Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church
364
Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church
364eBook
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Overview
The widely exposed transgressions of priests within the Catholic Church stunned the faithful and sent a new surge of energy through the progressive church reform movement in the United States. Despite the movement's growing profile, the world has only recently learned that Catholic women are the driving force behind reform. Good Catholic Girls is a lively account of these courageous women, as seen through the eyes of an impassioned journalist, Angela Bonavoglia. They include Joan Chittister, the Benedictine nun who refused to obey a Vatican order not to speak at an international conference for women's ordination groups; Mary Ramerman, ordained a Catholic priest before 3,000 jubilant supporters; Frances Kissling, whose fight for women's reproductive rights has shaken the Church at its highest levels; Barbara Blaine, a priest abuse survivor who created the nation's most powerful voice for victims; and Sister Jeannine Gramick, who built a pioneering ministry to gays and lesbians, despite Vatican orders to silence her and ban her work.
Backed by supporters worldwide, these and other women are rethinking Catholic theology, changing the face of ministry, and resurrecting the lost lives of female church leaders. As Bonavoglia shows, the hierarchy ignores them at its peril.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780062015396 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 364 |
| File size: | 973 KB |
About the Author
Angela Bonavoglia is a nationally recognized writer on women's issues and church reform whose work has appeared in The Nation, Chicago Tribune, Ms., Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Newsday, among others. She is the author of The Choices We Made: Twenty-five Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion, which was featured on Oprah. She lives with her husband in Westchester County, New York.
Read an Excerpt
Good Catholic Girls
How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church
Chapter One
The Revolt of the Erie Benedictines
When I phoned Sister Joan Chittister before my visit, she was roaring mad. Turns out that the New York Times magazine editors had killed a profile about her just before it was to go to press. The time was early 2002, just as the Boston Globe's spotlight team had let loose a fury of pedophilia accusations against Catholic priests. The reason Chittister was given: The story wasn't about pedophilia. This was after the freelance journalist had trekked, the weekend before Christmas, to the shores of Lake Erie in Pennsylvania, just a few miles short of Canada, to spend time with Chittister. And after photographer Joyce Tenneson, producer of a smashing book of photographs called Wise Women, went off to take Chittister's picture.
Chittister usually hates pictures of herself. She especially hated the one in Time magazine that made her look slightly diabolical, under a headline about her "Dangerous Talk." That was published in August 2001, when Chittister made international news. She had been invited to speak in Dublin, Ireland, at the first international conference of organizations world-wide on the ordination of Catholic women to the priesthood. No sooner had she been invited than the Vatican forbade her to attend. Chittister had a choice: Stay dutifully at home or defy the pope.
Into the Times' trash went the story. Lost was a moment of real celebrity that might have awakened people to the extraordinary women leading the progressive Catholic Church reform movement in the United States -- women who had just provided a prescient model for dissent. Chittister was incensed. "In the middle of this unprecedented male ecclesiastical scandal," she immodestly intoned, the newspaper of record had failed to see how important it was to bring to the world stage "the women who represent the very best in the Roman Catholic tradition."
Chittister has devoted her life to reaching Catholic women, emboldening them, and moving them to move the Church to change. She entered Mount Saint Benedict Monastery at the age of sixteen in 1952. But her real work began in those misty mornings before the dawn of the second wave of feminism. When many of us were burning our bras, symbolically at least, Chittister and a battalion of nuns at the Erie Benedictine monastery were doing something equally defiant -- tossing habits, veils, and starched white collars into one collective garbage heap.
Joan Chittister: The Early Years
When I visit Chittister, she has just turned sixty-six. Of average height and broad-shouldered, she walks with a limp and a lumbering gait, keepsakes of her bout with polio. The disease struck when she first entered the convent and confined her to a wheelchair for nearly two years. Chittister has marble-blue eyes that fill up with tears at a moment's notice. She has short, unstylish salt-and-pepper hair. She dresses practically, in jersey knits in blues and maroons, and sensible shoes. She has a big, robust laugh, and a tough-guy quality about her.
Most of the Erie Benedictines -- who numbered 135 in 2002 -- live in dormitory-style rooms at the sprawling monastery. Chittister is among those who struck out on their own. She lives in a simple, two-story, 150- year-old colonial house in a tired section of downtown Erie. She has three housemates: Sister Mary Lou Kownacki, who runs the Neighborhood Art House; Sister Mary Miller, who operates the Emmaus Soup Kitchen; and the indefatigable Sister Maureen Tobin.
When Chittister entered the order, Tobin was already there. A lumbering presence herself, shorter than Chittister, very plump, and slightly disheveled, Tobin was Chittister's principal when Chittister taught high school English, beginning in 1959. Tobin became her dear friend and, later, her manager. Today, Tobin schedules Chittister's speaking engagements, makes her plane reservations, screens her voluminous mail, picks up her guests at the airport, and keeps everyone who wants a piece of Chittister in an orderly line, getting to them as she is able to, while hardly ever losing her temper.
Chittister's house is full of fabulous old wood -- maple, mahogany, tiger oak. On the first floor is a comfortable living room, with two couches, overstuffed chairs, and a color TV on which Sisters Mary and Maureen watch a lot of basketball. A tiny prayer room opens out into a dining room, where a painting of the Last Supper hangs on the wall. The painting is darker and more mysterious than the original. Instead of the all-male gathering imagined by the Church fathers, this one -- more realistic, say the feminist theologians -- includes children and women. "Who do you think baked the bread and poured the wine?" snapped a visitor, Sister Bernadette, as I stood staring. "You don't think it was those Palestinian men, do you?"
Chittister's study, where she writes (she's authored more than thirty books and counting), is at the top of the stairs. Her chair is too high for her desk -- ergonomically speaking -- so she has to slouch to peck furiously on her little laptop. Otherwise, she is computer-savvy. She sleeps with a tiny, voice-activated tape recorder under her pillow so she won't miss those elusive moments of nocturnal creativity. She also has a C-Pen -- a kind of computerized Magic Marker -- that holds up to one thousand words of text that she can then download to her computer. Testament to her work, book jackets hang in frames all around. On her desk is a photo of her mother, her father, and herself as a baby in her father's arms. He died when she was three, an event that left her bereft.
For nuns, two major developments caused cataclysmic changes in religious life. The first was the Sister Formation Movement of the 1950s. A response in part to the new requirements for professional certification, particularly for teachers, American nuns pursued advanced education as never before. They earned master's and doctoral degrees, becoming among the most educated employees of the Roman Catholic Church. The other influence was the Second Vatican Council (1962 to 1965) ...
Good Catholic GirlsHow Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church. Copyright © by Angela Bonavoglia. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.