The Adventures of Catholic Woman

There are times I feel like I am a character in a comic book when it comes to my faith. Like Superman, who is considered the representative of all the positive ideals of America, I feel that people see me like that with regards to my faith – that I am Catholic Woman, fearlessly swooping in and taking care of their Catholic needs until there's a happy ending. That would be fine except for the following:

1. I don't have any superpowers.

2. I don't have a costume.

3. I'm not the positive embodiment of being Catholic.

To explain where my idea of “Catholic Woman” came from: a good number of my everyday friends and acquaintances are not Catholic, so I am called upon to answer questions about Catholicism. Most of these questions are along the lines of “Why do Catholics do/believe (fill in the blank)?” and I'll happily answer those as best I can. In the course of answering the question, there is an assumption that I agree with everything the Church says, when in reality I don't. So the question I face next becomes, “Well if you disagree with it, why are you still Catholic?”

I am still a Catholic – partly out of cultural identity, but also out of a true belief that despite my odds with the Church I still feel that this is where I belong. I believe I can make the Church stronger due to my disagreements than by leaving. However, from what I've gathered from others, is that if I identify as a Catholic, then I must (in their opinions) agree with everything.

Spare me the cape and tights, and while I'd like the superpowers I don't think they'll be coming anytime soon. I'm not “Catholic Woman” fearlessly flying into the ecumenical problems of the world and offering up the “right” Catholic answer to those in need. The beauty of the Catholic Church is that it is universal; there is no one embodiment. We are many, we are wide-ranging in looks and temperaments. Our faith, however it may come and whatever its strengths, is greater than any superhero ever could be.

Sarah Albertini-Bond fully confesses to not being a superhero but thinks superpowers would be cool and is not sure she could pull off a cape.

A Mass of Contradictions: God With Us

I searched four stores before I found them. I sifted through piles of white and red before my fingers curled around purple and pink. Finally, a full compliment of Advent candles to round out my wreath.

The first person I told was my girlfriend, Charlotte. We now have a double dose of candle-prayer rituals, which is perhaps unexpected, given that Charlotte once asked me if she should check atheist or agnostic on a survey. But it was her idea to buy one of the glass-encased religious candles they sell at our grocery store.

"You can find the right prayer for us," she said. We were weary with job-searching. We chose a rainbow candle.

This began a nightly ritual of lighting the candle, breathing out the day, and speaking aloud. We take turns choosing readings, from the Bible, from poetry, from the writings of physicist Richard Feynman. They have in common a cord of beauty that binds them, a blaze of hope in full view of evil and despair.

When Advent started I got out my wreath and taught Charlotte "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." I haven't been to Mass since Advent began—tricky schedules and ambivalent desires—but something in me craves and leaps to these rituals.

On the subway recently, there was this preacher. He spoke of renewal, of Christ, of powerful love, and I quietly assented. He spoke then of evil. He spoke of men marrying men and women marrying women. I stood straight-backed. My face was still. My inside changed.

"What's Emmanuel mean?" Charlotte asked me when I'd finished singing.
"God with us," I replied.

I am taking Charlotte home for Christmas and we'll attend my home church. I will probably not introduce her as my girlfriend—it seems disruptive and risky in this public and casual context—but a day is coming when keeping the bits of myself separate will bleed me dry.

You see, the only God I know is Emmanuel. Sometimes I hate God for it, and sometimes I doubt that a real God would be present in the mirrors of angry, frightened, hungering faces and not, to me at any rate, in blinding visions and streaming glories.

Nonetheless.

And so, I cannot hold myself too carefully, lest the queerness, in whatever sense, be revealed. Because when I have sex with my girlfriend, I am praising and wrestling God, and when I speak prayers before flame, I am sharing with Charlotte. When I walk down the street and quiet overtakes me—it is my Emmanuel I seek.

I am full of confusion. Should be one thing or the other? A bisexual liberal or a mystical Catholic? But something lifts my head and hands. I'll read this to Charlotte tonight. Our lights will stay lit, and we will breathe together to blow the candles out.

Rebecca Fullan wants you to know that the intercessory candle did the trick and now she has four jobs. She is hoping to find the candle for a less exhausting schedule next time, but is also deeply grateful for work.

From Research to Reality

While most of my friends studied abroad or took internships, I spent the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college huddled over books and a laptop. The research bug had bitten me. I was so obsessed with a research topic that day after day I willfully ducked out of the glorious California sunshine into musty libraries and non-air conditioned coffee shops to read and think and type.

The subject? The Catholic women's ordination movement. The more I read about its history and current activities, the more intellectually fascinated and personally inspired I became. I relished in stories of the courageous individuals who publicly demonstrated a Catholicism I could relate to—one that affirms the spiritual gifts and vocational callings of women, and all people for that matter. At the end of each day I called up classmates and friends and professors to tell them about the books I read and the controversies I pondered. While many feminists delighted in my interest, I found myself adamantly defending the cause to others who were skeptical or downright opposed to the idea of it.

Weeks of excitement culminated one afternoon over a cup of tea and an essay describing one woman's long discernment to enter the priesthood. Amid the story of her restless prayers and candid conversations with fellow Catholics, my stomach jumped, my breath escaped me, and I looked up from the page in utter shock: Despite my love of theology, ministry experience, and commitment to the church, I had never seriously deliberated ordination as a potential personal calling. Not once. While passionately analyzing and defending Catholic women who discern callings to ordination, I had never asked my faithful female friends whether they have considered this vocation either.

The discovery that I could rally around this topic without engaging it at the most intimate level left me stunned and dismayed. My tea went cold as I stared at the blank wall. As I tried to make sense of this, I found myself justifying my detachment. Most of my male friends who consider the priesthood do so after spending time with male priests. "Of course I haven't considered ordination," I told myself, "I don't know what I am really considering. Female priests are beyond the reality I have experienced." Furthermore, most of my male friends begin discernment after intentional mentors or well-established programs invite them to do so. "Women have no such programs," I thought, "and we have few mentors to provide a relationship within which to consider a call to ordination."

This day has haunted me in the years since. I have continued to recognize many circumstances that allow women, like myself, to overlook the question of priestly vocations. I have concluded, however, that if I truly believe that God calls women to ordination in the Catholic Church, I need to be intentional about breaching these obstacles in vocational discernment. I need to ask myself and my friends to consider ordination. I must spend time imagining what Catholic ordained life would look like, for myself and for my female friends. I need to allow others to share in my discernment. I need not only write about it; I must engage this subject as a living reality, one that might be quietly living within me.

Jessica Coblentz is grateful that her recent undergraduate career at Santa Clara University encouraged her to ponder such important, controversial topics. She is back in the Seattle area again, where she continues to have more coffee house realizations.
Image: http://www.christian-wallpaper.com/backgrounds/catholic-priest-and-the-altar-during-mass.jpg.

Marriage & the Book of Ruth

“Wherever you go, I shall go, whatever you do, so shall I do. Your people shall be my people and your God shall be my God too.”
Rendering of the Book of Ruth in song by the Benedictine monks in Weston Priory, VT.

Next week is my ninth wedding anniversary and I have been trying to find a way to mark the day even though my husband Chase and I will be apart. I keep telling myself that it won’t be so bad...after all this is not the first time we have been away from one another on November 13th. But this year, as was the case last year, he is in Europe and I am in New England and the distance feels even greater.

For the past few days each time I feel a longing to be with Chase or I begin contemplating my sense of loss I find myself re-reading the words of the Book of Ruth 1: 16-17. This is the passage in which Ruth commits to return with her mother-in-law Naomi to the latter’s homeland despite Naomi’s protestations. Ruth’s powerful but gentle retort is in part: “Do not ask me to abandon or forsake you! For wherever you go I will go, wherever you lodge I will lodge, your people shall be my people and your God my God.”
These words, spoken between two women, were typed—boldly—on the cover of the program for my wedding Mass and for nearly a decade I’ve turned to them in times of struggle and in times when I’ve needed to be reminded of the depth of love my God has for me. Most importantly I have turned to them to help guide the wonderfully complex journey that marriage can be. As a Catholic woman it is a joy to have this image of female friendship and compassion as a model.

Here I find an accessible image of deeply passionate union whereby the love and connection between two people allows one to embrace fully the life, the family, the nation, and the world of another. This is done not without trepidation and not without being aware of sacrifice but rather while embracing and facing head-on these very things. Ruth speaks these words to Naomi even though her promise will require her to move into foreign and unknown territory and even though Ruth risks losing her own world in the process. It is to this image of love so strong that even the unknown is not a barrier that I am drawn. In the entire Bible it is this passage and these words of fidelity and this promise of companionship that helped me first imagine and then work to craft a life in partnership with my husband.

I do not know if this exchange between Ruth and Naomi resonates with Chase the way it does with me. But I do know that on the 13th I will read Ruth’s words once more, I will most likely listen to my well-worn vinyl recording of the Benedictine monks of Weston Priory, VT singing them, and I will be praying for the wisdom and strength to live by them in the coming year. Click here for a link to the monks singing their song “Wherever You Go”. [http://www.westonpriory.org/music.html]

Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello is a mother, wife, runner, and Catholic living and working in New England where she is a professor of American Studies. She also writes for the blog “The Public Humanist."

Communion Across Centuries (and 3,000 Miles)

When I was about six-years-old, I used to love reading various books about the lives of the Saints. One of my favorite books included the story of St. Agnes. I cannot say that I was particularly drawn to her story – the words “virgin and martyr” made little sense to me then. No, it was not her sexual “purity” or willingness to die for her faith that attracted me – it was her beauty. She was portrayed by the book’s artist as an adolescent girl with dark hair and blue eyes that were simply captivating. Each time I picked up the book I quickly skipped over St. Patrick and St. Maria Gorretti to gaze upon St. Agnes and each time I felt comforted that this young woman was praying for me even if she was at a distance.

I have not thought much about St. Agnes until recently when I found myself doubting whether or not I’d made a mistake in pursuing doctoral studies. I was in the midst of wrapping a birthday gift for my godchild Isabel who turned ten (“double digits” as she likes to remind me) this month and was feeling a bit down because this would be the third birthday that I would not be able to celebrate with her. My studies at Harvard Divinity School have taken me a long way from my native California and sometimes those 3,000 odd miles seem like an endless space between beloved family and friends and me. As I wrapped Isabel’s gifts, I felt the grief welling up within me and the question of “sacrifice” surfaced. What had I sacrificed in pursuing doctoral studies on the East Coast? Time with family and friends, the comforts of familiarity, the grace of the Pacific – these, among other thoughts, came to mind. And so did St. Agnes. Her young face, piercing eyes, and the white lamb in her arms, a symbol of the sacrifice that characterized her life and name, swirled around my mind.

“Sacrifice” has always been a loaded term for me. Too many times, it has been used to sanction violence against women (and men) by claiming that such unnecessary suffering is a participation in the cross of Christ when, in fact, it is really a participation in structures of domination that are created by humans. This being said, there are moments in which we suffer the pain of sacrifice because we believe that in doing so we are enabling a greater good to emerge. For me, sacrificing my time with family and friends in California, missing yet another of Isabel’s birthday parties, is only bearable because I believe in the work that I am doing. I believe that engaging in a critical feminist theology of liberation with its vision of a world characterized by peace and justice is not simply worth these years of doctoral studies, but worth a lifetime of struggle and commitment. I believe such a world of justice and peace, such a coming of the “kindom” of God, is better than any gift I could possibly give Isabel. Such a world will probably not come around in my lifetime or even in Isabel’s, but I think that it is still worth working towards for as we work towards it we place ourselves in good company, company like St. Agnes, Dorothy Day, and Mary of Magdala. We place ourselves in the Communion of Saints where centuries, not to mention miles, cannot separate us from each other.

Currently a doctoral student at Harvard Divinity School, Pearl Maria Barros earned her Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and her Bachelor's of English and Religious Studies from Santa Clara University. When not reading, writing, and researching, she enjoys visiting with friends and family, traveling, and drinking coffee.

Jesuit Martyrs and Saints: One Catholic's Heroes

Martyrs and Saints. These are the action figures, the heroes of my childhood and my faith today. Did my parents get me Wonder Woman comic books? No. My good Catholic parents, God bless them, gave me comic books detailing the stories of martyrs and saints and Catholic leaders such as Pope John Paul II. I love that these “characters” filled my imagination and even to this day, I look to these Catholic heroes for inspiration, solidarity, and strength.

When I was studying theology at Regis College in Toronto with the Jesuits, I discovered a whole new set of heroes: the Jesuit martyrs and saints. These guys are in a class all their own in some respects because they are so filled with the zeal and mission characteristic of the Jesuits. My interest and devotion to the Jesuit martyrs was peaked when I visited the North American Jesuit Martyr’s Shrine in Midland, Ontario. Right next door to the shrine is a re-creation of one of the French Jesuit missions from the 1600s, Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons, which helped give me a context to the kind of life the missionary Jesuits lived. I was overwhelmed with the stories of Jean de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues and the other Jesuit martyrs and how they had given their lives and their deaths for the faith. Experiencing the mission helped me to get to know these martyrs

As with any hero, looking up to them means that you try to emulate their values, attitudes, actions, and perhaps their way of life. For me and the Jesuit martyrs, it means committing myself fully to the liberating mission of Jesus Christ. It means being willing to give of my whole self, not just the parts of myself that I choose.

Who are your heroes and what do they teach you about living the liberating mission of Jesus?


Sister Julie Vieira, IHM, is a member of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Monroe Michigan. She is author of the popular blog www.ANunsLife.org in which she writes about being a young, Catholic nun and answers readers' questions. Sister Julie also ministers at Loyola Press, a Jesuit publishing company in Chicago.

More than Meets the Eye

About five years ago, I wrote an entry in my journal which I entitled “Being a Catholic Woman.” I was a college sophomore, a double-major in English and Religious Studies, and an aspirant in a Roman Catholic women’s religious congregation. And I was searching – searching for a place to belong within a tradition that often defined me as the eternal compliment of men. At the time I wrote, “It seems that being a Catholic woman today is to work and be unappreciated, to speak and be silenced, to love and be rejected. It is to be caught between stagnant tradition and an enriched personal experience of faith, while attempting to build the Kingdom of God through a unique vocation and a myriad of ministries. Being a Catholic woman is a constant challenge to bring the Gospel not only to all of God’s people, but also to a hierarchical and patriarchal institution.”

I think there is still some truth in those words. “Being a Catholic woman,” for me, has indeed entailed living between the extremes of speech and silence, of love and rejection. What is different for me now, I think, is that I have come to accept the space between these tensions as my home.

When I was a little younger, in fact, when I wrote that initial reflection on Catholic womanhood, I still believed (desperately hoped?) that Catholicism would open its arms to me – its feminist daughter. I thought that I might still find a home within its familiar walls, that my questions and concerns about women, ethics, God would be welcomed. But they weren’t. Instead exclusive language continues, motherhood (physical or spiritual) is claimed as the essential vocation of all women, and theologians who dare to speak-out in favor of women’s reproductive rights are threatened with ecclesial censure. It has been hard for me to continue identifying myself as a Catholic woman. Of course, most would say that I should accept the Church as it is or leave. And perhaps they are right, perhaps I should leave. But who would I be without being Catholic? Being Catholic is not some sort of temporary club membership. It is a way of life. The teachings, controversies, horrors, and graces of the Catholic Church are the lenses through which I view the world. They are a part of me. Sometimes they obscure my vision, sometimes they sharpen my sight, but in all moments they enable me to recognize that being a Catholic woman is much more complicated than what at first might meet the eye.

Currently a doctoral student at Harvard Divinity School, Pearl Maria Barros earned her Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and her Bachelor's of English and Religious Studies from Santa Clara University. When not reading, writing, and researching, she enjoys visiting with friends and family, traveling, and drinking coffee.