Catholic Women’s Group Shifts Focus to Global Social Justice

Other people in Los Angeles take their out-of-town guests to Disneyland. We are going to show you reality. --Margaret Arnold speaking to 200 Catholic women at annual conference ofNational Assembly of Religious Women.

Born in the days of Vatican II and the changing social climate of the 1960s, the National Assembly of Religious Women--once a support group exclusively for Roman Catholic nuns--continues to evolve as a forum where religious women can seek social action.

Nowhere was this more evident than at USC last weekend, where the assembly held its annual conference amid the trappings of protest songs, buttons, newsletters and petitions.

“We are feminist women with a vision,” summarized one of the opening day speakers. She described the meeting as “a coming together by women of faith to see what we as a collective group can do about engaging in public action for the achievement of justice.”

The details of the large agenda were spelled out in the color-coded action packets outlining each day’s schedule of music, liturgies, reports, workshops and panel discussions dealing with a global array of issues--racism, unemployment, the feminization of poverty, political repression in South Africa, depressed housing in the South Bronx area of New York City.

Theme Borne Out

And the theme of the meeting, “The Politics of Struggle--Building the Community of Hope,” was borne out by dozens of speakers whose personal experience testified to struggle.

Typical was a Saturday morning session on organizing. Opening speaker, Maureen Fiedler, is one of the 24 Catholic sisters now under attack by the Vatican for signing an advertisement last year in the New York Times that called on the Roman Catholic Church to recognize the diversity of opinion among committed Catholics regarding abortion.

Fiedler, who was national coordinator of Catholics for the equal rights amendment and is currently co-director of the Quixote Center in Washington, got right to the point.

“Why organize? First, because it ends isolation,” she said. “Many women feel treated as second-class citizens--in church, in society. In organizing we lose the sense of being alone. Second, in organizing the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and our energy is increased when we come together. And third, we are building base communities which struggle for change and give us a place to talk.”

Suggests Modest Start

She suggested a modest start.

“Not everybody in every group is ready to picket at an ordination,” she said. “But there are other issues. The woman who would like her daughter to serve at the altar may not know how she feels about women becoming priests. There is a crying need in the church for non-sexist wedding services. Some groups have monitored sexist language in preaching.

“People are at all different places in their thinking and you have to make room for them. You can talk about the Gospel, about equality and the way Jesus lived. We don’t need to hit people over the head with patriarchy at the first meeting.”

On Saturday afternoon, the women broke into small groups and left the banner-draped conference center to investigate a Los Angeles described, in a slide-show introduction as “the second largest Salvadoran city, the second largest Guatemalan city, in the world.”

“Our identity as a multicultural city gives us a richness,” the narrator said, “but also gives us people with definite needs.” To see those needs close up, the groups dispersed to 10 on-site “strategizing” sessions, meeting with women engaged in such projects as shelters for the homeless, health care projects and union organizing.

First Time at Meeting

“I am overwhelmed,” said Chona Freeman of Winslow, Ariz., near the end of Saturday’s intense session. A member of St. Joseph’s Church in Winslow and active in the Altar Society, it was her first assembly conference.

“I knew we had problems in our church with conditions on the Indian reservation, but the Bronx, Central America, Africa--it’s almost too much,” Freeman said.

Marjorie Tuite, the assembly’s national coordinator, maintains that the group’s global agenda, with its sweeping challenge to all unjust structures in society, is a heavy but necessary load.

“You’re talking about connections,” she said. “If I can make the connection from the escalating military budget to poverty for women . . . I have to be as concerned about the right of Nicaragua for self-determination as with a neighborhood community to determine its own way. I think to work on one issue is a luxury in a global analogy. Because there is a basic problem: militarism out of a patriarchal structure, a world view of militarism that nurtures cultural violence.”

Wide-Ranging Agenda

Tuite, a Dominican nun and activist for human rights in Central America, was sitting late Saturday afternoon in a small room adjoining the conference room where wrap-up reports were urging continued support of the United Farm Workers of America and its boycott of table grapes, along with support for the pending Civil Rights Restoration Act, repeal of Public Law 93-531 that would relocate Navajo people from their traditional lands, and a litany of other issues.

She described the evolution as a continuing renewal movement.

“When we were formed, the thrust of Vatican II urged us to look at the Gospel, urged us to look at the charism of our founder, at the signs of the times and determine who we were and what we would be about in relation to mission,” she said.

What was visible during that dramatic period was change in dress and living accommodations, as women religious discarded outmoded costumes and customs.

“Not so visible,” Tuite continued, “was another change, a new understanding by sisters of themselves as women, a new reflection in meaning. Out of all that came new ways, and, to deal with them, we had to create a network. Our original title was National Assembly of Women Religious, and in 1972 at our meeting in Minneapolis we chose as our priority a justice ministry, concentrating on issues of justice affecting women’s lives in church and society. We became a multi-issue organization.”

Another Key Shift

This decade has seen another key shift.

“In 1981-82, we made a determination to be more inclusive,” Tuite said. “A lot of the things we had struggled for--the affirmation of a different life style--had been achieved. It made more sense for women to be meeting with women.”

The organization opened its membership to laywomen, changed its name to the National Assembly of Religious Women and remodeled its national board to include six lay and six religious women.

The assembly, with headquarters in Chicago, has one full-time staff member, 2,000 members, a budget of around $50,000 and publishes a bimonthly issue-oriented newspaper called Probe. Tuite lives in New York where she is full-time director of Ecumenical Action for Church Women United. “I do NARW (the assembly) as much as I can.”

“The purpose of this meeting is networking, sharing experiences, to be energized and motivated when the members go home,” she said.

Facets Linked

In her 1984 book, “Religious Women in the U.S.,” American historian Elizabeth Kolmer describes the renewal of Roman Catholic Church religious life as strongly tied to the growth of laity participation in the church.

“Together, these two groups, religious women and laity, are asking for a greater voice, for more direct sharing, in the spiritual life and apostolic ministry of the people of God,” she wrote.

The impact of that new alliance was emphasized in a lunchtime conversation by Pauline Turner of Worcester, Mass., one of the six lay members of the assembly’s board. She described the change as “casting aside the old stereotypes that had separated us.”

Turner, whose interest in women and religion goes back to her days as a student and later as a teacher at Marquette University, said she believes that “laywomen have been isolated” from church participation and that the assembly is healing a breach.

Need to Come Together

“I came here because I see the desperate need of women of the church to come together in a way that is organized and determined by the women themselves,” she said. “The first time I heard the idea that women should be ordained, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a nervy thing--we have our place and our role.’ You have to move out of that conditioning piece by piece.”

Married to a college professor, and the mother of a 14-year-old daughter, she describes the assembly as “trying to transform the church. In Worcester, we have a small liturgy group that meets in homes, and I think this sort of activity is happening in many places around the country.”

Like others seeking more inclusion for women, Turner said, she thinks that the hierarchical structures of church authority have to be changed.

“What ought the church to be? I have certain norms I always go back to from the New Testament where the very earliest church has men and women working together in equality. I see the church as a community of equals. And I see this women’s group committed to that norm. That’s how the spirit is working in this patriarchal century--calling women to enable and empower the whole church to fulfill its mission: enabling the whole of humanity.”

Minority in Church

With its membership of 2,000, the assembly is a minority presence among the nation’s estimated 52 million Roman Catholics, including 120,000 sisters. But it is a prickly presence. The group’s action agenda for women, including ordination and support for the sisters who signed the ad last fall in the New York Times underscores growing tension within Catholicism over the basic role of women in the church.

Tuite , who also signed the New York Times ad, acknowledges the minority status. “We don’t represent all women in the church; we don’t represent all women religious. (Time Magazine earlier this year quoted a National Opinion Research poll as showing that 41% of Catholic men and 57% of Catholic women could be considered feminists). We are a movement and people come and go. But it is the movement itself that holds the vision.”

It was the movement and its vision that had attracted another small delegation to last week’s conference. Independent film makers Julie Thompson and Brogan de Paor of A.K.L. Foundation for Media in Santa Monica spent a busy weekend with cameras, lights and a crew filming segments of the conference for a documentary they are making on the changing Roman Catholic Church in the United States.

“We’re interested in the influence of liberation theology, as it impacts on women and the social action agenda in this country,” Thompson said as she was helping pack up cable and film cans late Saturday afternoon.

Two Documentaries

Her projects have included two earlier documentaries, “The Willmar 8,” dealing with a women’s strike at a Minnesota bank, and “Citizen,” about the late Allard Lowenstein, a 1960s activist who also served as a U.S. congressman. Both have been aired on PBS.

The film makers see the Roman Catholic Church today at a major watershed in history.

“The U.S. church seems to be poised between some old world with a structural culture and a new, future world which is people-based,” De Paor said. “And the women are providing the driving force toward the future.”