One Faith, Two Authorities: Tension between Female Religious and Male Clergy in the American Catholic Church by Jeanine E. Kraybill (review)

One Faith, Two Authorities is a short monograph in which political scientist Jeanine E. Kraybill intends to “examine the very tension of policy and authority within the gendered nature of the Catholic Church and evaluate the level of influence female religious have on various social policy issues” (3). The focus is on what the author calls the “Assessment” of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, although she merges both the doctrinal assessment (2009–2012) and the subsequent mandate (2012–2015) into a single phenomenon. Using interviews, content analysis, and survey research, Kraybill hopes to provide an analysis of both the events of those fraught years and “what challenges still exist and where the faith is currently headed in terms of leadership models and roles” (17).

For this reader, it seemed as though Kraybill was attempting to combine three different studies within a single volume. The first was an account of the assessment and mandate, including some background information and what some of the principal issues at stake seemed to be. The second was an examination of tensions between the LCWR and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, as well as the forms of leadership each exercises within American Catholicism. The third, and most successful, effort was an analysis of the extent to which the USCCB and the LCWR agreed or disagreed on public policy issues; her conclusion is that they agreed far more than they disagreed. Through all three threads, the author wants to look at the role of gender in exacerbating tensions, as well as the significance of clericalism. Clearly, this would be a lot to accomplish in a lengthy and substantial volume; it’s impossible in a work of fewer than 120 pages of text. The result is a book that raises more questions than it answers.

The author is a political scientist, not a scholar of gender or religion, and that is evident in some of the work she does not cite. Nowhere, for example, is the foundational work on religious life by Sandra Schneiders even mentioned, or that by other ecclesiologists or theologians. The 2018 volume by LCWR on the events covered here, However Long the Night, is nowhere to be found, but it would have helped Kraybill to avoid some of the factual errors that riddle the book, such as the lack of differentiation between the assessment and the mandate, the designation of NETWORK as an “affiliate” of LCWR, and repeated declarations that religious sisters are “outside the institutional church” (e.g., 24). Works on the Apostolic Visitation of American women religious by McCarthy and Zollmann, Ronan, Schneiders, and Thompson would have provided substantial background, as well as an intersectional feminist context that would have deepened and enriched the discussion here. Examination of male religious, including consideration of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men (CMSM), might have helped Kraybill to disentangle the disparate influences of clericalism and gender. So might familiarity with the concept of kyriarchy, introduced by theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza over a quarter century ago, and explored deeply in her 2017 volume, Congress of Wo/men: Religion, Gender and Kyriarchal Power.

The questions raised by this book are important, and they deserve serious consideration by scholars with a variety of competencies. While Kraybill is to be commended for her effort, this volume does not succeed at what it attempts to accomplish.