Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

WOMEN-CHURCH

1243 WOMEN-CHURCH Mary E. Hunt WOMEN-CHURCH IS a global ecumenical feminist religious movement with roots in the Roman Catholic tradition . It consists of groups, individuals, and organizations that seek to be church without the trappings of patriarchal theology and practice. Women-church holds together the twin aspects of sacrament and solidarity, engaging in worship as well as social justice work. The movement began in the United States in the 1970s as a consequence of feminism, the Vatican’s refusal to ordain women, and the growing consensus among progressive Catholics that new models of church were necessary. Women-church groups are also active in Australia, Germany, Iceland, Korea, and Switzerland, among other countries. They are characterized by a desire to create communities with both religious and secular foci that approximate a “discipleship of equals,” a term coined by feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. This biblical notion signals a move away from hierarchical governance toward democratic practices, away from a corporate model toward small base communities . It involves a concern with political as well as theological issues. Decades after its inception, women-church remains a small but powerful movement that attempts to live out new ways of “being church,” a phrase that comes to English from Spanish and means functioning in the fashion of, while not necessarily being connected to, an ecclesiastical organization. At the same time, the movement pressures Christian denominations, especially Catholicism , to become more egalitarian. Women-church cooperates with church reform groups such as the Catholic Organizations for Renewal but differs from them in seeking to create concrete alternatives now, new models for contemporary communities. It does not seek to tweak the existing model by adding women to its clerical , hierarchical mold but to “be church” on women’s terms. Women-church arose out of the Catholic feminist movement’s exploring the ordination of Roman Catholic women. In 1975, following the ordination of Episcopal Church women in the United States, a group of Catholic women led by Mary B. Lynch, a social worker and feminist , convened a gathering in Detroit, Michigan, under the rubric “Women in Future Priesthood Now—A Call for Action.” This was an explicit public call for the ordination of Roman Catholic women to the priesthood and an implicit challenge to renew the institutional Church so that it might reflect the growing consensus that Vatican II’s call for lay leadership needed to be taken seriously. Part of this vision included fundamental changes in the priesthood, beginning with the abolition of mandatory celibacy. Clearly, Catholic women were in no danger of being ordained! The ensuing discussion served both to empower women as theological protagonists capable of making important contributions to the Church at large and to alert the Catholic hierarchy that the days of male-only ministry and decision making were numbered. This context formed part of the framework for the emergence of women-church. In 1978 a second meeting on ordination was held in Baltimore, Maryland, after the Vatican had made clear in its “Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood” that women did not “bear a natural resemblance” to Jesus, thus were not fit to be ordained. This recalcitrance on the part of the hierarchical Church was a source of deep disappointment but not surprise. It raised the question whether priesthood would ever be open to women and, if so, whether that priesthood would be sufficiently egalitarian and democratic that progressive women would ever aspire to be ordained. This formed another part of the foundation of women-church, which as a movement has avoided a clergy of its own and relies on a “priesthood of all believers” approach to ministry. A number of Catholic women in the United States received theological degrees in the 1970s with the hope of being ordained. Moreover, those women predominantly were members of religious congregations, engaged in innovative ministerial work. They served as pastoral ministers in parishes, prisons, hospitals, and university campuses, settings that heretofore had been off-limits to women. They went on to create whole new areas of ministry, for example, with battered women, persons with disabilities, and others who had been ignored by the male clergy. Women theologians produced original, insightful work in virtually every theological discipline—church history, systematic theology, ethics, and biblical studies. Their writings showed how women and women’s insights had been systematically ignored, dismissed, or rejected in the formation of contemporary Christian theology. More important, women scholars went on to...