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The story of the dysfunction of the Catholic Church as an institution is now the subject of multiple investigations and copious news coverage worldwide. Tragically, at issue is not just the sexual abuse of minors by clergy or the exploitation of women religious or the exclusion of women from positions of authority and oversight or denying women full use of their gifts. We are now confronting all of this together.

The picture that emerges is stark: In the eyes of the world, the church has lost much of its moral authority.

My part in this story began a few days after the Pennsylvania attorney general released a devastating report describing in detail hundreds of cases of sexual abuse of minors by members of the clergy, when I received an oddly addressed envelope marked “personal.” Inside was a “study guide” claiming to prove that the Catholic Church was “the harlot of Babylon.” We have all likely seen these pamphlets before. This time, however, the sender identified himself, gave me his phone number and added: “It is so clear that Satan is in control of so much of the Catholic Church: now is a wonderful time to get out of Babylon, Rev 18:1-4, God be with you and yours.”

His conviction was impossible to simply dismiss. Is this how others see us now?

I began to notice that anywhere I spoke, when I reflected on our priorities as a church, advocated for a gospel of mercy and inclusion or expounded on the requirements of the Reino de Dios, women young and old wanted to have conversations.

A few months later, as more records of abuse emerged, I joined 3,000 other Hispanic Catholics in Dallas, Tex., for the culmination of the V Encuentro process. Heading there, many of us imagined a time of speaking truthfully, praying together, grieving and healing. Even accounting for over 500 ordained members of the clergy in attendance, it was obvious that more than half of the delegates were women. Yet as the program unfolded, it was challenging to find the community we sought, as few women were included in the liturgical ministries and or in the major talks.

In the hallways, some women expressed outrage, while others seemed simply resigned. Is this how we see ourselves now?

Lamentations

I started comparing notes with other Catholic women who teach or lead ministries in the church. What were they hearing from their communities? Some recounted that their students asked why women would remain Catholic today. Others shared how their elderly parents grieved, unable to participate in Mass or “look a priest in the eye” because of the abuse crisis. One woman lamented the loss of her nephew’s vocation: He had tragically “walked away” from his plans to enter the seminary.

I began to notice that anywhere I spoke, when I reflected on our priorities as a church, advocated for a gospel of mercy and inclusion or expounded on the requirements of the Reino de Dios, women young and old wanted to have conversations. In any part of the country, at large meetings or small, in universities, parishes or classrooms, women came up to me, speaking in whispers. Women who teach, run ministries, parent and study shared their experiences of marginalization and their desire to serve the church and our collective good. They were also explicit about their fear of speaking up. “Why stay Catholic?” was no longer just a question coming from curious outsiders; it was a question we were asking ourselves.

“Why stay Catholic?” was no longer just a question coming from curious outsiders; it was a question we were asking ourselves.

Signs of the Times

One of my students, a 30-something youth minister, recently introduced me to a new term: the “dones.” Thinking I had misheard her, I asked, “Do you mean the ‘nones,’ people who don’t identify as belonging to any religious tradition?”

“No, I mean the ‘dones,’” she said, “Like, in, ‘I’m totally done with the Catholic Church.’”

There was pain in her voice, which soon gave way to tears. Saying “none” could be about disaffection, boredom or the perception of a faith tradition’s irrelevance, but “done” was about betrayal and disillusionment. It was about love and loss.

Melissa Cedillo, a recent graduate of Loyola Marymount University who is now working on issues that affect women, echoed my student’s frustration. “When are we going to have our #MeToo movement?” she asked, referring to the growing willingness in the worlds of business, entertainment and politics to act on women’s allegations of sexual harassment and abuse. We have no analogous community rising to speak on behalf of women in the Catholic Church, she lamented.

In a very practical way, the need to articulate reasons for remaining Catholic as women is also related to the church’s demographic survival and moral relevance. Betty Anne Donnelly, a former lay missioner and philanthropist, told me of her fear that “people’s willingness to learn about and be inspired by the church’s rich social tradition has been fundamentally undermined by the institutional church’s positions on several issues, not the least of which is the church’s failure to avail itself of the tremendous gifts of women in its liturgical life and governance.”

The contributions of Catholic social teaching and all the good works it inspires contribute to society in truly significant ways. Consequently, the church’s ability to grow and thrive in its ministries of compassion and mercy affect the whole world. The imperative to survive as the global Catholic Church is most acute when we think of how the most vulnerable and dispossessed of the earth depend on our work.

The Catholic Church’s ability to grow and thrive in its ministries of compassion and mercy affect the whole world.

What Can We Learn From the Past?

Women are Supreme Court justices and astronauts, surgeons and philosophers, prime ministers and firefighters. And although in many parts of our unjust world women and girls are kept from school and viewed only as necessary for reproduction, there are many of us with education and political voice working against this injustice. The wider culture has come to accept the basic truth that gender has no bearing on abilities or intelligence and cannot be used to curtail our God-given freedom. But today, in many corners of the church, women are not treated with equal dignity and worth. Too often, the structures of the Catholic Church show little openness to meaningful transformation.

This is not a new story. As the formidable Teresa de Jesús set out from Ávila in the 16th century, braving cold and illness to reform a religious order, her every move was controlled by men. St. Teresa was not allowed to study formally, and young priests were appointed to “guide her.” She was consistently made to feel inferior and incapable. But as difficult as Teresa’s life as a Carmelite nun was, religious life was often the only space where a woman in her time could have any education and develop her gifts.

The 20th century church offered something different. Following the Second Vatican Council, many women sought the possibility of theological study, and more than a few persevered to earn advanced degrees. At my own university, the merging of Marymount College and Loyola University in 1973 allowed for the co-education of women and men. Shortly after, the church historian Marie Anne Mayeski joined the faculty as the university’s first woman theologian. Her teaching inspired me, and she suggested I continue my studies. The door of education, once opened, could not be shut again, and we now have three generations of women theologians teaching the fourth.

But getting here has not been easy. In various other Christian denominations, committed students will often receive considerable institutional and financial support for graduate theological education. Catholic women rarely receive any from the church. For a Catholic woman (lay or religious), completing an advanced degree in theology can be a lonely and costly climb.

Today, many women theologians teach priests. We evaluate their work, engage them in the complexity of the Catholic intellectual tradition and help form them for ministry. But in our own parishes, we are at times forced to sit silently by and watch deficient homilies, uninspiring liturgies, neglected communities and abuses of power.

As the young theologian Layla Karst confided to me, “I remember responding to a faculty member’s question about my career goals my senior year in college by expressing my desire to go into ministry and being told that as a woman, my options for this were either to become a nun or become a Protestant or become unemployed.”

Many women theologians teach priests and help form them for ministry. But in our own parishes, we are at times forced to sit silently by and watch deficient homilies, uninspiring liturgies, neglected communities and abuses of power.

What Must Change?

Embedded in the frequent question from students,“Why are you still Catholic?” is a suggestion that there is something very wrong that is apparent to everyone else. Why isn’t it obvious to us? What prevents us Catholics from seeing it?

My attempt to understand this question pointed me in the direction of neuroscience. We Catholics seem to be suffering from a collective case of a condition called anosognosia, “an inability or refusal to recognize a defect or disorder that is clinically evident.” But unlike an individual who has suffered a traumatic brain injury, our problem seems to manifest itself in what the neuropsychologist Katherine Rankin characterizes as the “loss of the ability to accurately characterize one’s own personality and social behavior.” Once I replaced “the patient” with “the institutional Catholic Church,” I found Ms. Rankin’s outline of this condition in an essay for the anthology The Study of Anosognosia to be profoundly helpful.

Anosognosia is a pathological and extreme manifestation of a lack of self-knowledge or self-awareness, which in healthy persons (or in this case institutions) derives from:

1) Introspection: paying particular attention to our internal states and their meaning;

2) Exteroception: observing ourselves and our behaviors from an external, third-person vantage point, identifying group norms and, I surmise, playing an important role in moral reasoning;

3) Memory of a longitudinal self: putting together, through the aid of our memories, the key insights into ourselves and our behaviors that through multiple experiences we come to believe define us.

What lessons might we learn if we apply these categories to the institutional church?

We need introspection. This introspection must be vulnerable and truthful. It must notice how we feel, not avoid it. As an institution, are we joyful? Are we grateful? Do we feel we have clarity? Do we feel capable of doing the work of discipleship? If we feel none of these things, why not? What lies have we been telling ourselves about ourselves?

We need exteroception. If we step outside of ourselves and adopt the perspective of others beyond our institution, what do we find? Are we doing what it takes to be part of a moral order predicated on the inviolable dignity of every human person? How is that possible if we exclude half of the human race, victimize the vulnerable and cover up what we have done? What profound inconsistencies do others see in us that we fail to see in ourselves?

We need memory of who we are. We know how to do this. We have a rich bounty of memories from two millennia. From these, we can relearn and recalibrate who we are. The return to the sources, the ressourcement that guided much of the theological thought of the 20th century, did this. It allowed us to see more clearly and embrace more robustly Jesus’ words and actions as the best markers of our communal identity. Our interpolation of myriad ideologies extraneous to the New Testament witness, including patriarchy, mind-body dualism and imperial hierarchical structures, have contributed much to our inability to know ourselves as disciples of a very unambiguous teacher who revealed to us a very unambiguous God.

According to Ms. Rankin, overcoming anosognosia can also be aided by “explicit communication from others.” The mortal danger our Catholic Church is in right now has many authors: the priest who abuses a child, the bishop who covers it up, the pastor who expects “Sister” to keep the parish humming and his food on the table, the priest whose homily makes young people leave never to return, the closed rooms where the few make decisions for the many.

This cursory list reveals that the “others” whose explicit communication may be helpful include women. But do women continue to be excluded by the power structures of the church precisely because our perspective is destabilizing to a false self-image? Ms. Rankin would probably think so. As she explains, “[p]atients who consistently reject explicit feedback about their behavior and personality are more likely to have had a multicomponent breakdown of the self-monitoring systems.”

We are experiencing a multicomponent breakdown of the institutional church’s self-monitoring systems, and we need urgent intervention.

We are experiencing a multicomponent breakdown of the institutional church’s self-monitoring systems, and we need urgent intervention.

Why Are You Still a Catholic?

The hope-filled answers to this question from Catholic women I trust may provide the very medicine that the anosognosia affecting our church desperately needs. Clinicians refer to cases of anosognosia as a “loss of insight.” So what are some insights, derived from our communal memory, that we can offer in order to heal our Catholic Church?

Be church. Shannon Green, the director of the CSJ Institute at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles, is very clear: “As I have walked with college students for the past 15 years, I have returned to the question, ‘What makes good church?’” she tells me. We need to refocus on “church as ‘People of God,’ as radical hospitality, as pilgrims, as humble, vulnerable disciples who lay down our lives in radical friendship for our neighbor.”

Honor the incarnation. The theologian Nancy Pineda-Madrid points out that “the Catholic faith is and can be so much better than a lot of what we see today. While the church is infused by God’s grace, it also commits sin.” This is critical self-awareness. “I remain Catholic,” she tells me with conviction, “because, as a theologian, I have spent my life seriously studying this tradition and, in the process, have gained an ever-increasing appreciation of its enormous treasure. What we believe is extraordinary: We believe in the incarnation of the divine in human flesh, which is the greatest expression of God’s love for every human being. Wrestling with our beliefs will transform us and our world.”

Show up and act. A religious sister I greatly admire shared her grief with me while simultaneously insisting that her “first loyalty is to Jesus Christ and to being a faithful disciple during these difficult times. I cannot answer for those in power; I can only answer for my own actions, my own beliefs, my own response to the needs and the people I encounter each day. So I will continue to ‘show up’ as a Catholic and affirm my identity and my vocation.”

Make room for others. “Communion is an act of trust, caring for the local issue while holding on to the larger principles of speaking a common language of human life together,” the theologian Susan Abraham stressed in a note from the school of theology where she is dean. “Since this is a dynamic and organic notion, no blueprint exists for it because it arises in continuing dialogue and recognition of claims being made.”

Be a disciple. Emilie Grosvenor finds the deepest reason to remain Catholic in living out her discipleship. “To leave behind my Catholic identity,” she wrote from Scotland, where she is completing her doctoral studies, “would be to disown part of myself, allowing it to be claimed by those against God’s reign who claim to speak on its behalf. When we do our best as disciples to reveal the goodness in the world and in so doing call ourselves Catholic, we prevent the church from being completely defined by false prophets. We allow for hope to break through.”

All of these women give me hope. Our church’s lack of insight, and the breakdown of our own self-monitoring systems, are curable. We cannot allow the very blindness of the condition to keep us from seeking the change that will heal us.

The “others” are here: women, offering themselves in faithful discipleship and with bold vision to renew our communal life and saying “mine too.” The Catholic Church is #MineToo.

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JR Cosgrove
4 years 11 months ago

The reason to be a Catholic is timeless and has no meaning for female vs male or what happens in this world. That has been the message of the Church till recently and should not change. It seems nearly all of the articles written on this site do not understand this.

vezacora@gmail.com
4 years 11 months ago

Agree to this statement.
The reason to be Catholic is timeless .

vezacora@gmail.com
4 years 11 months ago

Agree to this statement.
The reason to be Catholic is timeless .

vezacora@gmail.com
4 years 11 months ago

Agree to this statement.
The reason to be Catholic is timeless .

vezacora@gmail.com
4 years 11 months ago

Agree to this statement.
The reason to be Catholic is timeless .

vezacora@gmail.com
4 years 11 months ago

Agree to this statement.
The reason to be Catholic is timeless .

Jason & Amy Rogers
4 years 10 months ago

Cosgrove touches on the deepest underlying reason for disagreement about various issues in the Church: should the Church be unchanging in its structures and teachings, or should it change at all? Personally I'm on the side that we are building the Kingdom, the Kingdom is not yet here. Therefore change is essential, even if risky.

JR Cosgrove
4 years 10 months ago

The Church has been a disaster when it has gotten involved in political policies since its beginning. It’s mission was always salvation not a heaven on earth. Why has this changed? Andjust what is the Kingdom of God? I see no evidence of any progress to any earthly state that God would favor. The modern world came about despite the Church’s opposition to it. What in the modern world is leading to salvation?

JENNIFER ROEBER
4 years 11 months ago

If you haven't been asked why you are still Catholic, you either aren't paying attention, or maybe you aren't Catholic. It's a decent question, which as a Catholic woman in particular, I sometimes struggle to answer. Yes, there is the abhorent years of all kinds of abuses, and most especially the enabling of abusers by the people who cover it up. All men. Why as a woman should I trust any of them? And yet, this is MY faith. But I also acknowledge that if the Church (and I mean the institution) doesn't allow the women who wish to minister in so many ways any admittance, it stands a very good chance of becoming a non-entity. No trust. No legitimacy within the world outside the Catholic hierarchy (we may already be there). And eventually, very few, or no women.

Jane Lawson
4 years 11 months ago

What a thought provoking and insightful analysis. So much of this resonates with me.
Thinking about myself and my women friends I ask the same question and there are a number of interconnected answers.
In many instances I think women are loyal to their parish which, if the leadership is good, women are involved as much as possible, the preaching is thoughtful, learned and joyful and the community is supportive, we focus on the parish and push the ‘church’ to one side.
There’s also the whole matter of identity. Being a Catholic in the UK is to be very aware of the centuries of persecution and the bravery of the recusant priests and martyrs (including lay women) to maintain it through penal times. It seems like a betrayal to walk away despite there being many good reasons.
And finally, to leave means leaving a community that has, with all its faults, often been the source of love, friendship, support and prayer.
In many institutions and organisations we have a choice to leave or stay and try to reform. Sadly, there are no democratic mechanisms in the church to enable this (how many times have we been reminded that the church is not a democracy) and until this happens, numbers will lea h away, especially the young.

Jason & Amy Rogers
4 years 10 months ago

@Jane YES

vezacora@gmail.com
4 years 11 months ago

I was asked the same question with a comment. You are a smart woman, why are you in this Church?
The question brought tears to my eyes. Truly, I have been betrayed by the Church I have " defended" and prayed for. This is my faith I was born, live and will die Catholic.
Over the years, our Church has gone through tribulations and the Church has survived.
There are a lot of good men in the Church. In time, women will have a place at the table.
By staying, I pray that Jesus will let this little light of mine, shine.

Celia Wexler
4 years 11 months ago

Intriguing op-ed. My book, Catholic Women Confront Their Church: Stories of Hurt and Hope (Rowman & Littlefield) has struck a responsive chord in scores of Catholic women. Most of the exceptional women I profile in my book have remained practicing Catholics, but to remain in the church is a continuing struggle. https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/My-discovery-of-how-I-can-be-a-Catholic-and-a-10634866.php'

Caoimhin Lycke
4 years 11 months ago

Womyn will restore and save the Church while guiding their enlightened brethren. Thanks be to G-d and the glorious, inspirational Wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

Katha Hartley
4 years 10 months ago

I am a 79 year old woman educated in Catholic schools including the university where I earned a Master’s Degree. I was educated primarily by women including many nuns in elementary and high school. I have lived in parishes across the United States. I had a very good career with high level managerial positions. I married, have children and grandchildren. With my husband, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I have volunteered in my communities and serve as an EM and choir member. I have belonged to ecumenical groups, read all the Vatican II documents, recent encyclicals, and taken many theology and philosophy courses. My point? I have never once been asked for my opinion, my thoughts, or my reasons for remaining a Catholic or my ideas about restoring integrity to Church leadership by any clergy person...ever! Not ever! And i’m not the only loyal Catholic who is invisible when solutions are being developed. Many of us agree on two - married and women priests.

Alan Johnstone
4 years 10 months ago

Maybe it is reasonable and wise to remain within the fellowship of believers in Jesus Christ as it is the community which the Blessed Virgin Mary still belongs to, is Queen of and is the only human being who is not also God who is body and soul and spirit in the next world.

Remember, Our Queen and the Mother of Our Lord has visited quite a number of people personally in the last two thousand years and She has never once complained about the status of women, bearing in mind that she chose females more often than not to convey her intended message.
And, I might add, they have been listened to by a vast number of believers both male and female.

I disagree with the premise of the headline, the "Church Militant", the fellowship of believers still to go through death is not in crisis.
The institution has never had respect or powerful moral authority over unbelievers in any age.

Anne Chapman
4 years 10 months ago

“No, I mean the ‘dones,’” she said, “Like, in, ‘I’m totally done with the Catholic Church.’”

This comment came from a student, It reflects what many young adult Catholic women are feeling. The data show that they are leaving the Catholic church in droves - in record numbers. And they are not returning to marry in the church or to have their children baptized in as great of numbers as did the young women of previous generations. According to CARA, infant baptisms are at a record low, in spite of the dramatic growth in (nominal) numbers of American Catholics. Similarly, the numbers of marriages in the church are near all time lows also.

Many educated young women have no desire to raise children in a church that teaches that their daughters are inferior ("ontologically") to their sons nor that ordained males are superior ("ontologically") to all other Catholics.

The reasons young women are leaving are not a mystery. Today's generation of young women have grown up with the understanding that they are equal to men, not subservient. They go to school, college and jobs, and although not "perfect", most are treated as equal to their male classmates and colleagues, most of the time. And they do have options for having the situation addressed if they believe they are being discriminated against because of being female.

Except for in the church. There they are taught that women are to be "passive", subservient to men. That their "proper" role is to be helpers to men.

I struggled for decades to remain Catholic. Like many here, I loved the church, especially the community of people in my parish. I struggled and prayed and hoped for change. Instead the church started going backwards, edging back to the pre-Vatican II mindset I had experienced growing up. Vatican II had kept me in the church when young. So much hope when I had been ready to walk. But, Paul VI decided to stick with the condemnation of modern birth control methods, choosing to continue harmful stress on the marriages of most Catholic couples, and John Paul II and Benedict chose to try to subvert Vatican II completely and to emphasize that the church believes that only male celibates have the right to define what the "proper" roles are for women - inferior to men. Then came the sex abuse scandals.

So, finally, ten years ago or so, in my late 50s, I became a "done". The longer I have been out of the insitutitonal Catholic church, the more I have come to see that I should have left much earlier. Although some do not believe it, one does not have to be Catholic to be christian. One does not have to be Catholic to live a life of faith. Removing the obstacle in the road called the Catholic church enabled me to focus on God and Jesus' message, rather than on the mental struggles related to dissenting from so many Catholic teachings.

I came to believe that patriarchy is at the heart of the evils committed by the church clerical caste. I came to believe that patriarchy and misogny are among the church's institutional 'original sins", enshrined in church teachings', and leading the institution to cause great harm to "the church" - to sin against the 1+ billion non-ordained members. The sex abuse crisis is among those evils, and, of course, is among the worst of the evils committed by the official church over the centuries.

I was taught that even passive participation in sin is sinful. By staying in the church, supporting it with "time, talent and treasure", as I did for most of my life, I saw that I was enabling the continuation of the dysfunction and harm caused by the institutional church. The only voice the non-clergy have is their presence and their money. I chose to stop enabling the dysfunction, because as long as the people in the pews continue to donate their time, their talent and their treasure, while still having no voice in the church, the dysfunction will continue.

I am an alum of LMU also, and I am happy to see that it has such an intelligent and articulate woman professor in the theology department.

L Hoover
4 years 10 months ago

I am a returning Catholic. My sin, as I came to understand it through prayer, was not in leaving....as being separated gave me the opportunity to discover where I belonged. Rather, I sinned in not appreciating all that God gives me through the Catholic church, and in not appreciating all the good that is done by the church and by God's servants who remain. I was looking at the glass half empty (and partially corrupt and too exclusionary). He showed me the glass of the Catholic church is way more than half full. Humans have weaknesses and institutions designed by humans, even with God's help, inevitably fall short, especially when compared to the perfection that is God. As such, being Catholic brings me more happiness and a closer relationship with God than I ever thought possible. My other thought is this: the time to cut out on that which you love is not when times are tough. Our church needs us now. I am grateful to every person who remains.....as long as they aren't shutting their eyes to moral responsibility. I continue to hope and pray for enlightenment and change.

Gwynith Young
4 years 10 months ago

I was never following church leaders. I follow the God/man who lived 2000 years ago. Should I stop following because of 2nd-rate men?

Gwynith Young
4 years 10 months ago

I was never following church leaders. I follow the God/man who lived 2000 years ago. Should I stop following because of 2nd-rate men?

Gwynith Young
4 years 10 months ago

I was never following church leaders. I follow the God/man who lived 2000 years ago. Should I stop following because of 2nd-rate men?

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