In early November, a group of faith activists gathered to discuss the future of the Catholicism and feminism.
The Women-Church Convergence, a historic coalition dedicated to justice in social and ecclesial structures, hosted 14 women and nonbinary people from across the country at Mount Olivet Conference and Retreat Center in Minnesota. As the organization begins to sunset, the gathering discussed how to make sure younger Catholic-rooted feminists are supported in their work.
“It’s been a long-time coming,” said K Kriesel, a nonbinary artist and associate of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary who attended the gathering this past weekend. “I’ve been familiar with these organizations for nearly 20 years, and I’ve been waiting for when they would usher in the next generation.”
The W-CC is a coalition of Catholic feminist organizations from around the world committed to equality inside and outside of the church. It began in 1983, working among Catholic-rooted feminists pushing for institutional equity within the church. As its leaders and members are largely retiring, the W-CC used its resources to fly in young Catholic-rooted feminists from across the nation to reflect on the future of feminist, Catholic-rooted liturgy and social justice.
Led by Katherine Wojtan, executive director of W-CC member organization Mary’s Pence, and Catholic midwife and spiritual director Luisely Melecio-Zambrano, the weekend created space for attendees to find commonalities and communion with one another. Both days were opened and closed with prayer and featured activities where attendees brainstormed and reflected on the communities that they represented, skillsets they could bring to the table, and struggles to show up authentically.
A future for Catholic-rooted feminism?
“The main question is whether a network of feminist leaders rooted in Catholic-feminist social justice is of value to you and to the larger world, and if so, how it can be developed,” Diann Neu, a W-CC member who helped organize the event, told Sojourners. Neu is the co-founder and co-director of The Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual. WATER is one of more than 32 member groups that have joined the W-CC since 1983.
Attendees shared from their experience that feminist women and nonbinary people are increasingly leaving a church that refuses to stand for reproductive justice and gender liberation. Many of them expressed strong reservations about the church’s continued stance against women’s ordination and reproductive care. The only way forward, they said, is reckoning with feminism’s histories of exclusion—including within W-CC.
“In learning about this [Catholic-rooted feminist] work and working on this on my own,” Kriesel said, “I’ve been very aware of the whiteness of the movement, and I am looking forward to amending that historical problem.”
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Even the organization’s name, attendees said, may be a deterrent for nonbinary people joining. But Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of the LGBTQ+ Catholic organization DignityUSA, said thinking critically about language is a natural conclusion to the W-CC’s feminist work.
“The whole sense of the divine has just expanded beyond anything that Catholics of the 1960s and 1970s could envision,” she said. “Gender is a totally different construct than it has been. What does it mean to be feminist-identified, what does it mean to be a woman? Those categories are just blowing up all around us in a way that is really exciting and incredibly challenging.”
Kriesel said that queer liberation is a natural outgrowth of a movement that “historically has asked what it means to be a woman.”
“If you keep questioning what the binary genders are, you are going to eventually arrive at more expansive answers,” Kriesel said.
History of the movement
While the idea of “Women-Church” was groundbreaking in the 1970s and 1980s, attendees said it also excluded queer voices, people of color, and those committed to abortion rights.
“It really was painful at the beginning that folks like the reproductive health movement and the queer movement were considered way too fringe for many in the Women-Church Convergence movement,” Duddy-Burke said.
She has been involved in the W-CC for more than 30 years and fondly recalled how women thought up “new ways to do ritual and new ways to reclaim ritual,” incorporating ancestral practices in modern-day spaces.
The exploration of Catholic-rooted feminist organizing is older than the W-CC itself. In fact, the organization traces its history back to 1977, when the National Conference of Catholic Bishops met in Chicago to discuss agenda items raised by the national organization Call to Action, from women’s ordination to expansion of ministries and the Equal Rights Amendment.
The feminist organization Chicago Catholic Women and other like-minded groups held space to discuss this with the bishops, but only two bishops appeared—and the section about women in the church was entirely omitted from the final 1977 report. Frustrated, the Women of the church Coalition was formed to join together laywomen and women religious working around women’s roles in the church. The Coalition soon grew to include other organizations, including the Women’s Ordination Conference and Catholics Act for ERA, whose leaders gathered twice a year to discuss and endorse timely actions.
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By 1983, the Coalition hosted an international conference, ”Woman-Church Speaks: From Generation to Generation” in Chicago, where members chose the name Women-Church Convergence. The name comes from a term biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza coined: “ekklesia of women,” tied to the Greek word for assemblies. With Fiorenza, Neu translated it to “women-church”—not only inclusive of but led by women.
“I often think of the Women-Church Movement as Catholic women’s take on Vatican II in some ways. There was a lot of this sense of liberation and newness and ways of being involved and a challenge to where authority lay that was the promise of Vatican II,” said Duddy-Burke.
Sunset according to feminist values
Duddy-Burke said it was only natural that W-CC’s practice of respecting the past and the future would lead them to “acknowledge the fact that this version of being together and doing this work needed to sunset.”
Wojtan reflected on how even in sunsetting W-CC, the group was committed to its values.
“It was such a feminist thing to do, to say we want to create a space for something new to be born,” Wojtan said.
Attendees and organizers were eager to situate future work within today’s “fifth wave” of the feminist movement, where collective liberation means explicitly challenging histories and present presentations of white supremacy and oppression of transgender people.
In response to Neu’s question of whether Catholic-rooted feminism is helpful to them and the world, the attendees offered a resounding yes.
Kim Carfore, professor of environmental studies at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit school, also attended the gathering this past weekend. In an email, she noted that attendees brought environmental justice, addressing the harms of colonialism, reproductive justice, and anti-racism to the Convergence.
Julia Zubiago, a public health professional pursuing a Master of Divinity at Boston University, said she hopes for a coalition that is “a big enough tent that we don’t all have to agree on the same things.”
While there is much work to be done, Wojtan is hopeful about the group that the W-CC assembled to explore a Catholic-rooted feminist future. During a time of isolation, dissent, and radical polarization, Wojtan said, “many people feel quite alone and criticized for their perspective, and many people have been traumatized by the church and others for their perspectives.
“I think we can heal and support each other.”
“I often think of the Women-Church Movement as Catholic women’s take on Vatican II in some ways.” —Marianne Duddy-Burke
Emma Cieslik (she/her) is a queer, disabled religious scholar and museum worker based in Washington, D.C.
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