women in the church

the Web Editors 12-06-2019

Climate music, baby Yoda, women in church leadership, and more on this week's Wrap. 

FILE PHOTO: Pope Francis arrives to lead the Wednesday general audience in Saint Peter's square at the Vatican, May 23.

A document for a meeting of Catholic bishops from the Amazon, expected to evaluate ordaining elderly married men as priests for the vast region, says the Church should make "daring proposals."

Sr. Carmen Sammut. Image via Rosie Scammell / RNS

Catholic sisters globally would be better equipped to carry out their work if they could become deacons, the head of a global network of nuns has said, an important marker in the sharp debate over women deacons that Pope Francis opened last week.

“We are already doing so many things that resemble what a deacon would do, although it would help us to do a bit more service if we were ordained deacons,” Sister Carmen Sammut, president of the International Union of Superiors General, or UISG, told RNS.

Magaly Garcia 5-17-2016

Image via  / Shutterstock.com

I keep finding myself repeating “it’s 2016” to my friends and family, on social media, and in my head. We read about all these things in history books that actually didn’t even happen that long ago like women “winning” the right to vote, schools being desegregated, or the first president of the United States having some melanin.

4-06-2016

Sojourners, a faith-based social justice organization, released a video on Tuesday that took a satirical look at this nearly 2,000-year-old trend.

In “7 Reasons Men Should Not Be Pastors,” women from the Sojourners staff listed out reasons why they thought men were unfit to serve as ministers, a parody of the reasons often invoked to disqualify women from positions of power. 

Image via RNS.

Installing Linda K. Burton, Bonnie L. Oscarson, and Rosemary M. Wixom to leadership councils could have far-reaching consequences in a denomination led exclusively by men.

When asked whether women are members of other key committees in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spokeswoman Kristen Howey said, "There are literally dozens of church committees. Women serve on many of them but we have no way of knowing that number without counting each of them."

The three principal, formerly male-only councils helping to run the 15 million-member faith include "four or five (male) general authorities," Howey said, plus the new female officers.

Patty Prasada-Rao 3-16-2015
Female clergy holding a Bible, glenda / Shutterstock.com

Female clergy holding a Bible, glenda / Shutterstock.com

One afternoon I was invited to share my experiences as a woman in Christian leadership — the challenges, joys, issues, struggles and blessings. It felt like those of us sharing were instant, intimate, connected soul sisters. Without knowing each other, and as different as our stories were, the common threads ran deep. We were all women in high levels of leadership in Christian organizations. So why does it still hurt so much? We’ve made so much progress, haven’t we?

After some questions, we reviewed what we would each share from our different perspectives. This would be a heartfelt, sincere, and vulnerable time of sharing. But I wasn’t quite prepared for what happened. The opening question was, “When did you first experience a challenge or issue with your leadership as a woman?” As the first woman began her story, the vulnerable places of her past and present began to flow through tears streaming down her face. And my own eyes welled up and brimmed over. This struck home to the core of my own experience. This is hard. It hurts.

Here are just a few of the barriers we shared about that afternoon. There’s the way that women are looked at differently with respect to their leadership styles. What is seen as strength in a man’s style may be critiqued as aggressive in a woman. When a man’s ego affects his decision-making, rarely is it confronted or dealt with, whereas a woman is called out for letting her emotions get in the way. This feeds the fear for many women leaders that it’s not OK to display any vulnerability. As much as we don’t want to admit it, there is also still a bit of a “good ole boy” way of operating even in Christian organizations that are advocates of reconciliation. To call it out can get one the blame of having a “chip on one’s shoulder” and playing the gender card for personal gain.

Lisa Sharon Harper 3-16-2015
Women's power symbol, Stefanina Hill / Shutterstock.com

Women's power symbol, Stefanina Hill / Shutterstock.com

“Mom,” I asked, “why didn’t the ERA pass?”

It was 1982 and I was 13 years old — an age with sharp awareness of what is fair, but with no understanding of the forces aligned to thwart history’s progress. I was unaware of the storm swirling around the Equal Rights Amendment. I was only aware of my mother’s belief that it should pass.

I wasn’t an evangelical, yet – or even a churchgoer. I was simply a girl standing at the precipice of womanhood in a household led by a strong woman who cranked up the car radio whenever Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” or Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” piped through station-wagon speakers.

We are woman! We are strong! We are invincible. We are survivors and we roar!

So, I had no idea that Phyllis Schlafly (a conservative Catholic) and a broad contingent of evangelicals were actively campaigning against the simple amendment that required ratification that year.

The ERA was intentionally simple. Like the 19th Amendment, the heart of the amendment was one sentence long: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied, abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

Seemed simple enough. It was fair. Anything less would be unfair. So how could anyone stand against it?

Kaya Oakes 1-08-2015
Solemn vesting of Cardinal Burke. Image courtesy Phil Roussin/Flickr.

Solemn vesting of Cardinal Burke. Image courtesy Phil Roussin/Flickr.

In an online interview this week, Cardinal Raymond Burke said the “radical feminism which has assaulted the Church and society since the 1960s has left men very marginalized.”

But many women will head to Mass this weekend and note that the priest, bishop, and pope have something in common: They are all men, and the power they hold in institutional church structures hardly looks like marginalization.

In spite of Burke’s paranoid opinion that “rampant liturgical experimentation” resulted in men who were “really turned off” by the Mass, women will stand and recite a recently revised Nicene Creed that states that Christ died “for us men.” They will pray to a God referred to only by male pronouns even as God’s gender remains stubbornly mysterious. Even the language of the liturgy negates the presence of women.

Yet Burke is bewildered by women’s “self-focused attitudes” and “constant and insistent demanding of rights.” Women, he said, “respond very naturally to the invitation to be active in the Church.” And yet, when the sanctuary becomes “full of women,” and the parish activities and liturgy are influenced by them, these become “so feminine in many places that men do not want to get involved.”

The fact that Burke gave this interview to a website whose very name — The New Emangelization — may lead many to question whether it is actually a parody, indicates the level of absurdity in Burke’s claims that women have somehow taken over the Catholic Church.

There is also something disturbing and insulting about his ideas concerning the men already in the church.

Kimberly Winston 9-16-2014

Mitch Mayne, Dr. Caitlin Ryan, Wendy Montgomery, and Diane Oviatt during the screening. Photo via Mitch Mayne/RNS.

It was a gathering that would have been unthinkable just five years ago.

On a cool summer evening, in a borrowed classroom overlooking San Francisco Bay, about 150 men and women gathered to screen a short documentary about a Mormon family whose 13-year-old son came out as gay.

The Montgomerys, who accepted their son and his news, were ostracized by church members, some of whom refused to accept Communion distributed by the young man in church. Like many conservative Christian denominations, the 15 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bans homosexual activity and considers it grounds for exclusion from Mormon rites, rituals and even the afterlife.

Eric J. Lyman 11-26-2013

Pope Francis carries his crosier after celebrating Mass in Assisi, Italy. Photo by Paul Haring/Catholic News Service. Via RNS

Laying out a blueprint for the issues that are likely to define his papacy, Pope Francis on Tuesday issued a biting critique of capitalism, calling on world leaders to fight against poverty and for the rich to share their wealth, and urging the media to adjust its priorities.

“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” Francis asked in an 84-page “apostolic exhortation” that is widely seen as a road map for his papacy akin to a presidential State of the Union address.

“How can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving?” he asked. “Today, everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without possibilities, without any means of escape.”

Eugene Cho 1-15-2010
Nicolas Kristof had a recent article in The New York Times titled, "Religion and Women," t
Ryan Rodrick Beiler 11-09-2009
People who do diversity work run the risk of setting impossible goals for themselves: The Beloved Community. The Kingdom of God.
Mimi Haddad 3-08-2009
How many times have we heard that women are more easily deceived than men?
Vicki Kemper 12-01-1988

In September, less than a week after the Episcopal Church elected Rev. Barbara C. Harris as its first woman bishop, Pope John Paul II issued yet another statement expressing his opposition to the ordination of women as priests. 

Women in the Church Tell Their Stories.

Cheryl J. Sanders 7-01-1987

Women in the Church Tell Their Stories.

Marie Wiebe 7-01-1987

Women in the Church Tell Their Stories.

Women in the Church Tell Their Stories.

Roberta Hestenes 7-01-1987

Women in the Church Tell Their Stories.