Women in the Catholic Church

Recent comments accusing the Catholic Church of being “a virus of misogyny” in the world today, have provoked a good deal of reaction. Clearly, they were intended to do that, but one has to ask if that kind of reaction is really the most helpful form of discussion. Rather than a battle of contradictions, it would surely be better to ask what the role of women in the Church should be, what it has been, or whether we need to talk about a specific role for women in the first place. These recent accusations of misogyny within the Church looked simply angry, seeming essentially to be a reaction to a circumstance found to be irritating. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the situation, surely one does one’s cause no favours by apparently reacting to annoyance in a purely personal manner?

The substantive issue however, remains: what of women in the Church? Is she guilty of misogyny? Misogyny means the hatred of women: does the Church hate women? On the surface of it, this is a strange accusation. From its origins, women clearly played a very important role in the Church: Christ had female disciples; Mary Magdalen (whatever recent films may claim) was widely admired as the “Apostle to the Apostles” – that is not a modern title, but one coming down to us from centuries of Church history, and of course Christ’s mother, Mary, the Blessed Mother, was revered above all the Apostles. The important part played by women in establishing the early Church is noted several times in the Acts of the Apostles and the Letters of St Paul. As the Church expanded and attracted the hostile attention of the authorities in doing so, women distinguished themselves alongside men in their courage in facing martyrdom: the Acts of Perpetua and Felicity from the third century North African Church contain several references to their outstanding courage, which amazed the onlookers – especially in the case of Felicity, nothing more than a little slave girl, but equal to her mistress Perpetua in the terrible glory of martyrdom. Another slave girl, Blandina, martyred at Lyons about thirty years earlier (177), was also noted for her courage. These female saints and martyrs were honoured as the men were:St Cecilia and St Agnes are as much a part of the history of the local Church in Rome as the great St Laurence. Indeed, a tour of the Roman churches introduces one to a great many female saints, almost more powerful in their iconography than the male saints: one church in Rome has an altarpiece in which there are no men present at all, and this was not done merely to make a point.

With the Peace of the Church in 315, new forms of Christian life developed, eremitical life and monastic life, and women were likewise prominent there: St Macrina in the Eastern Church and St Scholastica in the West were both noted practitioners of monastic life. It is important to note that the seclusion of monastic life is not a form of keeping women behind closed doors, as some recent publications ignorantly claim. The hermit, male or female, has a particular vocation to leave the world and its attractions behind in order to find God. Monastic life in common developed as a way of safeguarding that refuge from the world in the search for God. The Orders that attracted the strongest candidates, Carthusians and Cistercians, were also the most silent and secluded. In the twelfth century, the extraordinary figure of St Hildegarde of Bingen emerges: theologian, philosopher, poet mystic and a really remarkable composer. Of course one cannot do justice to her achievements in a short article like this, but, given the topic under discussion, the point to note is the fact that Hildegarde developed her astonishing gifts within the Church, in her Benedictine monastery at Bingen. They provided her with the education and resources she needed to bring her gifts to fruition. Nor does she turn around at some later stage and claim that she could have been even more of a contender if the rules had been different. She is not thinking about being a contender, she is thinking about God.

As the Middle Ages progressed, the number of gifted female saints who found within the Church what they needed increases. The Rhineland developed what almost amounts to a school of female theology across different Orders, Benedictine, Cistercian, Beguine and Dominican, including St Elizabeth of Schonau, St Mechtilde of Magdeburg, St Mechtilde of Hackeborn and others. The great Dominican theologians, Henry of Suso and Johannes Tauler, directed a good deal of their best efforts to their interaction with nuns. The sermons and letters they left, and the texts of the nuns themselves, indicate that this was a very serious engagement indeed. In Italy, later in the fourteenth century, we find the great figure of St Catherine of Siena, one of the great reformers of the Church – although when people are talking admiringly about St Thomas More and Erasmus in their role as reformers a couple of centuries later, St Catherine rarely gets a mention. Perhaps this is something on which we could work… Catherine had to plough her own furrow: her vocation was neither marriage nor enclosed religious life, and she became a Dominican Tertiary in the end, a process of vocational discernment in which she was helped and defended by the Dominicans of Siena. They took her very seriously, which is a lot more than the secular powers at Siena were prepared to do – at least initially. She was a great mystic and writer, and is a Doctor of the Church.

With the sixteenth century came the Reformation and the Catholic Counter Reformation. Again, women played a major role in that: the foundation of the Discalced (barefoot) Carmelite Order by St Teresa of Avila was an extremely important element in the Counter Reformation. St Teresa revived monastic life within the Carmelite Order for both men and women, taking her inspiration from the hermits of Mount Carmel, who had lived there in one way or another since the time of the prophet Elijah – in fact, Elijah is one of the patrons of the Carmelite Order, both branches. She was not the first woman to found an Order for both men and women – in the fourteenth century, St Bridget of Sweden, one of the Patron Saints of Europe, had founded the Bridgettines, who up to the Reformation had a great double monastery at Syon in England. St Teresa wrote extensively about the spiritual life and contemplative prayer, and, again, she is a Doctor of the Church. Almost every church you go into in Spain will have a statue or indeed an altarpiece of St Teresa in a very prominent position. Clearly, in the popular imagination, she is one of the most important people in Spanish history – but she is a Saint of the Catholic Church.

The sixteenth century also saw the foundation of religious orders dedicated to the education of women for the first time: St Angela Merici’s Ursulines and Mary Ward’s Sisters of Loreto. In fact, the education of women seems to have been largely a Catholic idea from the outset. Interestingly, although the Renaissance introduced Europe to all sorts of new ideas coming from the ancient Greek and Roman sources at that time being rediscovered, one area in which it represented at times a backward move was in fact the position of women. In its revival of Paganism, in certain respects, it also revived some of the more brutal pagan ideas about women, their inferiority, weakness and insufficiency, ideas which we find echoed in some of the otherwise notable products of the Renaissance, such as the great poet John Milton. The scholar Régine Pernoud noted that, in the Middle Ages, the Queens of France were consecrated alongside the Kings, so that they could rule in their own right, as Blanche of Castile, the mother of St Louis, did for several years in the thirteenth century, but after the Renaissance they were not, so that Anne of Austria was simply regent in the seventeenth century, largely under the direction of Mazarin.

The seventeenth century also saw the foundation of the Daughters of Charity by St Louise de Marillac and St Vincent de Paul. This was a new step in the possibilities open to women, since the Daughters of Charity were not enclosed, Sisters rather than nuns, and, unlike women as a whole at that time, they went out without male companionship to care for the poor in Paris. Again, they were not thinking of their own rights, but about Christ’s poor and how best to care for them. In the eighteenth century there was another new departure, the appointment of Maria Anagni to the Chair of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the University of Bologna, by Pope Benedict XIV, the first woman ever to hold a University Chair. The first woman ever to hold a University Chair was appointed to it by the Pope.

During the nineteenth century, the role of the active Orders increased enormously, and Ireland played a very significant role in that. Nano Nagle founded the Presentation Sisters for the education of women, Venerable Mother Mary Aikenhead founded the Sisters of Charity, important in the care of the sick. Mother Mary is notable as having been the very first person to found a hospice for the dying, at Harold’s Cross. The Hospice movement is now a world wide phenomenon, and of course others have been involved in that too, but it is interesting to note that it began with a Sister, an Irish woman fully committed to the teaching of the Church. Mother Catherine McAuley founded the Sisters of Mercy, who contributed enormously to the development of modern nursing; their model of “careful nursing” (on which Dr. Therese Meehan has done so much work) was largely adopted by Florence Nightingale, who came to know them during her work at Crimea, and admired them greatly. Nightingale became a very good friend of some of the Sisters, and always thought of Roman Catholic religious sisters as having opened new ways for women to flourish, to the great benefit of society. Probably the most influential Catholic in the latter half of the twentieth century was Mother Teresa of Calcutta – well known to the readers of Position Papers, I would think!

Why, given the prominence of women in the Church throughout the centuries, does the Church now find itself accused of misogyny? Practically speaking, misogyny could mean two things: it could mean refusing to acknowledge that women are different from men and that this difference has a value, and then reproaching them for not being men. This is largely what constitutes misogyny historically speaking: women are reproached with physical weakness, with excessive sensitivity, with simply being different. Or misogyny could mean refusing to acknowledge that there is no difference between men and women, and therefore treating women as different, and this is largely what it has come to mean these days.

There is a blank refusal in the modern world to acknowledge any real difference between men and women – the body is simply dismissed as irrelevant – and any attempt to disagree with that is shot down as misogynistic. Modernity views people in functional terms, which is why the vulnerable are increasingly under attack, since they don’t function so well, and functionally speaking, other than child-bearing which we can now manipulate, there need be no difference between men and women. But this reduction of people to their instrumental function is essentially an abuse, since a person is worth far more than their mere economic function, and once we start considering the person as a whole, we have to include the body. The Church has always maintained and continues to maintain that men and women are different, that this difference is a positive thing, and her teaching reflects that. But this is clearly at odds with the secular mentality, and in the drive to impose a baldly functional model of philosophical anthropology, obviously she will come under attack. This is not to deny that mistakes, and bad ones, have been made, and need to be faced. But the Church has not been worse than the secular world in this respect, and certainly Christian culture has been far better for women than almost any other: recent attempts in popular entertainment to assert otherwise have had to revert to mythologised versions of the Dark Ages, having little or no historical truth. The question we have to ask is: which is the more fulfilling view of humanity? Which, over the centuries, has yielded the better outcome – for both men and women?