‘A Feminist Without Rancor’

As its principal writer and editor, Susan Muto must digest many sources and “find the voice” of the proposed pastoral letter on the role of women in the Roman Catholic Church.

With an academic background in literature and spirituality, Muto helped establish Duquesne University’s Institute of Formative Spirituality and taught there until 1988. Since 1983, she has directed the Epiphany Assn., a center for Catholics who want to develop a deeper spiritual life.

Muto has written more than a dozen books and numerous articles on spiritual life.

When Bishop Joseph Imesch “interrupted” her life in 1984, asking her to work with the ad hoc committee, she says he caught her off guard: “Why me? I’m not a theologian. I don’t necessarily specialize in women’s issues. . . . “

At first she was almost overwhelmed by the diversity of mind between the bishops’ committee and the women who served as their consultants, Muto says.

She since has served as something of a facilitator.

“They needed someone with no major axes to grind,” she says. “I was not issue oriented whatsoever. My whole mind-set is always toward the larger picture: How do we find peace and not lose access to love and kindness?”

Muto calls herself “a feminist without rancor” and believes in the power of the process:

“You can become so issue-oriented that if the conclusion is not your point, then everything is vitiated. We’ve talked about sexism from the beginning. The Church is at the level of genius in holding two contrarieties together: equality in dignity; difference in identity. Sexism is violently against this notion.”

Still, she is not caught up in the issue of ordaining women into the priesthood. Rather, she talks about its resolution in the long run.

“I think you have to live within the limits of the moments in history where you are placed,” she says. “Yes, people may have ended up seeing something that the official church does not yet see. But if it is of the Holy Spirit, it will be seen and in due course it will find its way.

“Women are very good at waiting. They have patience and endurance. Curiously enough, something happens. There is action in waiting.”

Should that be interpreted as Muto’s support for ordination?

“I hear that,” she acknowledges. “Let’s say I’m thinking about it. What I see in reality is priestless parishes, women involved in associate roles, serving as chaplains. . . . Something is stirring.”

Not that progress is always apparent.

During the recent trip to Rome, when a draft of the pastoral letter was presented, “Mariella Frye and I had to lean on one another as women and not get discouraged,” Muto says.

And during committee meetings, she says, “there have been moments of overwhelming sense of discouragement when I’ve wondered: ‘Will we ever come to anything?’ Without (St.) John of the Cross, I think I would have lost it.”

Throughout the process, she has been inspired by the 16th-Century Spanish mystic, monastic reformer and poet.

In him, she finds a strong indication of “the deep feminine” component of spirituality. She finds a powerful metaphor in his writings of his “dark night of the soul,” Muto says:

“The Church at the end of 2,000 years seems in its own dark night. The parishes are emptying, there is a shortage of priests, religious orders are in their death throes, lay people go to Church on Sunday and see no application in their lives.”

She was writing about St. John of the Cross while working on the pastoral letter and found striking the analogy with women. “At a central point in his life where he felt he was changing into something new, he was snatched away by his order (the Carmelites) and imprisoned,” Muto says. “He knew what it was like to be marginalized, to be second class, and yet, out of that came some of the most glorious poetry in the Spanish language.”

The poetry is the result of that deep spiritual appreciation of what is masculine and feminine, she says; people have to have something of the masculine and feminine in them to be completely human.

“If what happened to him personally could happen to the Church at large, it would be wonderful,” Muto says.

“It could move this Church into the third millennium.”