongly a company of good women.

Readings:

Readings in Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition, ed. Barbara J. MacHaffie (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992). nos. 21-26

Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity. ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 134-58, 173-95

Teresa Berger, "Of Clare and Clairol: Imaging Radiance and Resistance," Journal of Feminst Studies in Religion 18 (2002): 53-69

(This essay is the reflection written for the October Sustained Learning Seminar meeting of The Learned Clergy Initiative at Duke Divinity School, Women's Vocations: Leadership, Power, and Constraint in the Christian Tradition with Dr. Teresa Berger. Readings used as a basis for my reflection are listed below.)

Copyright 2003 MargeryKempeGal

The four canonical Gospel accounts of Mary of Magdala’s experiences at the empty tomb leave her with a variety of epithets that are far more telling for the believer than some later theologians’ or hagiographers’ distortions as exposed in Katherine Ludwig Jansen’s Maria Magdalene: Apostolorum Apostola.

In Matthew 27:56, Mary serves as “guardian” opposite the sepulcher, a counter to Pilate’s own devised guard who become “like dead men” while Mary becomes a “courier” of the Good News, a “rejoicer” and a “meeter” of the risen Lord. In Mark 16:9, as first recipient of the Lord’s appearance (in contrast to her fear of the young man seated on the tomb and refusal to heed his charge to spread the message in the first part of that chapter), she becomes an “initiator” who runs to the companions as “announcer”, but must face their incredulity. Luke 24:8 shows Mary as “rememberer” of the Son of Man’s prediction of His own rising, but she is fated to be a “teller” who is not believed by the Eleven. John 20 contrasts Mary to the believing disciple and perhaps a confounded Peter who, confronting an empty tomb, then “went home again”. Mary remains as “weeper” and “looker” and is rewarded as “converser” and “teller” of Whom she has seen.

This Mary we meet, visually portrayed as a flesh-and-blood participant in events that cannot be explained scientifically, also is shown to us as philosopher and thinker in Karen L. King’s Prophetic Power and Women’s Authority: The Case of the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene). Mary’s question to the Savior on the nature of prophetic vision is much like a literary device or conceit analogous to a poet’s calling upon the Muse for inspiration. The explanation she receives regarding the mind’s function in the spiritual sphere has an intelligence and acceptability far beyond the absurd and laughable suppositions of Tertullian who imparted gender (a corporeal characteristic) to a soul when another’s “vision” supplied the proof.

Although King’s essay liberates the reader in showing how the Gospel of Mary itself liberates prophecy from sexuality, one is again brought back to the sorry reality that in its admirable task of assessing written texts in order to reduce confusion among believers, Orthodox Christianity had to defeat Gnostic Christianity as an heretical organ. Consequently, an authoritarian, literal, and legalistic religion brooking no dissent superceded an intuitive, imaginative, and poetic approach to faith in the Risen Lord. The unearthing of the Nag Hammadi texts in 1945 shows that the Holy Spirit cannot be defeated, even by men.

Readings:

Matt 27:55-28:10, Mark 15:40-16:11, Luke 8:1-3, 23:55 - 24:12, John 19:25; 20:1-18.

Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity. ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 121-41, 57-96.

(This essay is the reflection written for the initial September Sustained Learning Seminar meeting of The Learned Clergy Initiative at Duke Divinity School, Women's Vocations: Leadership, Power, and Constraint in the Christian Tradition with Dr. Teresa Berger. Readings used as a basis for my reflection are listed below.)

Copyright 2003 MargeryKempeGal

From Cardboard Character to Protagonist: Rewriting the Script

The essays from The Women’s Bible Commentary, particularly Ringe’s When Women Interpret the Bible and Wordelman’s Everyday Life Women in the Period of the New Testament, outline a bleak situation stemming from the androcentric orientation of the written Word.

The fact that a Roman power structure – tough, self-confident, world-wide reaching, and mighty – gave way to a Latin Rite in the Western Church where an exclusively male hierarchy has made much of these values in service to the Church Militant makes the present task for women in ministry seem almost insurmountable.

Fiorenza’s scholarship in Missionaries, Apostles, Coworkers: Romans 16 and the Reconstruction of Women’s Early Christian History provides a strong argument for high leadership activity of women like Phoebe and Prisca. However, there are still too many equivocating voices in the present-day ecclesial structure, voices speaking from a vested interest in preserving male pre-eminence, that are too quick to continue to dismiss these women as “deaconesses” for believing womenfolk or as hospitality providers.

I see a parallel to this dismissal in arguments against Jesus as having siblings. “Brothers” we are told, were but “cousins”. Thus Mary’s perpetual virginity is upheld. This preservation of a long-standing rule – that only a celibate male can be ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood -- and insistence on Mary’s perpetual virginity (wherein she takes on, more and more, the appearance of a cardboard character) are linked. The priesthood starts with a distorted view of the Mother of the Son of Man from a self-preserving instinct.

On the other hand, Meyer’s Women in Scripture spurred my re-reading of the Book of Judith. In a sense, this telling begins much as a present day action-adventure film (one geared to the desirable young-male demographic). The woman protagonist’s surprising entrance at the mid-point of the conflict between the Jewish nation and the Assyrian general Holofernes does not reduce the story to the present day equivalent of a “chick flick”: Judith is intellectual, physically attractive, and can wield a blade as well as any man. Somehow the Jewish nation and culture is able, in this writing, to humanize a woman character and proclaim her leadership. The placing of Holofernes’ head into a food sack creates a visual metaphor for the experience of women who must fight their way in a man’s world.

Readings:

Elisaveth Schuessler Fiorenza, "Missionaries, Apostles, Coworkers: Romans 16 and the Reconstruction of Women's Early Christian History, " Word & Word 96 (1986): 420-433.

The Women's Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, Ky: WJKP. 1992), 1-9, 244-251, 390-396.

Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament, ed. Carol Meyers, Toni Craven, and Ross Shepard Kraemen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000) The Book of Judith (found among the Apocrypha), and the entry "Judith". 104-106.