Nick Ripatrazone reviews the new anthology Unruly Catholic Women Writers:
A woman, single or married, can never become ordained. Many lapsed women have told me the Church’s treatment of women is the reason they have drifted from Mass and never returned. The anger the women in this anthology feel ranges from those who have sprinted from the Church and never looked back to those who long for a return home, even if that house feels broken. My gender precludes a complete understanding of this anger, this distance.
In that vein, when I posit that the best pieces in Unruly Catholic Women do not consider the Catholic hierarchy as a formless omnibus, I do not mean those words as an apologetic retort. One can hold such an opinion, of course, but it makes for thin creative work. Sustained critique is not possible with straw men.
Consider Kaya Oakes’s excellent recent memoir, Radical Reinvention. Oakes finds spiritual direction from both women and men in the Church; she notes its imperfections while finding its ultimate perfection in Christ. There are pieces in this anthology that perfectly capture the paradox of distaste and desire. Place a complaint of the Church delivered through caricature next to the earned wit of “Exile” by Colleen Shaddox: “To be raised Catholic and switch denominations is a lot like giving up Haagen-Dazs for broccoli. You miss the richness, even if you know it’s bad for you.”
Oakes reflects on her decision to remain a practicing Catholic:
[A] female Episcopal priest [told] me that the great feminist theologians are all Catholic for a reason, “because they’re still fighting. Because they’ll be fighting for some time to come.” We can’t bless the bread, or tear it with our hands. But look closely—in the pews, in the back, some of us are lifting our hands. We can’t read the Gospel. But we read everything else. We can’t baptize the children we might bear, lay our dead to rest with those words of grief and consolation; we can’t preach, we can only offer a “reflection” once in a great while. We can’t. We cannot. …
But in that “cannot” I have heard in my church, in the church I freely choose when it tells me all of the things I can’t do, I’ve never felt denied to the point of resentment. Because, vocation? My vocation isn’t behind an altar. My vocation is putting my ass in a pew, week after week. My vocation is the vocation of billions of people, in nearly every religion. It is the vocation of showing up.
The Dish 