Feminists Blueprint a New Religion: A Formula for Destruction

by Frank Morriss

The activists, spokespersons, manipulators of the Catholic feminist movement do not seek a reform toward greater female service; they seek a revolution to produce a new and entirely different Church than the one Christ founded.

Even a new name has been provided for the Church envisioned as rising from the ashes of the Catholic one — Women-Church.¹ It will have a theology, ecclesiology and praxis of its own, only most remotely connected to those of the Catholic Church, and often contradictory of Catholic truth. Notre Dame graduate Mary Jo Weaver is quite blunt in confirming this:

By way of context and general issues, and with attention to the work of Anne Carr, Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Mary Daly, we should be able to formulate a general description of Roman Catholic feminist theology and to demonstrate the broad range of questions it poses to traditional theology. Most of all, we should be able to see how it is that these theologians have laid the intellectual groundwork for a new Reformation. As Ralph Keifer noted in reviewing (Commonweal, July 3, 1981) Edward Schillebeeckx's controversial book Ministry, 'Reformation, then, requires a simultaneous crisis of liturgy, authority, spirituality and doctrine as its preconditions. It also requires the emergence of practical (and intellectually defensible) alternatives to the existing ecclesiastical structures.' By these criteria, Roman Catholicism is positioned for a new Reformation, and Roman Catholic feminists theologians have begun to formulate 'practical and intellectually defensible' alternatives to the church as we have known it.²

This is an amazingly frank revelation from a Catholic woman revolutionist, comparable to the outline of Hitler's thoughts and plans in Mein Kampf. The Church had no such definite warning from Luther or the other sixteenth century reformers. It explains much of the destruction from within of traditional structures and achievements, for example the religious communities and orders of women, to make way for Women-Church. But before we turn to the evidences for that, we might look for further testimony about the revolutionary character of the Catholic feminist movement.

Rosemary Radford Ruether is probably the best-known spokeswoman for that movement, and is regularly allowed to speak under Catholic auspices. Here is some of what she says:

Woman-Church means neither leaving the church as a sectarian group, nor continuing to fit into it on its terms. It means establishing bases for a feminist critical culture and celebrational community that have some autonomy from the established institutions . . . It means some women might worship only in alternative feminist liturgies; others might do so on a regular basis, while continuing to attend liturgies in traditional parishes into which they seek to inject something of this alternative . . .

Only if some groups work intensely and exclusively on imagining an alternative culture in a way that cannot be controlled or limited by patriarchal culture, but also are in dialogue and interaction with women within the institutions who can then adapt and make use of what is being developed in alternative communities does the possibility of genuine transformational dialectic take place. One must refuse the institutionally defined options either of continuing on its terms or of cutting of all connection with it and becoming sectarian and hostile to those who are working within established institutions.³ (emphasis added).

In scholarly terms what is outlined above is a call for cadres of revolution both outside the institution and fifth columns within.

That is Ms. Ruether's "scholarly" stance. When she turns demagogic, thumping her bible Women-Church, the truth becomes even more visible. The following is from her "sermon" at the Chicago Women-Church conference in 1983, reprinted in Women-Church:

As Women-Church we are not left to starve for the words of wisdom, we are not left without the bread of life. Ministry too goes with us into exodus. We learn all over again what it means to minister, not to lord over, but to minister to and with each other, to teach each other to speak the words of life. Eucharist comes to us into exodus. The waters of baptism spring up in our midst as the waters of life, and the tree of life grows in our midst with fruits and flowers. We pluck grain and make bread, harvest grapes and make wine. And we pass them around as the body and blood of our new life, the life of the new humanity that has been purchased by the bloodly (sic) struggles of our martyrs, by the bloodly struggle of our brother Jesus, and of Perpetua and Felicitas, and of all the women who were burned and beaten and raped, and of Jean Donovan and Maura Clarke and Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel, and of the women of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua who struggle against the leviathan of patriarchy and imperialism⁴

This is clearly not a description of a purged or improved Catholic Church. It is a new Church with its own central sacrament of "Eucharist" not related in any true way to that established by Christ. Indeed, it is a counter-Church. It must be noted that in the feminist lexicon the word "patriarchy" means the male priesthood and hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Ms. Ruether considers that the slavery of the non-ordained as the Jews were enslaved by Pharaoh. In her "sermon" (surely a term purposely used to indicate the authority to preach) she invites "our brothers Maurice Dingman and Frank Murphy and George Evans; Raymond Hunthausen and Charles Buswell and Torn Gumbleton, and even our brother Karol Wojtyla and all our fathers and sons and husbands and lovers, to flee with us from the idol with flashing eyes and smoking nostrils who is about to consume the earth."

The feminists obviously have adopted the once-prevalent Protestant myth that the Catholic Church is anti-Christ, the devil itself from Apocalypse occupying the Seven Hills of Rome. Ms. Ruether named Bishops sympathetic to the feminist cause, and included "Karol Wojtyla" with the insult of not calling him Pope. She says she was being "ironic" in putting him among the white-mitred pro-feminist prelates.

In a passage of her sermon that borders on the scatalogical, Ms. Ruether compares the preaching of males to women to rape, and insists the pulpit from which male priests preach is a phallic symbol from which to "bring down the seminal word upon the prone body of the people. . . ."⁵

Maria Riley picks up the revolutionary note when the feminist struggle and the feminine experience she asks: "through this process can we begin to act out of the authority of our shared understandings to struggle for the transformation of both the church and the world . . . ?⁶ Clearly Women-Church is not a refinement or improvement of the Catholic Church, but a departed, schismatic Church though some in it may lay claim to the term and title of Catholic.

The activists do not hesitate to speak of what they are promoting as a revolution:

. . . The mobilizing metaphor of this council document (Lumen Gentium, specifically its description of the Church as The People of God) remains the image of the church as a community of faith in history. The result has been a revolution in Catholic consciousness that is stronger than our words and deeper than our symbols. It is a shift from understanding the church primarily as the hierarchical institution to experiencing it as a community of disciples. It is a way of recognizing the primordial dignity of baptism as the basis for all mission and ministry.⁷

Some of the implications of this "image" of Church will be discussed elsewhere. Let it be said here, however, that there is no reason to believe that the description of "The People of God" is a "mobilizing metaphor" of Lumen Gentium. In any case there was no intended "shift of consciousness" away from the hierarchical property of the Church, for much of the dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium was devoted to declaring, explaining, and applying that hierarchical nature. We are left with the truth that the "shift of consciousness" spoken in the passage above is an artificial contrivance of those who wish to bring about a new Church with either no hierarchy at all or else one in the democratic insistence that no authority be effective and no obedience required beyond a "consensus" or majority. That, too, will be treated in greater detail below.

Revolution in Consciousness

The Scud missiles of the feminist revolution ai consciousness-raising techniques learned from new psychologists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow:

It (the feminist movement) is part of the rising consciousness of human rights around the world. It speaks of the essential dignity of every person and the consequent equality of women and men.⁸

The authors of the two quotations immediately above place the feminist movement in the context of the creation of base communities and the direction of "liberation theology" against oppressors of the poor in the Third World. Both devices count on "consciousness-raising" to bring acceptance of an egalitarian church that will interpret equality and dignity not in any true sense but in a Marxist way.

This explains that use of "confrontational theology," as it is called by Sr. Lilliana Kopp, founder of the Sisters for Christian Community. It shares the dialectic theories of Hegel, as did Marx. Sr. Lilliana calls "the loyal opposition" who practice "respectful confrontation" against Catholic structures, policies, practice and personnel "the most responsible Christians who serve the Church creatively and courageously." That is how employers of Scud missiles always think — reform through destruction.

Obviously the Patriot missiles with which to defend against such attacks are Catholic truths — the truths of tradition and of Vatican II, which contradicted not one of them. If any consciousness-raising is needed it concerns knowledge, meaning, and indispensability of Catholic doctrine, so we may as St. Peter said (first epistle) "Give reasons for our hope."

The narcissistic quality of "feminine consciousness" is clearly shown by an article in Cross Currents, summer of 1977.

Beatrice Bruteau, author among other works of Evolution Toward Divinity: Teilhard de Chardin and the Hindu Tradition, writes of "Neo-Feminism and the Next Revolution in Consciousness:"

Any revolution worthy of the name must be primarily a revolution in consciousness . . .

In our meditations on the future and our own growth into that future, we have realized that we are evolutionary beings and that which is actively evolving is our very consciousness, including our consciousness of ourselves and our consciousness of ourselves evolving. We may say that we are self-conscious evolution . . .

. . . The new feminine consciousness of the future can be expected to take up the masculine rational contributions into itself, to hold and absorb them, embed them in the matrix of its own intellectual insights, and eventually to bring forth a new being, a new world.

This leads Ms. Bruteau to a sort of mystic vision:

I have an awareness of one large life circulating through all. In some way, my boundary has become less definite in the sense of being less hard and sealed off. My selfhood has become radiant, streaming out from me, and is found participating in the other even as it is found in me . . .

Neo-feminism, she explains, deals in the existential, not the spirit. " . . . We ourselves are the future and we are the revolution, it will come as we turn and the world turns with us." (emphasis in original)

Obviously, that future does not admit of the Catholic Church as it was founded and as it has perceived the doctrine of salvation.

There are many ways to interpret that neo-feminist revolution, ranging from the romantic to megalomania. The heritage of de Chardin is clearly delectable in Ms. Bruteau's revolutionary and evolutionary synthesis.

But what cannot be detected in it, other than what she simply asserts as a sort of primitive and pure Christianity of respect and service of the "other," is anything traditionally Catholic. The neo-feminist revolution aims to stop tradition short in its tracks, cut it off so that it will disappear. Neo-feminists themselves aim at being the next and only religious tradition, the future and outcome of all that has gone before them. And they are frank and blunt enough to tell us so as Ms. Bruteau has quite openly done.

II.

The first and, to date, the most successful assault of the feminist revolution has been against the ancient and effective agents of the Catholic Church — the religious communities.

If a revolution were to seek the replacement of the Catholic Church with a new Church — specifically as is the reality, Women-Church, it would be expected that first an attempt to destroy or neutralize the Catholic Church's frontline defenders would be made. That is the case. Within a few years the Church lost many of its religious educators. Other religious removed their identifying uniforms, replaced their officers with feminist-thinking ideologues, and went off on activities of their own choice often with little or no relationship to the Catholic faith, and no different in essence or motive from secular benevolent or philanthropic enterprises. The success of this tactic has left Catholic hospitals with little or no religious environment, has left the battle against abortion with virtually no support from religious in habit or in vows, and has silenced the most effective apologists once supplied by religious orders. Respect for and loyalty to the Papacy has been all but removed from the thought and commitment of many religious — perhaps the majority. In some cases it has been supplanted by, at the least, indifference to Papal leadership, and in the worst openly expressed rejection and contempt for it.

. . . In Rome (at Vatican II) the Spirit descended on the assembled church leaders: its tongues of a static church, ushered in the dynamic church of New Testament times.

All across the country, congregations of women religious began to draw up models of structure change designed to meet the needs and demands of this new era of Church History. Among the Monroe IHM's (Monroe, Mich., Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) the small stirrings of pre-Vatican II days erupted into a groundswell. Teachers for more than a century, we stopped short, took a hard look at ourselves, redefined our call to ministry, wrote new lesson plans, envisioned the church not so much in the image of a pearl, but a seed to be planted deep in the earth whenever and wherever our ministry called us. Through more than a decade we pushed forward, sometimes with grace, sometimes not so gracefully, until we arrived at the Congregational Chapter, 1982.⁹

One of the aims of that chapter, according to the writer of the above lines, was "the empowerment of ourselves and others to Christian life" and "to 're-found' the congregation in its pristine values of gospel risk and discipleship." Obviously, the new sisters are claiming an authority or "empowerment" apart from higher Catholic authority, ie., an authority from themselves. This is usually the claim of antinomian revolt. Note also the assertion that there is to be a return to "gospel" values and away from a "static" Church that has departed from them. The Wycliffite¹⁰ quality of the feminist revolution is a general note throughout it.

The substitute for communities serving the true and traditional Catholic Church, and answerable to it for their authenticity, is to be "non-canonical" communities that are autonomous.

These non-canonical communities, such as the Sisters for Christian Community, are emerging very rapidly. Over 400 such communities already exist . . . Their non-canonical condition protects them from Vatican surveillance and control without, it seems, in any way limiting their commitment or ministerial effectiveness . . .

The non-canonical communities symbolized the growing ambivalence of religious, particularly women, toward unilateral regulation by male ecclesiastical authority.¹¹

The sisters' revolt against the visible and institutional Catholic Church is supported by antinomian, subjective theological theorizing by various periti:

Thank God that many have come to realize that the church in its official teaching and governance is not always mirroring the presence of Christ. When one identifies Christ with the church, then a knowing church has replaced a believing church. A professing church has replaced a needing church. A total authority has replaced obedience.¹²

It is significant that the quotation immediately above is from the volume outlining and defending the transformation of religious orders, notably the IHM sisters.

Only a step beyond, but in the same direction as this departure from the Catholic Church, is the intemperate language of hate for that Church used by Ms. Ruether:

The Church continued to betray Christ by using his name to establish a new kingdom of domination, to rear up new classes of princes and priests, and to justify the subjugation of women, slaves and the poor. The kingdom of Satan is thus doubly entrenched in history, since Satan now wears the robes of Vicar of Christ and uses the cross of Jesus as his scepters.¹³

This language is worthy of the Rev. Lyman Beecher and his 19th century fellow bigots, who indeed considered Pope to be Satan and anti-Christ. But it is by the leading prophetess of Catholic feminism and architect of WomenChurch. It is a mark of that "Church's" progress that Ms. Ruether is welcomed as speaker at Catholic parishes and campuses.

The "shot heard 'round the world" of Catholic religious feminism was the uprising of the Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters in Southern California against both their former community life and the authority of J. Francis Cardinal McIntyre, Archbishop of Los Angeles. For some generations the sisters had educated the children of area Catholics and many non-Catholics in their grade and high schools and Immaculate Heart College. They also owned and staffed a major area hospital. But the post-Vatican II superior Anita Caspary had the sisters discard their habits and eschew much of the discipline of community prayer and spirituality. Such was apparently not suited to a community that boasted a nationally praised "pop" artist. Corita (who later left the community to marry, and whose fame rapidly faded). When Cardinal McIntyre ordered the sisters to wear some identifying indication of their being in religious vows, a large number of the community publicly renounced their vows, and became in effect ordinary laity, though continuing to call themselves sisters. They boasted through the affair that IHM meant "I Hate McIntyre," and Sister Caspary and her aides cultivated the media including the prestigious Los Angeles Times to the advantage of their cause and to discredit the Cardinal. (Two score of the sisters kept their religious garb and vows and community life, and a handful migrated to the diocese of Wichita.) The eventful upshot of the revolt (in which the revolutionists scored the victory of having a Vatican-appointed committee award them the bulk of the IHM property) was that both the college and the hospital were alienated into secular ownership and management.

Within months some 1,500 religious sisters meeting in Cleveland had (in April, 1970) organized The National Association of Women Religious (later to use the term "Assembly" in place of "Association"). Among the First acts of the new organization was to send their good wishes to Anita Caspary and her non-nuns, who, reported Associated Press, had "broken away from Vatican control to establish 'a new form of Christian community life'."¹⁴

LCWR Objectives Declared

Obviously, one of the first lessons learned by the feminist "reformers" was the value of organizing and federating. Another lesson was the use of leadership, though the feminists pretend to a distaste of authority and power implied in leadership. Thus feminists have obtained almost exclusive leadership and influence in the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. (See Forum, "Religious Communities Networking For Radical Social Change,' ' for details on that use of the power of organization.)

It was as president of the LCWR that Sr. Theresa Kane RSM was able to importune Pope John Paul II for ordination of women. Her organizational office favored her with the chance to "greet" the Pope in his 1979 visit to the U.S. The "greeting" with its proposal for women priests, was televised nationally. By 1987 Sr. Helen Garvey BVM could claim a "chorus" speaking for women's ordination, a chorus needless to say directed by feminists networking in various organizations.

The LCWR makes its aims and its methods perfectly clear. In conjunction with the third inter-American meeting of religious in Montreal in 1978 the organization's board included among its goals for 1990:

To chart new directions and roles in ministry (including diaconal roles) especially direct service in the church (e.g., directed retreats, pastoral ministry). This may give rise to an increase of religious ministering outside formal Church auspices.

To effect change in structures within congregations, Church and society, which provide for systemic change through: Discernment; Participative decision-making; New models of leadership; Collaboration; Humanization of values; Reverence and concern for.¹⁵

The emphasis given the words systemic change by the LCWR board itself is greatly indicative of what is being done — a treatment similar to either systemic fertilizer or systemic insecticide insinuated into a plant by being drunk up into the entity inescapably. LCWR is offering the Church change it can't refuse.

Amazingly, LCWR continue to be the officially recognized liaison between U.S. women religious and the Vatican. This perhaps reveals a policy of appeasement by the Vatican in fear of an immediate break with the Church itself. Whether the Vatican recognizes the goal and reality of "systemic change" vowed by the feminists, and the danger it is to the Catholic faith itself, cannot be guessed.

III.

The theology and ecclesiology of Women-Church are by either essence or interpretation alien from and hostile to those of the true Catholic Church.

Both theology and ecclesiology of the feminist revolt are based on several fictions: (1) That Vatican II's recommendation of ' 'the People of God' ' as a description of the Church was a radical break with past understandings so as to invalidate a hierarchical Church; (2) that there was a primitive Christianity without clerical authority or an ordained priesthood; (3) that authority and law must be validated by acceptance, so that dissent is self-justifying; (4) that an absolute egalitarianism and a leveling poverty are "gospel values," so that class and economic differences are immoral; (5) that the desire and/or ability to "minister" renders ordination unnecessary, with an interior call to "ministry" substituting for Holy Orders, or in another scenario bestowing the power of Holy Orders upon all "called"; (6) that the liberation brought by Christ includes freedom from all "domination," which is the result of sin.

Discussing "The American Male Religious in the Context of the Whole Church" David A. Fleming S.M. wrote:

From the attitude of literal dependence on Europe and specifically on Rome which has characterized much of their history, many male religious moved after the Second Vatican Council to the polar opposite of aggressive independence. Gradually, however, a breath (sic, probably breadth) of vision and an ecumenical and patient sense of pastoral development seems to be emerging. New ecclesiologies, based more on the sense of the 'people of God,' the 'servant Church,' and the 'communion of believers' seem to be seeping explicitly or implicitly into our practical consciousness . . .

The new ecclesiologies and the growing sense of interdependence are also evident in our relationships with Latin America and other countries of the Third World. Even though many vestiges of the colonial outlook remain, it is clear that many male religious in the Third World are less attached to institutional permanence, more dedicated to the upbuilding of the indigenous Church, and readier to let go of their mentality and their positions of control.¹⁶

Fr. Fleming goes on to outline an "evangelizing community (that) tends to see the community as a whole as bearer of the mission and apostolic commitment, rather than "each individual alone" whose thrust "is to channel the energies of individuals and communities not in the direction of the observance of prefabricated norms but rather into living the freedom of the Gospel as it appears in a constantly evolving life-process."¹⁷

Though Fr. Fleming insists "the aim is not lawlessness and total lack of structure but rather a constant freedom and challenge to structure life in accord with the demand of God's call," it is clear that in distancing themselves from hierarchy both male and female religious invite anarchistic antinomianism and constant fractioning of community into self-determining fragments. Religious vocation becomes based on inner-direction. The result is already a departure from service to religion and Christ's redemption toward economic and social change. This accounts for the affinity between the new religious and Women-Church for leftist liberation theology and its support of leftist revolution, particularly in Latin America. It apparently is "God's call" in the context of an "evolving life-process" that religious become social reformers in conjunction with armed revolutionists, rather than evangelists of Christ's doctrine in the context of His Church and its regime. The Gospel is interpreted as a call for the poor to organize and defend their rights.¹⁸ The issue is not that there is anything wrong with organization and defense of rights. But that has become the essence and the importance of the Gospel, which it is not. Martyrdom becomes not death in defense of Christ's teaching, but death in promoting social change or resistance to governmental intransigence.

Mary Kinney, IHM, who has "facilitated groups of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious," describes the aims of the redefined "religious life" fully:

I see us struggling with the injustice and oppression of women in the world and the church today — working through the process of liberation, not only for ourselves but for all women and their need for just salaries, pensions, social security and acceptance into decision-making roles.

In all our ministries, I see us working for peace and justice in our world, and paying the price for that stance by being advocates for the poor and oppressed.¹⁹

Carol Quigley of the same congregation narrows the meaning of what is presented abstractly by Sr. Kinney:

I could not foresee (before becoming president of IHM and active in LCWR) . . . the invasion of Grenada by the U. S.; the tragic murder of a member of our own congregation: . . . increased involvement of Rome in the internal matters of U .S. congregations . . . the growing gap between the pristine values of our nation and current national and international relations; of the rising tide of fundamentalist religious and political conservatism. Nor could I anticipate these movements: the congregation's public positions on the side of the poor, e.g.. Central America, Puerto Rico gun control . . . ²⁰

False Theology and Flawed Analysis

It is not surprising to read Notre Dame de Namur Sr. Augusta Neal's admiration and recommendation of both the purposes and methods of Paulo Freire's "conscientization" of Latin Americans toward Marxist solutions to poverty and injustice.²¹ Freire was a leading disciple of the Italian Community theoretician, Antonio Gramsci. She (Sr. Augusta) links the rapid spread of Christian base communities to the spade work done by the Brazilian Freire:

Liberation theology, rising out of the Latin American experience, is witness to this movement. Skepticism about this theology and resistance to it by some First World church analysts (sic, though Pope John Paul II is among such "analysts") are historical phenomena demonstrating the current struggle between church and state, between manifestations of God's will and the keeping of the law.²²

Sister Augusta clearly identifies God's will with both liberation theology and its implementation, often by Leftist revolutionists, either in power or struggling for it. This explains the fervor among the new religious for politics, the armed struggle, overthrow of the ruling classes, etc. They are new crusaders heeding the deceiving cry of the Liberation Theologians, "Deus vult."

It should be noted Sr. Augusta's book includes in its bibliography the works of Frs. Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff, liberationists criticized by the Vatican for theological theorizing not in keeping with Catholic discipline and doctrine. In perfect fairness, it can be said that what is being woven into the new religious life of Women-Church and its admirers, both men and women, is not Christian justice but Marxist theorizing, and at the very time when the political and economic results of such theorizing has collapsed in Europe, after betraying the hopes and right" of mill ions of oppressed people. The new religious and their Women-Church are almost totally blind to historic reality and true Catholic social doctrine.

They are also blind to the fictional quality of the supposed conciliar base for their revolution.

The whole mistaken concept of the Second Vatican Council's radical rejection of tradition in favor a new, democratic and populist Church is well put by one Fr. Roger P. Chabot, a Yarmouth, Me., pastor writing in the official paper of the Portland, Me., diocese:

Prior to the Second Vatican Council, most Catholics referred to Church as the Church. The institution was looked upon as the one, true, historical Church, founded by Jesus himself. There was pretty much only one Catholic theology that appeared to contain all the answers. We then thought everything was exactly the way Christ had instituted them (sic).

Then came the Second Vatican Council. The bishops themselves began to question the unquestionable. They spoke of the Churches in god's plan of salvation. There was no longer only one theology . . . The variety of theologies began to be considered willed by God . . .

We've now progressed to a new phase of Church, that of 'being Church.' There's been a change in our understanding and experience of Church. We less and less look to the institutional church as the incarnation of Christ, but rather are beginning to consider Church as people gathered for worship, for service and for a deepening commitment to each other and to Christ.

This 'being Church' appears to breaking down the boundaries of the Churches and cracking open the monolith institution towards recognizing a discipleship of equals, seeking practical solutions to our common problems of this world. These contemporary followers of Jesus resemble the believers of the first century in that they are claiming the Spirit from their common initiation through the waters of Baptism. They less and less look to a superior earthly authority to tell them what to do, but rather, those who form community look to the Spirit alive in their hearts to guide them in their ethical reflections. The basic characteristics of being human is what forms their present-day theology . . .

Such false theologizing and subjective imagining offers a supposed excuse for the feminist (and male) adventures in schism, and even, as in the passage above, heresy. The feminist disregard that such fiction states errors about the primitive Church, about Vatican II, about doctrine and is tainted with early heresies such as that of Wycliffe and his Lollard followers. It also shares the "multitudinarian" heresy of Gerson, rector of Paris University at the time of the Great Western Schism. The truth is that not only is there no basis in Vatican II for this fol-de-rol, but actually Vatican II teaches the opposite, identifying the institutional Church as the one and only Church founded by Christ. It teaches that what elements of religious truth exist in other Christian churches are there accidentally, and belong in fact to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. The theme of the Women's Ordination Conference's Baltimore meeting in 1978 could have been Wycliffe's battle cry had that heretic been a women, and not a male Churchman — "New Women, New Church, New Priestly Ministry."

The latter term of that trilogy brings us to the ploy that the feminists believe will simply bypass the Church's refusal to ordain women as priests. All are called to serve others, which is to exercise ministry, and it is as ministers that all, men and women, are admitted into the "royal priesthood" of the laity. There is no limit to such ministry, which is equal to and can supplant the claim of a special, all-male service through sacramental power reserved to the ordained.

John H. Collins writing in the National Catholic Reporter's "Ministries" issue, Jan. 18. 1991, explains:

Priesthood lost its pull once the Second Vatican Council fully acknowledged the Protestant principle of the Reformation that all share through baptism in the new royal priesthood. Subsequent attempts to distinguish between priesthood of the ordained and priesthood of the non-ordained have proved futile. When the council also taught an essential difference between ordained and non-ordained, theologians have just had to look at some area other than priesthood to locate the difference.

For 400 years Protestants had no problems with a difference between ordained and non-ordained because, leaving priesthood out of the question, they had moved into the area of ministry. . . .

. . . Today, neither Protestant nor Catholic has anything left to distinguish between the ordained and non-ordained . . .

Now, this analysis is flawed by error and assumption. The "royal priesthood" is a Petrine, not a Protestant doctrine, and it never made the priesthood unnecessary or unacceptable until the Protestant reformers misinterpreted it. There is no problem about the priesthood (ordained, I mean) now except for those who want to abuse the concept of the priesthood of all baptized so as to make obsolete or unneeded the ordained priesthood.

The feminists, however, have recognized the utility of this error. An illustration for the Reporter article by Collins shows a robed woman anointing the hands of a robed man. I have quoted earlier the reliance of Mary Jo Weaver on the views of Fr. Schillebeeckx made known in his book Ministry.

The feminists have employed the new psychologies' reliance on "consciousness" to use participation in all areas of authority and service as the principal means of revolutionary change:

The method of feminine consciousness . . . is different (from the masculine). It works not by excluding but by incorporating. And so the new feminine consciousness of the future can be expected to take up the masculine rational contributions into itself, to hold and absorb them, embed them in the matrix of its own intellectual insights, and eventually to bring forth a new being, a new world.

The wholistic outlook characteristic of feminine consciousness has two aspects, both of which must be stressed and kept in balance; a fundamental and ultimate sense of unity of the entire human race — even of all of nature. . . .²³

For many women, this "participatory consciousness" must embrace socialism. The slogan of ISIS, an international feminist organization is "No feminism without socialism and no socialism without feminism."²⁴ The new world will clearly have a new religion, the feminist Women-Church, and a new state and economics, the Marxist ones. The true Catholic Church stands in the way of both those "achievements," and therefore has to go. The language used by one Carol Riddel in the ISIS international bulletin No. 5 (Oct. 1977) is almost identical to some of the Catholic feminist architects of Women-Church:

Feminism insists upon non-hierarchical collective organization based on voluntarism, mutuality, and autonomy. Each woman participates on an equal level of power, thus negating the hierarchical function of power, and instead cooperating as an individual revolutionary with others.

. . . It is through autonomy that women come to understand the need, the right, the obligation to define ourselves as autonomous human beings, who want to bring equality by smashing patriarchy and abolishing capitalism and the state.

It is not surprising to find that the Italy address of ISIS in Rome is the same as that of IDOC International (or was so in the 1980s). IDOC originated as Information Documentation on the Counciliar Church, and was used by Catholic progressives to put out to the world media their subjective interpretations of the meaning of Vatican II. (See Forum, "Catholic Educators and Marxist Ideology — An Unholy Alliance", Nov. 1990.)

IV.

Priestesses and Goddesses: The Myth, Liturgy and Imaginings of Women-Church.

Though Women-Church claims a gospel purity and simplicity as its theology and ecclesiology, there are indications its liturgy, worship and mystagogy would be just the opposite. The activists, having foisted upon even the Scriptures an "inclusive" language, are trying to substitute for traditional liturgy and worship an elitist and gnostic form ranging from the silly to esoteric and exotic resurrections of paganism.

Mary Jo Leddy (Sister of Our Lady of Sion) "meditates" in mediocre Eliotese verse:

Let us read the Scriptures together
letting the words form
in the silence of our being
letting the words shape
the word we have to speak together.
Let us wait in the hope
of coauthoring a new chapter.
Let us hold ourselves
in readiness for a vision. . . .

We face the empty loom
the loom without
is the loom within.
The Spirit weaves
with invisible threads
drawing us beyond
to one another, to the future

As in the beginning
is now and ever shall be
world without end. Amen.²⁵

(Amazingly, Sister Mary Jo is being accepted by many Canadians, including some Bishops, in her role as editor of The Challenge, as a genuine publicist for the Catholic Church. It is clear from her own works that she speaks for an entirely different Church.)

Agnes Cunningham, S.S. C.M., a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, is busy (in the imagery of Sr. Mary Jo) weaving into feminist spirituality something that is redolent of pagan goddess worship though in the mode of the modern guruship of Fr. Matthew Fox, O.P.:

. . . Sophia (Wisdom) has a place in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures as a 'real biblical person.' She is, in Elizabeth Schuessler Fiorenza's words, 'the God of Israel expressed in the language and imagery' of a Hellenistic goddess. She is the 'gracious goodness of God' revealed. Thus, Sophia can be perceived as the 'divine feminine': Creator, Wisdom personified, teacher and, in a curious turn of thought, 'that which is taught.'

In the New Testament, Sophia is equated with Jesus, Incarnate Wisdom. Expressions such as 'Christ-Sophia,' Lord of the cosmos; 'Sophia-Spirit,' as the resurrected Jesus; 'Jesus Sophia' and the 'Sophia-God of Jesus' can be found in the writings of many Christian feminists. Like Sophia in the Old Testament, Jesus is 'Creator Incarnate,' through whom the new creation proclaimed in John is made possible. Jesus, again like Sophia, is Word and Wisdom of God. The Sophia-myth is presented as the basic myth of Christianity, while 'Sophialogy' has been identified as the earliest Christian theology.

The authors of Sophia (Susan Cady, Marian Ronan and Hal Taussig, Harper & Row, 1986) defend this 'female goddess-like figure' as a powerful image in the development of an authentic feminist spirituality.²⁶

Whether the feminist goddess is Sophia or Hermaphroditus, it is clear that it is not the God of either Old or New Testament, but the deity of a new (or perhaps very old cults redux) Church. And at that point all attracted to feminism must ask themselves if they can enter the groves of worship and discernment through invocation of created deities, or abandon feminism and remain Catholic. Even though much of this "goddess" language is more rhetoric than reality, it may be at the least that the feminists are introducing their followers to self-worship. Psychologist Paul C. Vitz has summarized this.

Historically selfism derives from an explicitly anti-Christian humanism and its hostility to Christianity is a logical expression of its very different assumptions about the nature of the self, of creativity, of the family, of love, and of suffering.

In short, humanistic selfism is not a science but a popular secular substitute religion, which has nourished and spread today's widespread cult of self- worship.²⁷

Maria Riley, O.P., has developed a whole course of exercise that stresses the female Self for "Liberating the Power of Women's Spirituality."

. . . Spirituality is not something we have or we don't have. Spirituality is a life process. It is coming in touch with our unique spirit, as lived through our life experiences. It is the process whereby we recognize the God of our experiences as well as the God of our faith tradition. (p. 7, Wisdom Seeks Her Way, the work cited Note. 6).

It is obvious there are two "gods" involved in that feminist spirituality: the subjective God of self and the God of faith tradition. The emphasis of the feminist revolutionaries is clearly on the former deity.

Thus Sr. Theresa Kane calls for "a Church modeled on a community of adults, having co-responsible membership (that acknowledges) the equality of ministers and administrators."²⁸

Humans have replaced Christ's words and actions in creating the Church.

When those called to the Church replace the divine Caller then self-worship is certainly near, if not present: Surely that is what is proposed by Sr. Luke Tobin, who so "reformed" the Sisters of Loretto that they are on the edge of extinction, or at least an endangered species:

The circular model required by Jesus could be extended to the whole church. Just imagine a circle of representatives from many nations with the bishops speaking to the consensus reached in their countries and the pope as an elected president. Ready to participate in the ensuing dialogue would be a diversity of elected delegates, including women and representatives of other racial and religious minorities."²⁹

If Christ is supposed to be Head of the Church and the Pope His only vicar, then the vision of Church held by Sr. M. Luke will require the removal of Christ by the reduction of His Vicar to a presider. It is difficult to conceive such a Church being Christ's body; it will have replaced that Body.

Benedictine Sr. Mary Lou Kownacki had a dream, whether a fictional one for propaganda purposes or a real one isn't quite clear. It was prompted by her reading that Hildegard of Bingen (who feminists consider a Progenitor) had a dream of a woman at an altar wearing bishop's clothes. In Sr. Mary Lou's dream a bishop at a prayer service in the National Shrine "called forth and blessed 12 women as 'bishops in the spirit."' They all were "outstanding leaders in the church" and included single, married, divorced and religious. They set up a National Conference of Catholic Women Bishops in Washington, D.C. Predictably enough women bishops were to be proliferated to match in number male Bishops.

'An organized nonviolent resistance movement among women in the Catholic church is waiting to erupt,' the NCCWB's first press release stated. 'The formation of a women's house of bishops is the first step in a broad-based campaign that has the potential to revolutionize the church . . . .

We are in the process of outlining a nonviolent campaign that will equal the civil-rights movement. . . . It will include education, direct action, economic boycotts and symbolic life-giving actions that model a new way of being church.

As Dorothy Day, one of our deceased bishops in the spirit, so often said. 'We must build the new community in the shell of the old.³⁰

Whether Sister was writing tongue-in-check or not, the last statement is serious. The women are determined to destroy all but the shell of the traditional Catholic Church and fill it with their "being church" on their own terms.

Ms. Dolores Curran, columnist, told the 1991 Mile-Hi Conference of catechists in Denver the past February that the Church was courting trouble by not giving in to women's demands for equality, including ordination. Since Ms. Curran's sense of humor, if it exists, is completely hidden this must be taken as a threat. It could not be prophecy, since Ms. Curran has never displayed that charism. It is a very serious display of feminist intentions to have their way or leave the house in shambles. In politics the tactic is known as "Rule or Ruin."

Sr. Kownacki is national coordinator for Pax Christi USA to which belongs a number of the more "progressive" Catholic Bishops. Could it be she foresees possible attempts at authorizing women clerical power by one or more of these Bishops. Would her dream seem so farfetched in discussions in the dicasteries of Pax Christi? Perhaps not. She concluded her dream column with, "Nightmare or vision? Indeed, who knows. Only the future will tell."

Apparently if the hopes of the feminists include validity for their ambitions, they are going to have to find someone in the Apostolic Succession (even though they condemn Apostolicity as patriarchal) to give it the coloration of authenticity. It is not unthinkable that there are Bishops who might be persuaded to do what the nameless Bishop of Sister's "dream" did. I might give names, but prudence dictates against such speculation.

Some feminists are not content with a dream of being Bishops. They are determined to progress into Divinity itself, a final stage in their struggle against mere religion. Lilliana Audrey Kopp, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist and "catalyst" for the "Sisters for Christian Community," draws on Lawrence Kohlberg's theories of stages of development to conclude:

Kohlberg speculated that were . . . conditions of hopelessness, frustration and despair to obtain (against liberated "sixth stage" sisters) 6th stagers would survive by moving upward to the 7th stage of maturation for which utter despair is a PRECONDITION! At the moment when 6th stage persons would contemplate the utter futility of self-autonomy, the pervasiveness of injustice, and the meaninglessness of finite values, they would be catapulted upward toward embracing a 'more cosmic perspective' and toward identifying with the INFINITE.

. . . Walter E. Conn, professor of religious studies at Villanova University . . . wrote that such a religious conversion is not only rare but is probably not even religious in the ordinary sense. In fact, such a serious and radical transformation might be better described as " conversion from religion to God.³¹

Meanwhile, the unlucky religious women stuck in the sixth stage, will have to be content with merely being Church. Sister Lilliana complains that "although they (Fathers of Vatican II) redefined the Church as the Community of the People of God, they held back from making the rhetoric reality."³²

Of course, Vatican II did not nor could it "redefine" the Church at all, but it is the illusion of the feminists and their supportive theologians that it did. This fundamental error makes more pathetic than anything else this romanticizing of Sr. Lilliana:

We are women who have experienced the — SUDDEN SPRING of self-realization that frees us from the long winters of ACCOMMODATION and moves us toward inirradicable CONFRONTATION DETERMINATION . . . , and perhaps beyond . . . .

— We are women too rich in experience to rhapsodize on the beauty of SUDDEN SPRING for we understand the grave responsibilities of CONFRONTATION VOCATIONS and the inevitable short-range consequences . . .

— We are women with our fingers on the pulse-beat of the Church, who feel new life coursing through it — life to be contoured, finally, by the CONSENSUS FIDELIUM . . . of the emerging laity . . .

— We are women ever in process of BECOMING, stretching toward full personhood, strong with the courage of our convictions, sensing the deepening in our vocations to be co-shapers of the CHURCH RADIANT. . . .

— Finally, we are the dancing flowers and illusive shadows of SUDDEN SPRING, - the mystery in the ferment of NEW LIFE . . .

WE ARE THE SPRIGS OF HOPE THAT HAVE BROKEN THROUGH THE ROCKS OF TRADITION, SEEDLINGS WHOSE PENETRATING ROOTS CRUMBLE THE STONES THAT HOLD BACK THE FUTURE. . . .

Liturgical Fabrication

Lest we think this is the effusion of one mystified, gnostic-teched lady addicted to capital letters and . . . separated . . . phrases, consider some of the "liturgy" of Women-Church offered by that Church's spokeswoman, Ms. Ruether. She suggests morning prayer that "might take the form of the hatha yoga 'Salute to the Sun'" and close the day with "deep breathing" to allow the body and mind to rest. She gives a ceremony for "reclaiming menstruation" in which participants shed their clothes and enter a pool of water, immersing themselves and saying, "Blessed is the dying away and blessed the regeneration."

Then there is "the New Moon Ritual," which has women gathering in a circle, each crowned with flowers, and saying a "prayer," part of which is:

Great Mother-Spirit of the universe . . . Recreate us and all things anew, O Mother-Spirit. Banish the powers of destruction that crush the spirits of living things and choke the channels of communication of life-giving energy.

There is a litany of "saints and demons," which includes (among the former, I'm sure) Rachel Carson, Johnny Appleseed, Audubon, Justice Paul Douglas, Teilhard de Chardin, and Margaret Mead. In a "Puberty Rite for a Young Woman" women discuss with the subject of the rite "how to choose or avoid conception." There are "covenant celebrations" for both heterosexual and lesbian couples. The latter is complete with a "communion rite" using a chalice of water representing the "tears of the oppressed" (presumably homosexuals), raisins — "the dried-up dreams of generations who were not free (again presumably homosexuals) and "fresh cool grapes . . . fruit of the New Earth."

There is a "croning liturgy" for elder women, which includes four "circle-casting incantations," in the course of which the "crone" is delivered to "God/Goddess in our midst," and the spirits of air, fire, water and earth are invoked.

There are "stations of the cross" in which Jesus is condemned to death at International Harvester, burdened with the cross at the South African Consulate, falls the first time at the South Korean Consulate, and is helped by Simon at the El Salvador consulate, and meets the weeping women at "Chicago government — which shares in Reagan's robbery of the poor and hungry . . ."

Faithful to the Leftist coloration of Women-Church, no mention is made in these "stations" of the Kremlin, the (then) Sandinista Red regime in Managua, the Communist North Korean consulate, etc. (The above rituals and incantations are given in Ms. Ruether's Women-Church, p. 122 et seq. (See Note 1.)

This sort of liturgical mummery is only the feminist species of a general sort of redoing of ritual that the architects of new-Church would foist upon Catholics. Consider the following "alternative" for the once solemn anointing of the dying: At a liturgy for those in mid-life, all the lights in the church are extinguished while a solo voice or several in dialogue say:

. . . Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness, the dancing.

Here the reader pauses long enough to create the sensation of 'waiting in darkness.'

What we call the beginning is often the end.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

At this point instrumental music is introduced as background accompaniment to the reading. A solo flute or oboe would serve best.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future . . .
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

At the still point of the turning world . . .
Neither from nor towards; at the still point,
where the dance is . . .
Where past and future are gathered . . .
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance.³⁴

At this point "a dancer can be enlisted" to make a "dance presentation" of the oils of anointing. The poetry of Eliot appropriated for this "ritual" is perhaps significant in its proper context, but becomes nearly mumbo-jumbo here, perhaps leaving the anointees impressed but hardly having any greater consolation of faith than they had before the ceremony, and perhaps considerably less.

This sort of liturgical fabrication can be expected in full flood with the arrival of Women-Church. It is based on the misinterpretation of the term "People of God," as if they all have received the charism of liturgical creativity. It is somewhat like giving over the libraries of the world and all the publishing houses to "folk" writing or to any amateurs interested enough and brash enough to substitute their literary attempts for those of genius. A Gresham-type law then takes over and drives out the great liturgy as mere relics of a past time.

Training for this "folk liturgy" begins early in new-Church. A Canadian text "Living the Liturgy"³⁵ in the "Preparation for Holy Communion" volume has a space for children to "write . . . a song you would like to sing to the Lord." The communicants are told that "You feel like dancing or singing with joy" at Mass, for you feel the same when someone gives you a wonderful present. Receiving Communion is compared to sharing hot bread made by Grandma. A picture is provided for the children to fill in "happy faces" for the people, to make the bells ring and to decorate the altar with flowers. This is to convey that "Mass is truly a celebration." Whether they are ever expected to learn it is a celebration of Christ's death on the cross is not indicated by the communal, "party" atmosphere that is stressed.

V.

Summation

I believe a case has been made beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt that the feminist movement is directed toward a revolutionary replacement of the Catholic with a Women-Church that is alien in theology or theological interpretation, Leftist in social ambitions, egalitarian in claims to authority and power, esoteric and gnostic in liturgy and worship.

The movement is global in scope and aimed at creating "consciousness" of "being women" as the motivating force of "liberating" the Church.³⁶

Its revolutionary character is fueled by subjective misinterpretations of the Second Vatican Council and acceptance of a new Christology with stress on a worldly kingdom of God that elevates social works above (or replacing) spiritual or moral ones. (It is Karl Rahner who has given us an "ascending Christology" originating in Christ's humanity, as well as a concept of grace as "divinizing" nature.)

It considers not only the male priesthood but the perception of masculine Deity as historical and/or cultural developments.

It is immanentist in its reference to faith, insisting that experience is determinative, and specifically feminine experience. It welcomes revision of history. Biblical understanding as reform, even when it is destructive of tradition, or perhaps particularly when it is so destructive. Thus, feminists are sympathetic to such things as representing the crucified Jesus Christ as a naked woman, even though this speaks contrary to reality. Here, the medium is the message, even if it is not the Gospel message. Theology professor Susan A. Ross saw the "Christa" art displayed in New York's Cathedral of St. John as forcing "the viewer to see a woman's body as a sacred symbol," though obviously that is not the message of the crucifixion.³⁷

An objective reading of Vatican II will not only fail to find the basis for these feminist presumptions, but in fact will reveal the opposite. The "People of God" description, dating to acceptance of the sovereignty of God over the Jewish people, is not presented as negating hierarchy, but actually embracing it. Baptism is not given as the empowerment or basis of the priesthood, but rather the Sacrament of Orders is so given (see Lumen Gentium, Ill-28 - " . . . In virtue of the sacrament of orders, after the image of Christ, the supreme and eternal priest (Heb. 5:1, 7:24, 9:11-28), they are consecrated in order to preach the Gospel and shepherd the faithful as well as to celebrate divine worship as true priests of the New Testament.")

If the ecclesiastical structure of the Catholic Church results from a divine grant of authority, there cannot be the "alternative" structures as promoted by Schillebeeckx and echoed by Mary Jo Weaver and her sister-feminists.

The basis of martyrdom for both men and women is the same — suffering for their faith in Christ and His Gospel. To include in such martyrdom all women who have suffered oppression by men is to misuse the concept of martyrdom and amounts to special pleading that is not to the point.

The revisionism of history that views the primitive, "gospel-value" church as without clerical authority or an ordained history is not defensible from true history. Such authority is evident in the Acts of the Apostles, in the Didache, and in its acceptance from the earliest times. The Church has always rejected what became Protestant ecclesiology, personal direction by the Holy Spirit in contradiction to ecclesiastical authority, decree, and determination. Indeed, the error of antinomianism and religious subjectivism is shown in the fragmentation of those who make appeal to immanent and personal direction into countless sects, cults, denominations, each based upon some new or superior "revelation." It is not surprising, therefore, to see feminism exercising a fractioning power, with the "roots" of this plant crumbling the rock of the past.

Subjecting Catholic "ministry" to a personalist call is part of that subjectivism, and believing that ministry, stemming as it is claimed from baptism, needs no ecclesiastical validation will lead to sectarianism as surely as it has in Protestantism.

Since the teaching of a "royal priesthood" of the baptized dates to St. Peter himself, it is ridiculous now to appeal to it as the basis for a ministry, even a priestly ministry, that does not distinguish between the ordained and the non-ordained. How could the priesthood have prevailed if that were a proper interpretation?

The acceptance by the feminists of the "self-esteem" theories of the new psychologists is, on the other hand, quite distant from Gospel values of self-abnegation, sacrifice of self, carrying of Christ's cross — the very ideals that motivated the founders of the great religious communities.

The gnostic atmosphere of much religious feminism emanates from the late Teilhard de Chardin and his intellectual Doppelganger, Matthew Fox, O.P. Fr. Fox edited the "divine works with letters and songs" of Hildegard of Bingen, who figured in Sr. Kownacki's dream of a female bishop. The Dominican's book is referred to by Sr. Cunningham in regard to Sophia, the resurrection of the "divine feminine." Ms. Weaver refers twice to Teilhard as influencing Rahner's intermingling of the secular and spiritual and as injecting the evolutionary note into modern understanding of the Church. Both Teilhard and Fox have depended, in reputation, largely upon female votaries. One of them who is an associate with Fr. Fox is the witch, Starhawk.

If we did not know of the actual involvement of the psychologist Carl Rogers with the dissolution of the California IHM community, we might have inferred a relationship between Rogerian theory and the Catholic feminist revolution. For Rogers' promotion of a new "emerging person . . . thrusting up through the dying, yellowing, putrefying leaves and stalks of our fading institutions," a person who will "change the fundamental nature of our society," I refer you to The Emperor's New Clothes — the naked truth about the new psychology, by William K. Kilpatrick, chapter II.

It is Rogers who offers a sort of upward mobility beyond religion, beyond even self, to where the person "has become an integrated process of changingness.''³⁸ Probably no other man could, with impunity, tell them that the key to their liberation was the title to that operatic insult of womanhood, La donna mobile. In their flight from being "objects" and puppets for men, the feminists have let a male psychologist, who himself progressed from Christianity to spiritualism, turn them into whatever restless and fragile wraiths their imagination pretends to be their fulfilled reality.

The ladies who have allowed themselves to be turned into "integrated processes of changingness" have in turn changed religion into something very much like Gatsby's garden parties:

The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

It's almost a feminist liturgy.

Notes

1. Women-Church, Theology & Practice, by Rosemary Radford Ruether, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1985.
2. New Catholic Women: A Contemporary Challenge to Traditional Religious Authority, by Mary Jo Weaver, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1985, pp. 146-147.
3. Ruether, Women-Church, pp. 62-63.
4. Ruether, Ibid., p. 72.
5. Ruether, Ibid., p. 71.
6. Wisdom Seeks Her Way: Liberating the Power of Women's Spirituality, by Maria Riley, O.P., Center of Concern, Washington, D.C., 1987.
7. Partnership: Men & Women in Ministry, by Fran Ferder and John Heagle, Ave Maria Press, 1989, pp. 116-117.
8. Ibid., p. 119.
9. Carol Quigley, IHM, in preface to Turning Points in Religious Life, Christian Classics, Westminster, Md., 1988, pp. 7-8.
10. John Wycliffe, 14th century English heretic who taught that the only authority is that of the righteous, and that therefore authority comes directly to the righteous from God.
11. Sandra Marie Schneiders, IHM, in Turning Points in Religious Life (op. cit. note 9), p. 36.
12. Anthony Kosnik, ibid., p. 139.
13. Rosemary Radford Ruether, To Change the World: Christology and Cultural Criticism, Crossroad, New York, 1981, p. 24.
14. The Milwaukee Journal, April 20, 1970.
15. Joan Boyle, BVM, Religious Life: Tomorrow, Canadian Religious Conference, 1978, p. 40.
16. Ibid., pp. 49-50.
17. Ibid., p. 52.
18. Bernice Kita, MM, in preface, What Prize Awaits Us. Letters from Guatemala, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, N.Y.. 1988.
19. In Turning Points (op. cit note II), p. 243.
20. Ibid., p. 245.
21. Paulo Freire, Brazilian activist and theoretician, proponent of the theories of the late Antonio Gramsci, who saw Communism coming from the conversion of institutions including religious ones from their original purposes to agents of Marxist socialist change. (See Forum, "Consciousness-Raising and the Erosion of Religious Life.")
22. In From Nuns to Sisters: An Expanding Vocation, Twenty Third Publications, Mystic, Conn.. p. 85.
23. Beatrice Bruteau, "Neo-Feminism and the Next Revolution in Consciousness," Cross Currents, Summer, 1977 reprinted from Anima, Chambersburg, Pa., Spring, 1977
24. ISIS bulletins up to 1980.
25. Reweaving Religious Life: Beyond the Liberal Model, Twenty-Third Publications, Mystic, Conn., 1990.
26. Chicago Studies, Our Lady of the Lake Seminary, Mundeline, IL, vol. 25, no. I, April, 1989.
27. Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship, Wm. B. Eerdmans Co., 1977, p. 105.
28. Brooklyn diocesan Tablet, Feb. 17, 1990, Sr. Kane speaking at "afternoon of reflection for women.)
29. National Catholic Reporter, "Profile," Nov. 9. 1990.
30. National Catholic Reporter, Sept. 14 1990.
31. Sudden Spring: 6th Stage Sisters, Sunspot Publications, Waldport, Or., 1973, p. 106.
32. Ibid., p. 28.
33. Ibid., p. 107.
34. Alternative Futures for Worship, vol. 7, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville. Mn., 1987, p. 138.
35. Living the Eucharist, A Preparation for Firm Communion, by Francoise Darcy-Berube and Jean-Paul Berube, Novalis, St. Paul University, Ottawa, 1984.
36. Partnership (op. cit. note 7), p. 119 and elsewhere. See also Women and Ministry in the New Testament, Elizabeth M. Tetlow, wherein the theology graduate of Woodstock College insists that a replacement of the primitive Christian concept of ministry by Jewish model of priesthood ousted women from an equal place with men in the Church's official ministry.
37. See 1980's "Miriam's Song" publication of Priests for Equality, West Hyattsville, Md., 20782, especially regarding "Christa," Susan A. Ross, Loyola University, Chicago, theologian, in "Miriam's Song 2," p. 20.
38. Vitz, work cited in note 27, p. 23.

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