A consensus emerged after the crisis that putting more women into positions of leadership and decision-making would strengthen the Church’s mission-effectiveness and credibility. Legal scholar and Vatican advisor Helen Alvaré argues that for this to become a reality, both the commitment and creativity of those currently in charge will be necessary. The good news is that women are ready and willing to get to work.
The secular feminism of the latter half of the twentieth century made more than a few just demands, especially in light of the global, historical record concerning women’s dignity. But still it could not be reconciled with a wholly Catholic project for women, including the project of conceiving the work of women in the Church. Even stripped of a few of its most objectionable elements–an intrinsically combative approach to men, the derogation of childbearing, and the championing of abortion–something has always been clearly missing from the secular feminist project.
What is it? Nothing other than the framework, the foundation of any program or philosophy concerning human dignity or anthropology within the Church: a true account of the meaning of life, which is neatly expressed in Evangelium Vitae as being a “gift which is fully realized in the giving of the self,” the giving of self to God, our author, and to every “neighbor,” our sisters and brothers in the Lord who are also “authored” by God. This is the framework, the condition, for every single work in and of the Church, whether by its sons or by its daughters.
Even if we begin on this foundation, however, more specific conclusions about how to make women’s presence in the Church more “capillary” and “incisive” – in Pope Francis’s words – remain elusive. As a woman who has worked in the Church for about thirty years, I would like to speak about women’s service specifically as Catholics representing the Catholic Church, either as part of some Catholic institution or by speaking publicly in their capacity as Catholics.
First, the Church’s burgeoning material in this arena include both the language of women’s “rights” and women’s “dignity,” “gifts,” “vocation,” and “genius,” all within the framework of that “service – when it is carried out with freedom, reciprocity and love (as the Letter of Pope John Paul II to Women says), expresses the truly ‘royal’ nature of mankind.” To this set of concepts, Pope Francis adds the line dividing “service” from “servitude.” In other words, reasoned notions of women’s dignity and rights are not independent of the project of women in the Church, even while they must be enacted within the framework of service.
Second, given the service framework, immediately we can see that Catholic women have to eschew standard secular feminist notions such as quotas or identical outcomes for women as for men. In the secular system, these outcomes pose as ends, not just means; but the Church, of course, has different and higher ends.
Third, we have a lot of great theory to work with, especially from the last fifty years’ treasury of teaching documents, and also from female and male theologians and philosophers and other scholars – lawyers, economists, sociologists, and so forth. While the theoretical track is always important, we are right now facing the question of how to realize this theory in practice.
Fourth, and broadly speaking, in the visible, practical world, giving flesh to the image of God as male and female means integrating women into the Catholic project in the world, regularly in partnership with Catholic men, and also regularly as an individual voice, depending upon the work at hand. It is the “great anthropological theme of our times,” this theme of the meaning of the two-sexed humanity, created in God’s image.
Women never achieved in the worlds of work, politics, media, entertainment, and business the sort of humanizing, person-centered influence that some secular feminists claimed women would achieve. But should the Church start down this path of integrating women into more fields of action, it will only – according to its own theology – make God more visible in the world, and offer a revolutionary model for the world to follow.
I won’t go into the details here, of course, but it is easy to imagine that such a commitment will require the Church – women and men together – to figure out how many women can answer their vocational calls to serve the Church while doing what women have continued to desire even over the last fifty years of feminism: assure themselves first that justice is being done at home, to their husbands and children.
The amount of coming and going in and out of the workforce, flexible hours, job-sharing, benefits-negotiating, and other strategies this may involve could be considerable. This is why it hasn’t been done well in many places. (But may I say – not exactly modestly – on behalf of women that anyone who has watched forty mothers set up and break down “international food day” at a Catholic high school in less than two hours flat, feeding 500 boys, caring for each other’s toddlers, serving up food from twenty-five countries, and leaving the school hall spotless in time for first lunch period, simply has no doubt that women will be of tremendous aid to the Church in figuring out how to get this whole “home and work” thing sorted out).
Fifth, it is quite possible that we will see in the Church what we have seen in the world in the matter of the intersection of women’s desires and the needs of others: Women may well cluster in certain vocational areas and be less represented in others. I mused to the Washington Post a few years ago that my experience heading a commission investigating clerical abuse in a large archdiocese led me to believe that having women, particularly mothers, in the complaint-intake office at a diocese would have made a historical difference to the Church. This was simply my sense after one year sorting through the abuse complaints and the diocese’s responses. This will have to play out according to women’s gifts and the Church’s needs over time. That is the way of true vocations. Other obvious areas probably include medicine, administration, education, immigration, and I think law, based upon what I’m seeing in women in law over the last fifteen years.
Sixth, Pope Francis is confirmation that at least one of the practical realizations of women’s work in the world precisely as Catholics will involve the Church moving toward women, not just women moving into specific roles within the Church. By this I mean the following: Pope Francis is saying that what women are doing already – their loving, merciful, person-centered ways of working and living – are what the Church wants to be, as an institution with both a Petrine and a Marian face.
In “Catholic speak,” part of discerning a vocation is to identify needs lacking adequate responses. The world’s response to Pope Francis indicates the need for the kind of virtues women often manifest, the kind a Church with a more developed Marian face might manifest overall.
Helen Alvaré is a Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, where she teaches Family Law, Law and Religion, and Property Law. She is a Member of the Holy See’s Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life and serves on the board of Catholic Relief Services.
Excerpted from the chapter “Even Our Feminism Must be of Service” from Promise and Challenge: Catholic Women Reflect on Feminism, Complementarity, and the Church, ed. Mary Hasson (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 2015). Reprinted with permission.