Feminist Theologian Urges Religious to Find a Way to Weed Out People
CINCINNATI — Rosemary Radford Ruether, eminent Catholic feminist and population control advocate, echoed the cold sentiments of eugenicist Margaret Sanger when she suggested that we should "find the most compassionate way to weed out people."
Her address, strangely enough, was one of the least bizarre presentations at this major New Age/neopagan event in the tri-state area around the Ohio River, which featured shamans, animists, and pagan earth rituals. Nearly all the area's religious communities, including the Diocese of Covington, Ky., sponsored the event.
In her speech to the 400 people — mostly consecrated religious — attending the four-day eco-spirituality conference Memorial Day weekend at Cincinnati's College of Mt. St. Joseph, Ruether outlined her plan to save the planet earth from the "patriarchal-minded, elite male humans" who are living in "ecological sin." (The Sisters of Charity run the College of Mt. St. Joseph.)
Introduced formally as a "Roman Catholic eco-feminist liberation theologian and woman of the coming millennium," Ruether beseeched religious to become voices for population control.
"To allow unrestrained fertility is not pro-life" she said. "A good gardener weeds and thins his seedlings to allow the proper amount of room for the plants to grow properly. We need to seek the most compassionate way of weeding out people. Our current pro-life movement is really killing people through disease and poverty," she said.
In place of the pro-life movement we need to develop the "spirituality of recycling," proposed Ruether, "a spirituality that includes ourselves in the renewal of earth and self. We need to compost ourselves."
Speaking from a feminist perspective, Ruether, author of Gaia and God, connected the sexism perpetrated by patriarchal-minded man with the domination of the earth by man.
"The psychosocial root of our ecological problems is sexism, the subjugation of woman" she said.
"We need to construct a new habitation," she proposed. Clues to a "healing culture" will come primarily from the Eastern religions of Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, which promote "compassion for all sentient beings." We cannot properly draw upon our Judeo-Christian roots, she explained, because these traditions are the primary source of domination and subjugation.
"We Western Christians need to give up the idea that there is a one true way," remarked Ruether. We need to engage in a "process of converging dialogs," she suggested, to integrate our different cultures.
Most of our ecological problems stem from this insistence on patriarchal domination, she said. But "nature does not need us to rule over it. We are parasites," she asserted, "utterly dependent upon the rest of the food chain. Nature would be much better off without us."
Ruether also promoted the popular ideology of androgyny, a belief which denies that there is any meaningful biological base to male and female sex roles. In the androgynist's worldview, each person has his or her unique mix of male and female" biological traits. Androgyny, a theory popularized by Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung, was a concept heavily promoted by population control advocates during the recent UN conferences in Beijing and Cairo.
Ruether noted that whenever she is asked whether God is male or female, she always responds, "God is not a mammal." She explained that eco-feminists such as herself reject the idea of a Father-God and the "male-identified intellect" that rules over nature. Eco-fems embrace the god(dess) within, the Cosmic Christ, the incarnation of the cosmos, she said.
"That is true transcendence," Ruether remarked. "Transcendence needs to be liberated to mean a constant renewal eliminating dominance and male distortions"
The patriarchal theologians' concept of transcendence is merely a delusion, she insisted.
The Deluded
The retired bishop of Covington, William A. Hughes, was joined by 31 religious orders, two Catholic colleges, and the Diocese of Covington in sponsoring this veritable parade of eco-heretics known as "EarthSpirit Rising: A Midwest Conference on Healing and Celebrating Planet Earth."
The brother of the local Franciscan provincial and publisher of St. Anthony Messenger, Fr. Jim Bok, O.F.M., celebrated the one Catholic Mass of the conference. Participants were also offered a Quaker service, an interfaith service, t'ai chi, yoga, meditation, a nature walk, and an "earth ritual" to choose from for Saturday and Sunday morning spiritual events.
The conference's stated purpose was to emphasize the spiritual dimension of the Green Movement. According to the EarthSpirit brochure, "the spiritual dimension of life offers the greatest untapped reservoir of power, imagination, and courage for meeting the challenge of calling people to a new relationship with the Earth. We must create a new vision of human presence within the Earth community. We must learn to live holding the Earth and its people as sacred."
The conference was also offered as a one-credit course. Theology and Human Ecology, at the College of Mt. St. Joseph, under the tutelage of professor A. Kay Clifton.
Invoking The Ancestors
The conference commenced with a pageant of flag-bearers waving butterfly flag-kites over the audience as a thinly clad dancer gyrated on stage to the thump of bongos and other "indigenous" instruments. Conference participants then joined hands — right hand in right hand, left hand in left hand — to invoke the ancestors of all present into the room "to share the past, present, and future of Mother Earth."
Feel the knuckles of your neighbor, intoned the cantor. "Feel their fingers, feel their child hands, the hands of their ancestors, the hands of the primate, the hands of the reptile," she added.
At the conference dedication honoring "ecological saints" such as Teilhard de Chardin, participants "memorialized" their ecological role models by placing an object of themselves in a special memorial spot throughout the duration of the conference.
Shamans And Sorcerers
In an effort to become one with the stage, opening speaker David Abram, Ph.D., removed his shoes and socks to deliver an esoteric magico-animist treatise, punctuated by Norwegian haiku and impressively lifelike animal grunts and raven caws.
Abram, who identifies himself as an eco-psychologist and itinerant street magician, spoke at length about his travels through Asia, living among various folk shamans and sorcerers.
"May a deep and full vision take hold of me and may I awaken into the beautiful story around me," he greeted his audience. He then asked everyone to reflect upon the time when "animals could become people and people could become animals" because there was no language barrier between the human and the critter.
Our greatest problem in history, he lamented, is that we evolved from primates into creatures who could speak and communicate with one another. That destroyed the equilibrium of the animal-human relationship, he suggested.
The sorcerers, shamans, and witch doctors of indigenous communities, however, have been able to maintain that primal communication with the earth and all its creatures, said Abram, because they understand that "everything on earth is animate, including the nonliving"; some things, such as the ground or a boulder, simply move slower than others. Their belief in this concept of animism is what sets them apart from the rest of their community, he said.
Since "they understand the intelligence of the wolf, the frog, or the Douglas fir," Abram said, they are able to enter into meaningful relationships with nonhuman beings.
He then graphically described his own delusions of becoming a raven, "the wind blowing past my naked body, through my ruffled feathers." Humans are meant for relationships with the nonhuman, he asserted with an amplified caw, and people are only human inasmuch as they are in relationships with the landscape and environment.
His presentation, laced with innuendo and various descriptions of sexual contact, stopped short of embracing bestiality.
Council Of All Beings
"Deep ecologist" John Seed promoted his Council of All Beings, a community therapy workshop intended to reconcile the human community with the earth.
He said that the council can be made up of any ritual or series of rituals as long as it is "a shared-intention process." We send out a gesture of reconciliation to the earth, which is "our sacred text," said Seed.
We have become so detached from the earth, so alienated, he said, because we have been conditioned for centuries to think that we are the center of the world. More than a few centuries ago, "astronomers were burnt at the stake for suggesting that the earth was not the center of the universe."
He showed his audience of 400 one of the council rituals he has devised. Conference participants were invited to stand, eyes closed, and project their energy fields down into the earth, first into its soil.
"Thank the soil for sustaining you," he said. "Feel the presence of long-gone beings." He then asked everyone to project their energy roots deeper. "Move down through the earth's crust, down 1,000 feet where we pass through long-gone beaches no one has ever set foot on and one-billion-year-old stumps of ancient mountains.
"Now, will your energy to proceed down even further into the molten mass of inner earth, down into the solid iron crystal that forms the densely packed core. Honor it as the heart of Mother Earth and let its power rise into you and renew your intentions to lose any illusions you have about separation from the earth. Then withdraw your roots from the core, back up to the crust, past our ancestors in the ground, and back up into your bodies."
He concluded with a love song to the universe called Dance Your Life for Planet Earth.
An Irreligious Panel
Five speakers formed a panel to discuss the "religious connection" of reconciling with the earth. The panel was moderated by Elizabeth Farians, Ph.D., who identified herself as "one of three feminist theologians back in the '60s."
Now a vegetarian activist, Farians said she was one of the founding mothers of the women's ordination movement and coalition founder of the Joint Organizations Working for the Rightful Status of Women in the Church, which "badgered the bishops back in the council days"
Farians said that she invented the groups that belonged to the coalition to make it seem like more of a united front.
But, she explained, "in those days I was really out there myself, without any sisters to support me." She expressed her negative view of religion as a catalyst for anything, because of the Catholic Church's history of oppressing women.
Fr. Al Fritsch, S.J., a founder of Priests for Equality, described religion as "a binding of ourselves to a greater being." It is creation-centered, he added. He presented his theory of the four seasonal stages of our human lives. Spring is the green period of our childhood, when we are in "the fullness of awe," said Fritsch. In our summer period, we experience the "heat of passion," he said, "when we realize that we have wounded Mother Earth." He emphasized that we have to blame ourselves. In autumn, we come to understand that we are powerless and we offer our "prayer of petition." Winter then comes as a blessing, a mystery that unfolds, 'said Fritsch.
"We see what we have is passing and we look toward something greater."
Sr. Virginia Froehle, a Sister of Mercy who penned the book Called Into Her Presence: Praying With Feminine Images of God, spoke of the Catholic sacramental life as "rooted in the earth." She berated the pre-Vatican II Church as a patriarchal perversion of Jesus' Gospel.
"When I was growing up in the Church," she said, "God was an awesome, distant God. He used to be masculine, like a father in charge, protective and demanding. But is this the God of Jesus or is this simply the image of the patriarch?"
That outdated image of God, said Froehle, "is what reinforces domination: men over women and men over the earth." She stressed that the patriarchal hierarchy of religion must go if we are to advance.
"God is like a bakerwoman and a fisherman. God is both masculine and feminine," she said.
Rev. Mendel Adams, pastor of the Church of Christ in Union, Ky., presented the Protestant viewpoint. He said that when he founded his congregation, he wanted it to be "intensively inclusive and proudly progressive." His bishop is even a woman, he added, and his church has publicly and proudly ordained homosexuals, realizing that "all types of people" are called to ministry.
"You Catholics have done it, too," he acknowledged, "but we openly admit it."
He lamented how "Christianity is so arrogant." Christians believe that "even if there are other religions and we have a few to prove it, we are the best! Likewise, Christians seem to assert that even if there are other creatures on this earth, man is the best." He suggested that rather than focusing on ourselves as Christians, we need to "practice Christianity in an ecumenical way that is open to other myths and sources of wisdom"
Adams sees himself as "more than just a Christian." Being a Christian, he said, is "just one part of me."
According to Adams, the purpose of a pastor is "to help people cope with life by developing rituals." Adams' Church of Christ congregation does this through the use of nature trails. "We built nature trails on the 20 acres of land we bought. We felt that was the primary purpose of our church. Someday we'll get around to building a house of worship for ourselves. Right now we rent from the Presbyterians," he said.
Ruether rounded out the panel. Dr. Farians introduced her as "one of the greatest theologians ever."
Ruether identified Christianity as being at the root of the environmental crisis. Traditional Christianity, she said, makes the "elite male humans" feel as if they have the right to dominate the earth and all its creatures, including women. This might be, she suggested, "because Christians believe that they are sojourners on their way to Heaven"
The Christian typically misunderstands the Incarnation, charged Ruether.
"The cosmos is the real incarnation" — in her view. "Our institutions, parishes, schools, and homes need to become 'green zones'," she said. And although "monasticism is the source of our Christian problems, its roots are green."
When asked about what we can do in our parishes about those who are living in "ecological sin," Ruether suggested that we need to educate the seven year olds in the second grade so they can go home and teach their parents not to use Styrofoam cups and to recycle their glass bottles.
EarthSpirit Rising participants were treated to meatless, eggless, nondairy meals throughout the course of the conference.
"Some of us have already made the connection between our food and the environment," explained Linda Richardson, chairman of EarthSave Cincinnati, which provided the meals.
"Others are on varying stages of a journey toward this realization and may have questions about the why and how of making changes in our daily lives that are very personal and ingrained from a lifetime of conditioning arid habit. Our food choices have just as much impact on our planet's well-being as our choice in the checkout lane between cloth, paper, or plastic.
"I hope our meals will speak to the voice within each of us, the voice of logic, compassion, and conscience."
Catholic Sponsors
The demographic breakdown of this gathering was: 80%-85% women, of whom 80%-85% were women religious; the average age was 55-65 years.
The list of sponsors included almost every religious order in the tri-state area of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, except for cloistered religious orders.
Heading the list was: Bishop William A. Hughes, retired bishop of Covington. The other sponsors were:
The Diocese of Covington; the Jesuit Community at Xavier University, Cincinnati; Xavier University, Cincinnati; Franciscans of St. John the Baptist Province, Cincinnati; the College of Mt. St. Joseph, Cincinnati; Marydale Retreat Center, Erianger, Ky.; Milford Spiritual Center, Milford, O.; Mother of God Church, Covington, Ky.; Franciscan Justice, Peace, & Integrity of Creation Office, Cincinnati; Franciscan Sisters of Mary, St. Louis, Mo.; Sisters of Charity of Nazareth Center, Nazareth, Ky.; Sisters of Loretto, Englewood, Colo.; Sisters of Mercy, Chicago Region; Sisters of Mercy, Cincinnati Region; Sisters of St. Francis, Oldenberg, Ind.; Sisters of St. Francis, Tiffin, O.; Sisters of the Humility of Mary, Villa Maria, Pa.; Sisters of the Precious Blood, Dayton, O.; The Ancilla Domini Sisters, Donaldson, Ind.
And: Adrian Dominican Sisters, Adrian, Mich.; Byzantine Nuns of St. Clare, North Royalton, O.; Dominican Sisters of Springfield, III.; Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine, Ky.; Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Monroe, Mich.; Sisters of Charity of Mt. St. Augustine, Richfield, O.; Sisters of Charity, Cincinnati; Sisters of Divine Providence, Melbourne, Ky.; Sisters of Mercy, Cedar Rapids, la.; Sisters of St. Dominic, Akron, O.; Sisters of St. Joseph, Tipton, Ind.; Sisters of St. Joseph, Cincinnati; Sisters of St. Joseph, St. Paul, Minn.; Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Ft. Thomas, Ky.; Sisters of the Incarnate Word, Cleveland; Ursuline Provincialate, Crystal City, Mo.; Ursuline Sisters, Louisville, Ky.
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This item 390 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
