In recent weeks when the news spread that the Vatican is making significant strides to revise its handling of clergy sexual abuse cases–all while allegedly linking the severity of these sins to the ordination of women–the questions came in, and I started to ask myself, “How are you feeling about this, Jessica?  How are you doing?“

I couldn’t stop thinking about the story my friend Katie told me the other day. During a recent weekend, she volunteered at a middle school camp for inner city youth run by the Catholic parochial school where she taught for a few years after college. On that Sunday morning, she went to Mass with the students and their teachers in the camp’s quaint wooden chapel. The presider was gracious with the kids, and a good homilist, too. “But the tabernacle there–” she told me.  That’s what got her. “The tabernacle looks just like the boy’s Catholic school down the street. Like the shape of their building.”  I began to smile as she went on.  I delighted in the fact that this friend anticipated the wonder I would share with her as she recounted this experience for me.  ”This is what Catholicism is about, isn’t it? Recognizing Jesus inside an inner city school like that? Like that?  Believing that Jesus dwells with the underprivileged so much that you make a symbol of it with the most important part of your sanctuary?”

I nodded as we savored this moment that captured the best of our Church.  In that small moment, we didn’t have to convince ourselves that we are so blessed to belong to this Church.  We are blessed to have  church that views inner city schools as tabernacles, and tabernacles as inner city schools.  And blessed to be raised in a church that has given us the eyes to see the world in this way, too. “I wish I had moments like that more often,” Katie said. I think she was referring to the tabernacle at the camp, but I was thinking the same thing about the moment we had just shared–that moment of unwavering pride for our faith.

I’ve been telling a lot of people that, for many reasons, I feel sad and disappointed about the recent Vatican stirrings.  And, really, I’m feeling tired of feeling sad and disappointed. But I am also trying to tell a lot of people about my hope. I’m trying to talk about that, too. I’m trying to tell them about the eyes this tradition has afforded me–Katie and me.  Eyes that recognize miraculous transformations in places and people that much of society overlooks. Eyes that see Jesus in the sometimes harsh and unglamorous realities of our cities.  Eyes set on recognizing God’s redemption of our world in any and every place.  Even in our Church.

Yesterday in the New York Times his op-ed was titled, “Religion and Women,” so naturally I was eager to read.  And I really appreciated many things about this piece.  It highlighted a multiply of oppressions against women, both some regularly witnessed and experienced by women in the US, and some more commonly associated with other parts of the world. He also illustrated how widespread these problems are in relation to religion–many types of religion throughout history and across the globe.

Most of all, I appreciated how Kristof demonstrated the complex relationship between gender and religion.  While religion is often sighted as a source of women’s oppression (and rightly so, I think), frequently it is also a context wherein women receive opportunities to exercise their power and authority. In my experience, people commonly dismiss religion as entirely sexist and misogynist, missing the complexity of gender dynamics that exist within many religious communities. Kristof points this out with an example of conservative Christian and pentecostal churches in Africa, which often recognize women’s leadership more than their other community’s outside religion.

We absolutely need to call out religion whenever and wherever it oppresses others, but I hope we can do this accurately so as to honor the women within religion.  If we simply dismiss religion, I think we run the risk of dismissing the reality of the women within the world’s many traditions.  That would be a very contradictory attempt at battling women’s oppression.

Image from http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/04/02/opinion/ts-kristof-190.jpg.

It wasn’t until halfway through the Mass that I realized the deep singing voice behind me belonged to the famous American Catholic politician.  ”Peace be with you,” I said, offering the tall man my tiny hand. Only as he reciprocated the gesture and words of peace did I became aware of who this man is.

It wasn’t mere celebrity that had his presence on my mind throughout the Eucharist and the rest of the Mass. After a week of meditating on the difficulties of being a Catholic feminist in light our nation’s debates concerning reproductive rights, there I was with the famous public figure who has been set apart as the embodiment of this tension between women’s rights and religious tradition.

I was humbled. What kind of courage and devotion must one possess to show up to Mass time and time again, undoubtedly aware of the political implications accompanying every walk one takes toward the altar in that communion line? Although there is real friction in my feminist Catholic identity when it comes to navigating the question of abortion, the discomfort I experience and the Catholic allegiance I profess in light of it is really so easy compared to a man who must work out these tensions so publicly.

From the protest lines to the Communion line. I felt a great deal of courage, standing in that line with him.

As many of you know, last year the Vatican announced its plan to conduct a 3-year study of all the non-cloistered women religious communities in the US.  While much of Rome’s rhetoric surrounding this “study” presents it as a friendly checking-in on the lives of women religious in the States, the response from the leaders of these American religious communities points to the widespread suspicion that there are very different motives underlying the Vatican’s announcements:

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, following a four-day meeting in New Orleans Aug. 11-14, issued a statement questioning what it says is a lack of full disclosure of the motives behind a Vatican investigation of U.S. women religious communities.  In an Aug. 17 press statement, the conference also said it objects to the fact that the congregations “will not be permitted to see the investigative reports about them” when they are submitted in 2011 to the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life and its prefect, Cardinal Franc Rode.

In addition, the women religious leadership expressed concern about secrecy they say is surrounding the funding of the study, said Sr. Annmarie Sanders, director of communications for the women’s conference…The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, meanwhile, is in the midst of a “doctrinal assessment” of the women’s leadership conference, having cited concerns in three areas: ordination, the primacy of the Catholic church, and homosexuality.  Read More…

Today, NCR reported that the Vatican has now asked the US Bishops—and the women’s religious communities, themselves—to fund (as least partially) this 1.1 million dollar study. Why is the Vatican “studying” only US religious communities?  And, why have they targeted women’s communities—especially the most visible, publicly influential women’s communities? Even as these questions remain unanswered, begging suspicions that this whole “study” may be a guise for what is really a contemporary Inquisition of sorts, the Vatican now seeks to place its financial burden directly on the American church.

Now, I understand that, through the hierarchal system of the church, American money will partially finance these sorts of things whether the American church is officially responsible or not.  What I place in the collection basket at Mass makes its way to the Vatican, in part, one way or another—that’s how this whole institution thing works. However, the finances in the American church are in shambles due to years of financial mismanagement, and most recently, the horror of the clergy sex abuse scandals. And with the current economic recession, even thriving ministries are financially struggling. Now, in addition to the American money already allocated to them, the Vatican wants us to front the bill for their project?

Finances aside, I object to the imposition of such a major, invasive project on the American church—particularly American Catholic women. I have not heard one American voice give reasonable support to this study.  As far as I can tell, it’s motives our entirely from outside this country, yet we will suffer its impact entirely.

The Vatican has been painfully vague about this whole project.  Therefore, even as I write this, I realize that I could be all wrong in my pessimism and interrogation of Rome’s motives.  The Vatican could be really, genuinely concerned with bettering the lives of American women’s religious communities.  They could have kind motives.  Has my perception of the Roman Catholic higher-up’s been totally, unjustly corrupted by malicious media and uber-liberal theology—or are my suspicions grounded in the Vatican’s history of power abuses, a disregard for the laity, and a painful tradition of patriarchy?

I’m the kind of person that gives people the benefit of the doubt.  But I can’t ignore the incredible emotional (and, I think, rationally-founded) response I have to this current situation. Has Catholicism driven me mad, or does this whole situation seem wrong to you too?

Greg is one of the many LGBT friends and mentors I have encountered during the last four years at Santa Clara. Like any other demographic, some of these friends are in long-term relationships, others are single, and some are other places in between. They are some of the most important people in my life, whatever their relationship status. Having said that, I cannot describe the overwhelming sense of joy and relief and justice that I felt when I heard this great political news today. Marriage (or no marriage) never affected my view of LGBT people or their romantic relationships–I naturally think of some couples I know as if they were married, just like my own parents–but in this very concrete judicial decision I had a deep sense of how much it symbolically mattered for my friends’ lives, and the many ways in which this tangible stride toward equality had the potential to inform the ways they are perceived by others.

“Love Rules” –those two little words captured the relatively recent formation of my own views about LGBTQ folk. I came to college generally indifferent about gay and lesbian people. I knew few, especially those who were out, and honestly, if I were asked about homosexuality I would have likely said, “It is probably wrong,” hesitantly referencing the Bible or popular Christian reasonings on the issue. It was not until I fell in love with certain people, and experienced the genuine goodness of their love and faith and hope–only to discover later that these individuals were gay and lesbian people–that I came to realize that I could not, actually, “hate the sin but love the sinner.” It was impossible to love as Jesus loved while “hating” a formative aspect of their identity. Just as I easily recognized that no one could hate women but really love ME, I could not separate my love and affection for my friends from their sexualities.

Love ruled–it won out over the awkwardness of unfamiliarity, over the passages that I had once read as dismissals of homosexuality, over the fear I held about standing up to my community–especially my Christian community–on an issue that many people would hold against me.

And isn’t that the kind of love we associate with God? A love that can overrule all of our pre-conceptions? A love that is bigger than even the supposed Christian truths that we try to glimpse with our human minds? If we ultimately believe that Love Rules above all, then we are necessarily vulnerable to surprise. To changing our minds. To being overturned.