WOMEN AND RELIGIONS: PORTRAITS, ORGANISATIONS, DEBATES

Armed with these shared tools, North-American feminist theologians address numerous questions, which find vastly diverse answers.

Feminist theologians, whether Catholic or Protestant, bring their critical analysis to bear primarily on the Bible. In all cases, these women's questioning rests on the observation that Scripture is both cause and consequence of a patriarchal, androcentrist and sexist vision of the world. The Bible, generated in a patriarchal context, went on to be used to legitimate women's subordination, marginalisation nay their oppression over many centuries.

Some of these theologians, emulating Liberation Theology's approach, start from their oppressed position to read the Bible as the word of a God who always sides with the oppressed and invites collaboration in his liberating project . Others favour a literary research aiming to list the female figures who then become by analogy the “suffering handmaids” of all ages. Conversely and on the basis of their female experience, others selectively exclude passages demeaning to women. From this angle, the core of the Gospel, shorn of its contextual and androcentric formulations comes through as God's message of liberation in Jesus. Other exegetes set about to reconstruct the history of women blotted out by the tradition, adopting in the process a hermeneutics designed to “make silences speak”.

Another key point is the thinking around God and Jesus's maleness. According to feminist theologians, common metaphors for God impose a male divine, and the Father metaphor inescapably evokes a patriarchal system and an infantilising hierarchical relation, justifying besides the authority of fathers on the strength of their natural likeness with God. The discussion of the maleness of God's thus has broad implications: the reassessment of God's image would have a major impact on the admission of women's experience in theological thought, ethical pronouncements and the way authority is understood and ministry apportioned in the Church.

This has elicited a vast array of responses. Some stress the fact that God is different from its masculine representations, beyond masculine or feminine. Some scour the Bible for its feminine language about God – within the limitations imposed by comparisons almost exclusively restricted to the language of motherhood. Indeed they may even advance a “Mother-God” alternative, a theme enlarged upon by others with a “Sister-God”, “Friend-God”, “Midwife-God”... The quest for a feminine language about God harnesses pneumatology: the Spirit or Ruah (literally breath) is feminine in Hebrew and proposes a non-parental relationship, introducing a relational God, connected to the world. Among the most radical thinkers, the critique of masculine language opens sometimes on a form of pantheism, sometimes on a “Goddess” theology or cult. Some post-Christian currents abolish any discontinuity between the world, God and women so as to be melded with an all-encompassing Goddess.

This invites a range of more or less radical reinterpretations. To a God incarnate, Christ and only Saviour of mankind, some prefer The Gospels' Jesus, who through his behaviour and praxis proves a liberator of women. Others find the symbol of restored justice more in Christ than in Jesus. Some advocate a sophiological Christology wherein Jesus is Holy Wisdom incarnate, Sophia's child, thus neutralising his maleness (become an accidental characteristic). There is also a trend that relativises Jesus's person and role: acknowledged as a prophet, he is no longer seen as an ultimate messiah, single incarnation of God now understood as cosmic and self-realising in the world. In some instances the refusal to identify Jesus with the Christ and the rejection of any dualist opposition between God, man and the world results in preferring to name him “Christa” thus referring to a messianic community in which Love's vital power is incarnated. More radical still are those who even reject the symbol of the cross, being a sign of “Christianity's necrophilia” and symbol of a quintessentially oppressive patriarchy.

The figure of Mary embodies the essence of womanhood as determined by the Catholic magisterium: virgin and mother. As such, feminist theologians see in it an ideal beyond the reach of real women and an obstacle to their egalitarian claims, notably within ecclesial hierarchies. According to feminist analyses, it is used to legitimise Christianity's androcentric and patriarchal orientations and to enshrine a specific vocation for women.

Feminist Catholic theologians' relationship to the institution may vary widely in line with the multiplicity of theoretical orientations being voiced. Beyond a majority of women who make do, theologians included, with the Catholic Church as it is and make no calls for change, some exemplars set the tone among Catholic feminists.

Some women raise their issues within the Church they deem patriarchal. They call for major changes, structural reforms and strive to re-think the whole Christian project whilst asserting their belonging to the institution. E.J Lacelle has called this the “reformist-transforming Christian” current, R. Radford Ruether and E. Schussler-Fiorenza are its foremost exponents.

However, women have also left a Church they consider male-dominated. Some who still see themselves as Christian – radically so – live their faith without the established church but remain connected to the institution. In what has become known as the “Christian-post-Christian current”, many women have drifted away from the instituted Church or continue to belong “in dissent”, sometimes lived as an exile. Others have regrouped without the established Church in what is known as para- and post-Christian currents. They hark back to the cult of goddesses and of the mother-goddess and adopt wholly rethought celebrations and liturgical practices. This current is described as “thealogical”. Finally, external to the Church, some women practice in a women-only “anti-church” made up with intellectual followers of Mary Daly more focused on philosophical issues

Christian feminist are unanimous in calling into question the authority in churches and community structures. Their most significant demands bear on the use of inclusive language – that is a liturgical language that expressly references women –, on egalitarian structures and on the foregoing of stereotyped masculine and feminine roles.

In North-America, the subversive counter-models talk loudest. Rosemary Radford Ruether launched the movement of the “women-church” based on the model of Liberation theology's basic ecclesial communities. This is a women's ecclesia^[1] understood sometimes as a section of the feminist movement, sometimes as a contestation of the patriarchal church, sometimes as an “interpretive community” or “spirit-led” community. Encounters bring together Catholics for the most part and are the occasions for original celebrations during which women express through rituals their experience of liberation. In another instance, in Quebec, the group “L'autre Parole” proposes feminist spiritual celebrations, the liturgies of which, still imbued with Christian content, aim to channel an experience and a symbolics specific to women.

In Europe, notably in Germany and the Netherlands, the movement takes the very different form of Women's Synod that bring together representatives from women's organisations and from the churches to discuss theological and liturgical issues.

Feminist theologies provide a fine example of the many and manifold views and practices that congregate within Catholicism. For all that they are produced by a minority, the quantity of writing dealing to a greater or lesser extent with women's demands for emancipation since the 70s and especially the 80s bears out the vitality of these critical, non-institutional theologies, which provide fresh understandings of the extant religious phenomenon; the manner of their reception within the Catholic and Protestant institutions remains a moot question. Their admission to the academic realm seems under way though with distinct variations according to regions and linguistic zones. As for inroads into the Roman texts, feminist theologians' research may be seen to have been partly taken on board: the care given to some details and formulations (such as refraining from placing on Eve the weight of the original sin in the 1991 Catechism) has not as yet structurally altered the inner logic of traditional discourse (keeping to the same example: while shorn of references to Eve-the-sinner, the texts continue to uphold Mary, “the new Eve”. For feminists, therefore, there is still some way to go, since the relation to women, no longer openly negative though it be, remains bound in with an ideal figure). There is no way of telling whether those are first steps heralding changes to come or superficial accommodations aimed at preserving the structure untouched. As against that, it is quite certain that the Catholic sphere creates meaning and community alongside and outside the institution, and this in widely varied modes