Holding on and Changing the Tradition
By Janet Giddings
Undergraduate Professor
Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Ethics
Santa Clara University
Holding on and Changing the Tradition
In any year, a seminar on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition would be exciting and worthwhile. In the year of a pandemic, a riot at the U.S. Capitol, and workplace challenges at the university, it was more than that, it was necessary. The pandemic year offered much challenge and reflection as a Catholic woman and intellectual. The study of the Catholic intellectual tradition offered reflection on what to hold on to, and what to change.
It was working with others, the communion of minds, and the exchange of ideas that held me in good stead during this study. Revisting and reading new material with the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (CIT) Study Group at Santa Clara University offered collegial consideration of the tradition. Questions on sex abuse, women as deacons and prists, male authority in theological issues, the history of racism in the Church, justice issues with contingent faculty contracts, and the theology of human dignity did not always mesh.
The CIT group first considered the question: What does it mean to be a Catholic, Jesuit University? During a pandemic, and in light of contingent faculty inequity and other issues discussed in emails over many months, this was a much-loaded question for seminar members. In a selection from Michael Buckley, S.J., we read how theological issues and robust doubt and questioning is the sound way to keep theology alive and systematic in the Catholic intellectual tradition. Theologians must be free to analyze theological ideas and how they are applied in the Church. Theologians must scrutinize and assess Encyclicals from the Pope. After all, hadn’t Jesus questioned authority? Using Buckley as the springboard to discuss the struggle by some faculty to unionize, the lack of the administration viewing the “whole person” in regard to contingent faculty, and sentiments about the Board of Directors and leadership in a Catholic, Jesuit institution moved to the fore. Buckley’s question, “What is the teaching church now to expect from such an institution?”1 in regard to confrontation was spot-on for a discussion on ethical issues. We work in a Catholic, Jesuit institution and if, as John Dewey said, “that reflection, human thought, originates only in confrontation”1 then issues of fairness, overwork, underpaid contingent faculty, lack of job security, and lack of active engagement in policies must be part of theological discussion. Santa Clara University must meet the situation for the common good. “Discussion is the formalizing activity of the university, and the refusal to discuss is the destruction of its life,” said Buckley, adding, “The theological discussion that constitutes a university as Catholic must be free” (136).2 But we might ask: What do political and institutional issues have to do with theology? Ursula King gave answers to why structural and institutional wrongs are theologically important.
Bruce Rolff, Touch of an Angel, stock.adobe.com
After years of struggle as a woman theologian in academia, she asked, “Will [women] be encouraged to make their full contribution to the intellectual life of the Church or, more important still, will women become real co-equals and co-partners in shaping the Catholic intellectual tradition?”3 So, it should be with women and contingent faculty that they are fully engaged as whole persons and will help make a “difference in the way the institutional and structural levels of the Church will be organized in the future.”4 Where King argues that the Catholic Church and its intellectual tradition cannot do without women, Catholic universities cannot function without contingent faculty. Therefore, the input from faculty on these issues was part of the examination as to what makes a Catholic university Catholic and Jesuit, fair and robust in serving students in the tradition while making necessary adjustments. And, what confirmed this is from a Boston College study: “A reverence for the dignity of each human being; created in the image of God. Hence, a commitment to justice, to the solidarity of the human family, and to the common good.”5 It was not hard to better understand the theology of this issue as the CIT group worked toward a common understanding. We are created by God and to value our own dignity and the dignity of others we must know that “solidarity helps us to see the ‘other’”6 and that is theological. In CIT discussions we focused on how we can help build a better culture in our university, and the discussions were fruitful.
This is why more diversity and more women in theology and in all intellectual discussions will serve students and teachers best. The Catholic intellectual tradition is essential learning with all its warts and beauty and its long development has created theological artworks in the minds of millions of people over millennia. In the essay “Seeing Catholicly” by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, we can reflect on our own learning experiences and development. Along with Martin Luther King Jr., who said in a 1954 sermon, “Sometimes, you know, it’s necessary to go backward in order to go forward,”7 the exercise of reflection on the Catholic intellectual tradition allowed that. How do Catholic colleges and universities wrestle with Catholic identity while challenged by racial and gender inequality that permeates the tradition? “Catholic writers struggle to align an ancient faith with a modern culture, the former attempting to hold to a tradition and the latter in a constant state of flux, and their art is a direct result of this tension,” says O’Donnell on artists and poets.8 So too do the many of us who teach theology and other disciplines in Catholic, Jesuit universities work within this tension. Teaching is an artform. As we work to align Catholic theological ideas, especially authoritative ideas from the Church, we offer ancient ideas, the progression of those ideas, and how we will change. With new ideas we must ask: Who is included in these ideas?—and ensure all voices are heard.
We must make a conscious effort to create curricula with citational diversity, including as many diverse minds and voices as possible. In order for all of us to learn how to respond to our contemporary world, we must listen to experiences other than our own. An example from human experience: “The metaphor of the ‘welcome table’ was articulated by the enslaved bards and poets who composed the songs known to us as the black (or Negro) spirituals” and a redacted version of the song was used during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.9 We can include this human experience in courses and with colleagues asking: How can we create a welcoming table, embrace other human beings and recognize their dignity? How might we help normalize community by creating a table of solidarity that works for all? Sometimes we have to go back to move forward, and we must set the table for everyone without exclusivity. As faculty in Catholic higher education we must ask: What is justice? Whose justice? Justice for whom?10 We need to ask this in light of theological ideas and why God seems fair to some and not to others. Just as Massingale seeks “to discover how the Christian faith has been both complicitous in and subversive to the existence of racial hierarchy in American life,”11 so with that everyone in a Catholic university must seek to uncover these aspects of the tradition and find way for reconciliation. White people must understand and never forget, “The darker your skin is, the more likely you are to be imprisoned, a refugee, a forced migrant.”12 It is our ethical responsibility as educators in a Catholic Jesuit university to work toward anti-racism through the learning experience. This is how we change, by responding with attentiveness.
What are Catholic feminists doing in the Catholic university and Church these days, especially when Catholic authority does not see us as fully human? I suppose it is fair to say we are about one-fifth human. I say one-fifth because women are allowed to run the administration of parishes, work in social welfare programs, work as nuns who teach and pray within communities, serve as nurses in Catholic hospitals, and allowed to teach theology in the university. Yet we are not seen as worthy for positions as deacons or priests or in positions of higher authority. In the CIT study we considered ways of knowing from the lens of women. Oftentimes it takes women who offer learners an alternative lens. As Hinsdale said of her experience in both her master’s and doctoral programs, “I had only two female professors,”13 which is unacceptable theologically. If the Church is the body of Christ made up of humans and women are human, then not allowing all humans to be part of teaching and having authority in Catholic Jesuit universities and the Church is not offering a full learning experience. We need women theologians at the “welcoming table” in universities, in Church, at home, and in circles where we can make a difference.
An essay by Christina Lledo Gomez provides an outstanding contribution to the change needed in Catholic intellectual understanding. Gomez opens the discussion on the use of “mother” by the Church. She discusses implications of viewing women and the Earth as certain types of mothers, which in turn have had devastating effects, especially for Indigenous women. “Mother Earth is ignored and yet romanticized,” said Gomez.14 Gomez discusses how seeing mothers as sensitive and tender, supporters and savers of others, etcetera, diminishes the whole woman. A woman may be sensitive, tender, nurturing, caring, and an exceptional CEO or computer scientist, and more. How has this not become clear to the Church? How can the intellectual tradition change with the times and move forward if it is stuck in this rudimentary idea? Here is an opportunity for the Catholic intellectual tradition to cherish voices of the elders while embracing new voices.
Elena Aseeva, Hands Pyku, stock.adobe.com
Yet, it is Gomez’s explanation as to how Indigenous women have explained oppression that really resonated. “Anishinaabe-kwe native, Renee Elizabeth Mzinegiizhigo-kwe Bedard says the historic oppression of Indigenous women is the context in which they mothered in colonial times and the context in which they continue to mother today—a mothering that ‘has been constructed within the context of control, conquest, possession, and exploitation...’ its foundations in ‘...White, male-centered Christian fundamentals.’”15 This point can refer us to the current global tragedy of human trafficking. Too many men use women of color as colonial fodder for their sexual appetites. These women are part of the historical conquest and possession culture that has used them merely as means to their sexual ends. The Catholic tradition must change by listening and eliminate methods of harm.
The essay by Gomez is startling and essential reading on theology, gender, and the Church. She offers:
Whereas in the Western Christian context women have been pitted at the extremes—either as the Virgin Mother Mary or as Eve, wife of Adam, seductress and whore—white male European- Christian colonizers have pitted Indigenous women also at extremes: either as Earth-Mother-Goddesses/Indian-Queens/Indian Princesses on the one hand or ‘easy squaws’/ virgins ‘waiting to be won and conquered’ oversexualized temptational figures on the other.16
How can this not be discussed in view of God, theology, and the Church? Solidarity can be our goal as long as the “our” is inclusive. Gomez is not against the Church. Rather she is “calling for the re-imagination of motherhood as reality rather than concept, a respect for women who are mothers in their diversity and complexity,”17 and we should include these discussions into Catholic intellectual pursuit.
The Catholic intellectual tradition is holding steady. Many of the Catholic intellectuals we read in the CIT seminar remain foundational, and we should continue to revisit them. The more recent and current Catholic intellectuals are bringing the change required to serve all people and tend to wounds of the past. This seminar allowed reflection on the Catholic intellectual tradition, Catholic universities, ideas learned in the past, and ideas newly considered to bring inclusive change.
Janet Giddings has taught since 1999 in philosophy, theology, and religious ethics. She has been teaching undergraduates at Santa Clara University since 2005. She is currently working on a book which focuses on the philosophy, theology, and ethics in the poetry of Edwin Markham, the American poet 1852–1940.
Notes
1 Buckley S.J. Michael J. “Chapter Seven: The Catholic University as Pluralistic Forum.” The Catholic University as Promise and Project: Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998, p. 130.
2 ibid. p. 136.
3 King, Ursula. “Chapter Seven: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition: A Gloriously Rich but Difficult Inheritance.” Examining the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. Sacred Heart UP, 2000, p. 138.
4 ibid. p. 139.
5 O’Malley S.J., John. “How the First Jesuits Became Involved in Education.” The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum: 400th Anniversary Perspectives. Fordham University Press, 2000, pp. 56-74. The Catholic Intellectual Tradition: A Conversation at Boston College. The Church in the 21st Century Center, July 2010, p. 10.
6 Beyer, Gerald J. “The Meaning of Solidarity in Catholic Social Teaching.” Political Theology, Vol. 15 No. 1, 2014, p. 9.
7 King Jr. Martin Luther, “Rediscovering Lost Values.” Sermon. Detroit Michigan, February 28, 1954.
8 O’Donnell, Angela Alaimo. “Seeing Catholicly: Poetry and the Catholic Imagination.” The Catholic Studies Reader. Fordham University Press, 2011, p. 335.
9 Massingale, “Chapter Four: A Dream Deferred: Meditations on African American Understandings of Justice and Hope.” Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, pp. 137–138.
10 ibid. p. 143.
11 ibid. “Chapter Three: Toward a More Adequate Catholic Engagement” p. 86.
12 Copeland, M. Shawn. “The Intersection of Race, Class, and Gender in Jesuit and Feminist Education: Finding Transcendent Meaning in the Concrete.” Jesuit and Feminist Education: Intersections in Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-first Century. Fordham University Press, p. 133.
13 Hinsdale, Mary Ann. “Who are the “Begats”? Or Women Theologians Shaping Women Theologians. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 33.1, 2017, p. 93.
14 Gomez Lledo, Christina. Mother Language, Mother Church, Mother Earth: An exploration of Catholic rhetoric on mothering which affect the way women, the earth, and Indigenous peoples are treated. Intersections and Fractures: (Re) visions of Feminist Theologies, Carolyn Alsen, ed. Decolonizing Theology Series, Lexington Press, 2020, p. 2.
15 ibid. p. 11.
16 ibid. pp. 12–13.
17 ibid. p. 18