The Catholic sister Theresa Kane has decided to write a letter to Pope Francis, asking that the Catholic Church finally put an end to the scandal of gender inequality.
This is Theresa Kane’s second letter to a second pope. In 1979, she (holding the office of president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious) asked the pope of that time, John Paul II, during his visit to the USA, to open all ministries of the church to women. This year, after 36 years, Kane once again knocks on the closed doors and writes to Pope Francis: “If the Catholic Church is to be an agent of God’s message in our 21st century, we need to see that the worldwide degradation of women in every country of our planet is the first and fundamental issue of all social and religious violence and does not come from God. [..] We as a Catholic community are called to proclaim to the entire community of our planet, fully and in love, that these scandalous convictions and actions that promote gender inequality are forms and manifestations of idolatry. Where idolatry flourishes, God is not in our midst. We must bring into the center of our everyday lives a God who loves, who cares, who is creative, thereby eradicating all forms of gender inequality. Only then will God be present in our world as the One who is alongside us, as Mother, as Father, as our divine source of grace. I call upon you, Pope Francis, to listen to the women in our church and in the world who have been weeping in distress for years. Only radical (at the very roots) gender equality in church and society will begin to reduce violence, hatred, and other forms of inhumanity in our world today.” The full text of the letter here .
Likewise, from 18 to 20 September of this year, a conference devoted to the issues of women’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church took place in the city of Philadelphia, USA – a week before the visit of the pope of the Roman Catholic Church to the USA. The conference gathered advocates for women’s rights from all over the world, and its timing was not chosen by chance, because the women who work in the Worldwide women’s ordination movement again wish to draw attention to the fact that there is a rift between the message proclaimed by Christianity and the church hierarchy – there is talk of the equality of women and men in the Catholic Church, yet women are denied the right to work in all areas of ministry of the Catholic Church, specifically – in the priesthood. The focus of the conference is the need for radical changes in the structures of the church, and its organizers hope that their message will reach Pope Francis and the whole wider church. The theme of the women’s ordination conference this year is – Gender, Gospel, and Global Justice.
WOW, or Women’s Ordination Worldwide (http://womensordinationworldwide.org/), is a women’s movement in the Roman Catholic Church that was founded in 1996 at the first European women’s synod in Austria. WOW is an ecumenical organization of national and international groups whose main mission is to advocate for the right of women to be ordained in the Roman Catholic Church.
The conference is supported by the US movement “Women’s Ordination Conference” (http://www.womensordination.org/), and such a global gathering takes place only for the third time in the last 15 years. The conference organizers wish to see reforms in the Catholic Church. Mary E. Hunt, at the beginning of the conference, spoke about how feminists have helped develop liberation theology and have shifted the field of theological inquiry from the clerical, ecclesial sphere of scholarship to the lay and community sphere.
Hunt spoke about the work that women should do: “The main question is not whether women will successfully become those that men forbid us to be – whether because of our nature/anatomy or because of their limited understanding of our common tradition – rather, we must see in what way the marginalization of women carried out by men (in the priesthood or elsewhere) reinforces the power structures of various inequalities and injustices all around the world.”
The well-known theologian of biblical hermeneutics Schüssler Fiorenza also gave a presentation at the conference, whose thesis was that Pope John Paul II, known for his phrase “the feminine genius,” as well as for a strict separation of the roles of women and men in life and in the church, was influenced by the European ideas of his time that were popularized in post-war Europe. This theology, according to Fiorenza, emphasized maternity in woman and is based on the general assumption that men and women are essentially different but complement one another. In Fiorenza’s view, the current Pope Francis has taken over John Paul II’s view of highlighting the “female genius.” But the repetition of such an assumption cannot realize itself in the reality of poor women.
The conference also saw the making of a film about three progressive Catholic nuns, “Radical Grace” (http://radicalgracefilm.com/), whose struggles for women’s equality in the Catholic Church have created enormous problems for them with the hierarchy. The film is intended to be shown in communities that are interested in issues of social justice and combating poverty.
Sources
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/womens-ordination-conference-opens-philadelphia (accessed 19.09.2015.)
http://radicalgracefilm.com/ (accessed 19.09.2015.)
http://womensordinationworldwide.org/ (accessed 19.09.2015.)
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/theresa-kanes-message-pope-francis-eradicate-scandal-gender-inequality (accessed 19.09.2015.)
http://www.womensordination.org/ (accessed 19.09.2015.)
Material prepared by Aļesja Lavrinoviča Editing – Milda Klampe