HOW CAN YOU CALL YOURSELF a Catholic and be a feminist?" "How can you call yourself a feminist and be an active Catholic?" Both of these questions have been proposed to me--at times, with gentle curiosity, at other times, with aggressive challenge. Sometimes it is a Catholic who asks; sometimes a feminist. My usual response is, "Well, I am." The response is brief but open to dialogue if the questioner is interested.
The two questions point to tensions in my life that are not easily lived with nor readily resolved. Being a Catholic feminist and a feminist Catholic has demanded of me a fidelity that goes beyond ideology and religiosity and the ready answers and easy community each can provide. For me the struggle has been to engage in as honest a dialogue as possible between the two realities as I seek my personal truth in relation to both. I have also had to learn to live with the human frailties and sinfulness, as well as the moments of grace, in all three realities--the church, the feminist movement, and myself.
I am a Roman Catholic. That statement does not so much identify the church of my affiliation as it names a fundamental dimension of my identity. I am who I am today because I was born into an Irish Catholic family; attended Catholic grade school, high school, and college; entered a community of Catholic sisters, the Adrian Dominicans; and have lived my adult years as a person publicly identified with the church.
I am a feminist. That statement does not so much identify my politics as it defines the meaning of myself as a woman. To be a feminist is to assert the fundamental equality between the genders. Feminism shapes my vision for the transformation of the church and the world, a vision which gives abiding commitment, direction, and energy to my life's work for justice and peace.
In truth, I am enriched by both communities--the feminist and the Roman Catholic--but fulfilled by neither.
The feminist community affords me a home as a woman. The passion that informs that simple statement must be read within the pervasive context of patriarchy in which all women live their lives, whether consciously or not. For me patriarchy includes those symbols, language patterns, attitudes, structures, systems, and social and cultural mores that constantly impress upon all women their inferiority and dependency.
Patriarchy breeds an environment that allows, even encourages, the abuse of women. That abuse ranges from simply ignoring and trivializing women, to demeaning women as sex objects for humor, advertising, or personal pleasure, to sexual and verbal harassment, to violence, and rape. And there are the more subtle forms of violence that keep women "in their place"--poverty, diminishment, marginalization, exclusion, dependency. To live as a woman in a patriarchal world is always to live vulnerable to potential or actual abuse.
The feminist community has courageously named the evil of patriarchy with its diminishment of women and its concomitant diminishment of men. It has analyzed the negative and destructive effects of patriarchy, as it has played itself out in the social, cultural, political, economic, and ecclesial structures of our world.
More important, the feminist community has affirmed our value as women. It has given vision and energy to many women, and some men, to move beyond any system that diminishes the value of a person. It has identified its solidarity with all liberation movements that put the essential value and beauty of the human person, not ideology, at the center. And it has recognized its common cause with efforts to move beyond racism, economic classism, cultural, economic, or political imperialism toward a human community of mutuality and respect among all persons.
BUT THE FEMINIST COMMUNITY does not meet all my needs. The feminist critique has rightly identified the deeply entrenched patriarchy of the institutional church with its historical misogyny that continues to manifest itself, albeit more subtly, today. But it has not answered the deep hunger of my soul to be in touch with the living tradition and the community of my Catholic faith.
The church remains rigidly insensitive to women's experience. Women remain voiceless and powerless as the institution structurally excludes them from any role in final decision making, even in matters which affect their lives as women. Furthermore, the church as institution refuses to take seriously the questions women are raising. But the church is more than the institution.
The church is also the abiding community of believers, that community of women and men who declare that life has meaning beyond the experience of oppression, suffering, violence, and sin that shape and destroy so much of its grace and beauty; who recognize in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus the promise and the reality that good will be triumphant; who celebrate this hope and this reality through its rich liturgical heritage.
The church is the community of women and men who place this hope and this reality within the rich and varied tradition of faith expressions. It is a community that includes a history of struggle and dissent as it moves with interminable twists in its search across the ages for ever more authentic expressions of the church God calls it to be.
It is within this community that I live as a Catholic feminist, a feminist Catholic. My feminist commitment to move the church beyond patriarchy is not only for the liberation of women but also for the liberation of the church, for the credibility and integrity of the gospel in our time.
I also believe that the Catholic tradition has something to offer feminism. While I wish the church would enter into serious and mutual dialogue with women about their experience, I believe its fundamental respect for life, even though it is not fully consistent in its emphasis, offers a legitimate challenge deserving far more serious consideration than many pro-choice feminists would allow.
If the church would enter into dialogue with women, it might begin to understand that often the choice for abortion is but the logical outcome of the patriarchal value system and structure. This value system emphasizes control over all life processes and a structure supporting the male experience of freedom, independence, and autonomy, while subordinating the female experience of interrelatedness with life processes. A consistent ethic of life demands that we confront patriarchy. And to work toward a post-patriarchal world is to be profoundly committed to life.
The church's long tradition of identifying the importance of the common good as the seed bed for the individual good provides a healthy corrective to the individualism that shapes the American ethos and the feminist movement within that ethos. Within this context, the church as a global community and the global community of women call the Western feminist community beyond its national and ideological boundaries to participate in transforming the unjust structures of our world that sustain massive poverty, suffering, and violence.
A feminist and a Catholic: My self-definition makes me somewhat an alien in both communities. But I choose to live my life in this tension, because I believe so strongly in the truth that each community brings as we move through the mystery of life toward the potential, yet present, realm of God in my church and in our world. And I have discovered I am not alone.
Maria Riley, O.P., was a research associate and coordinator of the Women's Project of the Center of Concern in Washington, D. C. at the time this article appeared, and was the author of Women Faithful for the Future (Sheed and Ward, 1987).
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