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DETERMINED BUILDERS, POWERFUL VOICES l 209 Whether or not American sisterhoods continue to attract feminists, those sisters who came together to establish the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and to heighten awareness of global injustice have laid down a legacy for young people in the Catholic Church who are increasingly attracted to some kind of social justice work. If many Catholic women in the parish have grown tired of fighting for feminist ideals, their persistent voices have raised a series of issues that continue to be discussed within the Church and, given the cultural climate, cannot be ignored forever. If Catholic feminists today sometimes seek extraecclesial sources of spiritual nourishment, they do so partly as warriors preparing for a long campaign. Military language is not out of place here; the Catholic Church and the army are similarly hierarchical institutions insistent on obedience that harbor different forms of protest. As Mary Fainsod Katzenstein has shown in Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest Inside the Church and Military (1998), women in the military have turned to the courts and Congress, whereas feminists in the Church have used “discursive” protests. Catholic feminists write books and articles, organize workshops and conferences, conduct quiet protests, and join spirituality groups to explore radical pathways toward faith and justice. Most of the women who participate in such activities consider themselves members of the Catholic Church who are fearless in their attempts to reshape the institution. Perhaps they are best understood as guerrilla fighters within a recalcitrant institution with a very long history. If they sometimes appear to be underdogs or to occupy marginal positions within the institution, it would nevertheless be unwise to dismiss their vision of the future. In the late 1960s, during the Vietnam War, when someone asked Ho Chi Minh what he thought of the French Revolution , he is reputed to have said, “It is too soon to tell.” SOURCES: Papers from the groundbreaking Grail conference (1982) can be found in Janet Kalven and Mary Buckley, Women’s Spirit Bonding (1984). For an introduction to Catholic feminist theology, see Susan Ross, “Catholic Women Theologians of the Left,” in What’s Left? Liberal American Catholics, ed. Mary Jo Weaver (1999). Pope John Paul II prohibited any discussion of women’s ordination in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (May 30, 1994), English translation in Commonweal, June 17, 1994. A collection of liturgical prayers and comments about women celebrating Eucharist can be found in Sheila Durkin Dierks, WomenEucharist (1997). A more extensive study of this phenomenon is Miriam Therese Winter et al., Defecting in Place: Women Claiming Responsibility for Their Own Spiritual Lives (1994). Helen Hull Hitchcock’s article “Women for Faith and Family: Catholic Women Affirming Catholic Teaching,” describing the emergence of antifeminist Catholic women, and Sandra Zimdars Swartz’s article “The Marian Revival in American Catholicism: Focal Points and Features of the New Marian Enthusiasm” on contemporary Marian apparitions, can both be found in Mary Jo Weaver and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America (1995). A survey of contemplative practice among laywomen is Virginia Manss and Mary Frolich, The Lay Contemplative: Testimonies, Perspectives , Resources (2000). Extensive bibliography and history of the women’s movement in the Catholic Church can be found in Mary Jo Weaver, New Catholic Women: A Contemporary Challenge to Traditional Religious Authority, 2nd ed. (1995). DETERMINED BUILDERS, POWERFUL VOICES: WOMEN AND CATHOLICISM IN NINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETHCENTURY QUEBEC AND CANADA Carolyn Sharp SIX MILLION ROMAN Catholic women live in Canada. Three million are found in French-speaking Quebec where they represent more than four-fifths of Quebec women. One and a half million Catholic women live in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, where they form one-third of the female population. While most of these speak English, nearly one-third speak French as their first language, and many others are recent immigrants to Canada. The remaining one and a half million Canadian Catholic women live in Canada’s other eight provinces and three territories. They are predominantly English speaking, except in New Brunswick where nearly two-thirds of Catholic women are Acadians who have French as their primary language. Any discussion of Roman Catholic women in Canada must begin by recognizing the fundamental duality of this experience. French-speaking women, especially in Quebec and Acadia, have historically found themselves in a homogeneously Catholic society in which religion and language are markers of a shared cultural and political identity within an English-speaking and Protestant-dominated continent. Even today, despite the...

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