During the 1970s, many Catholic women religious entered what they called “political ministry” in order to work for social justice. Such ministry was mandated, they believed, by the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent publication of two important Church documents—”A Call to Action” by Pope Paul VI and “Justice in the World” by the General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops.
One organization created during this period to encourage political ministry is Network, a Washington-based group with between 6,000 and 7,000 members nationwide. Founded by a core group of Catholic nuns, the majority of Network’s membership is women religious.
In one of its brochures, Network defines itself as “a Catholic social justice lobby.” Each year, Network chooses issues from the agenda on Capitol Hill and lobbies for or against particular legislation related to those issues. They keep their members posted and instruct them when and how to pressure their federal representatives.
Last year, Network opposed funding for MX missiles, for continued deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe and for space weapons research. They supported a freeze on the production, testing and deployment of nuclear weapons. They also lobbied against all economic and military aid to Central America, “pending peaceful negotiations and policies respecting human rights.” They supported the Civil Rights Act of 1984, the pay equity bill that provides survivor benefits to spouses of vested employees who die before retirement and the Export Administration Act, which prohibited bank loans to South Africa.
They do not, as a rule, lobby for legislation to restrict abortions, according to Network National Coordinator Nancy Sylvester, I.H.M. The reason, she said, is that Network members are already reached by the efforts of many pro-life groups. Network avoids duplicating the efforts of other lobbies in touch with its members, she added.
Network chooses issues on the basis of their “ability to effect systemic change toward a preferred world vision and a feminist perspective,” according to its brochure. Network’s preferred world vision and feminist perspective have been outlined in a paper by two of its board members, Francine Cardman and Margaret Farley, R.S.M. They are theology professors at Weston School of Theology and Yale Divinity School, respectively, and they are know among women religious for ,.their” writings in “feminist theology.” Farley was one of the signers of the controversial Oct. 7, 1984 New York Times advertisement by Catholics for a Free Choice.
In their paper, “Testing the Vision,” Farley and Cardman describe the norms of justice according to both the Gospel and Catholic social teaching as “the dignity of the human person, the need of persons for community and the equality of all persons precisely because they are human beings.” Therefore, it concludes, “all patterns of social relationship based on the domination and subordination of categories or classes of persons must be rejected. For this reason, it is necessary to insert the concerns and claims of women into the political agenda, whether national or international.”
Given this understanding of Christian justice, specific structural changes are needed in American civil society, Farley explained in a telephone interview. For example, the Equal Rights Amendment should be passed and political leadership opportunities should be expanded for women. Is it not a paradox that one who condemns domination and subordination should make female leadership per se rather than responsible leadership such a priority? Are women exempt from the temptation to become tyrants?
Farley disagreed that ERA could possibly harm the rights of women by abolishing laws that are designed to protect them, such as their exclusion from combat duties in the military. “Special treatment laws are not discriminatory if they are relevant to what the law is all about,” she said.
For example, she continued, someone should not be hired for a job involving heavy lifting if he or she cannot meet certain physical requirements. But those physical requirements are not limited to one sex. Therefore, weight or height or strength are relevant criteria for selecting candidates for such a job, while one’s sex is not.
The assumption behind this is that one’s sex simply is not relevant to one’s role or duty or activity; the only things that matter are one’s qualifications, qualifications that have been drafted with a “feminist perspective.” According to this logic, if a woman is deemed “qualified” to be a soldier, she should be allowed to be one.
Sylvester said that she knew of a man who was more patient and tender than his wife. Should not he be the one to stay home with the children, she asked. In asking the question, she denies that God has ordained the woman to be the nurturer and that by accepting her maternal responsibilities in faith, she will be given the grace to become more patient and tender. Such virtues any Christian, whether male or female, should develop. But the patience and tenderness given to a woman who seeks them must be indeed extraordinary to have won such praise in civilization’s greatest art and literature.
Network, then, rejects the Judeo-Christian understanding of equality before God, an understanding which also acknowledges fundamental differences between the sexes that regulate their responsibilities. “Obviously there are differences between men and women,” Farley said. “But are they relevant? Certain theories say they are. I myself don’t see it that way.”
Among those “certain theories” are those aspects of Catholic social thought Farley and Cardman failed to mention in “Testing the Vision,” Even the documents of the Second Vatican Council uphold the Church’s understanding that men and women have distinct natures and separate roles.
The Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World states: “With respect to the fundamental rights of every person, every type of discrimination, whether social or cultural, whether based on sex, race, color, social condition, language or religion, is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God’s intent.”
The key phrase is “with respect to fundamental rights.” A woman has a fundamental right to be treated with dignity and not as a piece of property, to have and to express her opinions, to be educated and to make use of her gifts and abilities. In other words, she has a right to those things that enable her to fulfill her God-given purpose.
But she does not have a “right” to be a priest, when the Church has not made it her duty to be one. She does not have a “right” to an abortion, when she has an obligation to God to care for the life he has entrusted to her. If she is a mother, she does not have a “right” to pursue activities that interfere with her responsibilities toward her children.
The same document that upholds the fundamental rights of women also notes the need of young children for the care of their mothers at home. “This domestic role of hers must be safely preserved, though the legitimate social progress of women should not be underrated on that account,” it reads. Vatican II’s Declaration on Christian Education exhorts Catholic schools to “pay due regard in every educational activity to sexual differences and to the special role which divine Providence allots to each sex in family life and in society.”
The Church is not contradicting herself. She is wise and just to uphold basic human rights on one hand and to exhort her flock to fulfill basic human duties on the other. What becomes of children and family life when mothers abdicate their maternal responsibilities? If the Creator of male and female had intended the men to fill the job, why do women alone have the make up to carry, bear and suckle new life? Why are women the sole possessors of that remarkable potential to develop a deep and mysterious bond with a newborn babe?
But Farley and Cardman cast aside the Church’s affirmation of sexual equality in fundamental rights and sexual differentiation in complementary responsibilities. In its place, they assert the modern, secular notion of radical equality between the sexes.
The paper explains the rejection of traditional Church teaching by stating: “Justice can have many meanings, but in this [Catholic] tradition it invariably means some form of affirmation of persons and groups of persons according to their concrete reality. When there is growth in understanding the reality of persons, the content of norms of justice changes. Radically new insights into the reality of persons and the relationships between them have come in the last century ….New insights into the dignity of the person and the essential need of persons for community have translated most explicitly into new understandings of the principle of equality.”
The paper never presents these “new insights.” But according to Sylvester, they are those that have been provided by modern social science. Psychological and sociological testing has demonstrated, she said, that we are socially conditioned from birth onward. Therefore, it is not known conclusively whether cultural definitions of male and female shape us as men and women or whether our natures as men and women shape our definitions. “I don’t think the verdict is in,” she said. Such thinking implicitly denies that male and female have been created by God. In fact, it denies the existence of human nature itself and erroneously assumes that man is his own maker and the author of his purpose.
“Children need care and fostering,” Sylvester continued. “But is it necessarily divided by sex? I don’t think that is a prevailing truth. Women are the bearers of new life, but does that bring with it certain instincts? There are a lot of questions, and we don’t have all the answers.”
She may have been honest enough on the telephone to admit that Network does not have all the answers. But Network members are led to believe by Network material that the group is an authentic interpreter of Catholic social teaching. Network claims to be giving “a positive and effective form to prophetic witness.” As prophets they proclaim that Catholic teaching justifies the elimination of distinctive male and female roles.
Farley and Cardman seek to dismantle the division of labor between the sexes not only in civil society but also in the Church. According to Farley, her views on the Church are not relevant to the work of Network, which aims to change civil society. But it is important for Catholics to recognize that those behind Network are battling against the distinctions between men and women on two fronts—in the political arena and in the Church.
Arguing that “qualified” women should be allowed to enter the priesthood, Farley said the Church, like civil society, denies women “access to decision making roles.”
In an April 13, 1984 National Catholic Reporter article, Cardman explained that the feminist critique of the Church is not limited to the male priesthood but extends to the structure of authority itself. “Feminists reject hierarchy as a social pattern,” she wrote, “because it exalts a few at the expense of the many, raising up ‘servants’ who ‘lord it over’ those they supposedly serve, and causes people to be objects rather than subjects of their experience, whether political or religious.”
Irrelevant to Farley and Cardman is the choice Jesus made to have men shepherd his Church, a choice that has been continued to the present day by apostolic succession. Equally irrelevant is the fact that Jesus was a man who revealed God to us as our Father. Jesus’ manhood and his selection of male apostles were necessary not to communicate the content of divine revelation, Farley said, but to get the attention of a patriarchal society. The continuation of a male priesthood and the emphasis on Jesus’ manhood today “hinders the fullness of the gospel,” she added.
In conclusion, the basic assumption underlying the feminist vision the leaders of Network have for society and the Church is that the differences between men and women have no relevance for the right ordering of human affairs and have no role in mediating Christian precepts.
This is not the place to demonstrate fully the falseness of this assumption. That would take another article or even a book. But let it be said that this assumption stands in radical opposition to many thousands of years of Jewish and Christian thought.
Down through salvation history, holy men and women who have encountered God have revealed to us a God who is a father, a lover, a king and a shepherd. The faithful are trusting children, betrothed virgins, devoted subjects and dependent sheep. In passing onto us the mysteries of the two most important relationships on earth—the covenant between God and his people and its reflection in the covenant between husband and wife—we have been given a rich heritage full of male and female imagery, full of truths that transcend the limitations of culture and time.
When God decided to enter history in human form and dwell among us, he affirmed and enriched these images and truths, when he was utterly free to change them and set the record straight. The human spirit both male and female has responded and continues to respond with faith and joy to the revelation Christ has entrusted to his Church.
It remains to be fully seen whether the attempts to tamper with this heritage in the Church and in the human institutions that have been shaped by her is the creative work of the Holy Spirit or the destructive work of the spirit of this passing age.