US Catholic feminist theologies have been developing for more than fifty years, but most of their insights remain in the domain of academic theological circles. Indeed, when Pope Francis called for a “profound theology of the woman” in 2013, his call seemed to ignore the decades of work done by Catholic feminist theologians, biblical scholars, and ethicists, many of whom had already reimagined theological anthropology in ways that might prove helpful to understanding why a “theology of the woman” is not necessarily what the Catholic Church needs.Footnote 1 The disconnect between Pope Francis’s call and Catholic feminist theologies is indicative of the deeper disconnect between the Curia and US Catholic feminist theologians both of whom tend to view one another with suspicion.
For example, in then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s 2004 Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World (hereafter OCMW), the letter refers to two “tendencies” in “new approaches to women’s issues.”Footnote 2 The “first tendency is to emphasize strongly conditions of subordination in order to give rise to antagonism: women, in order to be themselves, must make themselves the adversaries of men.” The second tendency “emerges in the wake of the first” and suggests that “in order to avoid the domination of one sex or the other, their differences tend to be denied, viewed as mere effects of historical and cultural conditioning.” It continues, “In this perspective, physical difference, termed sex, is minimized, while the purely cultural element, termed gender, is emphasized to the maximum and held to be primary.”Footnote 3 OCMW argues that “above all it [this perspective] strengthens the idea that the liberation of women entails criticism of Sacred Scripture, which would be seen as handing on a patriarchal conception of God nourished by an essentially male-dominated culture” and also considers “lacking in importance and relevance the fact that the Son of God assumed human nature in its male form.”Footnote 4 Although OCMW never explicitly names these “tendencies” or this “perspective” as “feminist,” it is fairly clear that OCMW is addressing (and arguing against) feminist theological and biblical critiques of Catholic theological anthropology, ecclesiology, and Christology. For the Curia, being a “Catholic feminist” is likely an oxymoron.
Meanwhile, Catholic feminist theologies continue to name sexism as sin and argue that the Curia’s insistence on a theory of gender complementarity, its refusal to ordain women, and its hierarchical structuring of power are vestiges of sexist sociocultural norms rather than divinely mandated. Or, in other words, for many Catholic feminist theologians, “The liberation of women” does “entail criticism of Sacred Scripture” and theological texts that perpetuate “a patriarchal conception of God nourished by an essentially male-dominated culture.” For Catholic feminist theologians, the Curia’s critique of feminist understandings of gender, sexuality, and power—even if the term “feminist” is not always used—is reflective of sin rather than grace. It would seem, then, that there is an impasse between the Curia and Catholic feminist theologies, for how can they enter into dialogue if each sees the other as antithetical to being Catholic?
In this article, I propose that a possible resource for “engaging the impasse”Footnote 5 between the Curia and Catholic feminist theologies can be found in the response of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) to the doctrinal investigation of the LCWR undertaken by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in 2009.Footnote 6 From 2009 to 2015, the CDF investigated the LCWR because of “three major areas of concern,” the third one being an allegation of LCWR subscribing to “radical feminism.”Footnote 7 Reflecting retrospectively on the experience of the doctrinal investigation, LCWR members Janet Mock, CSJ, and Annemarie Sanders, IHM, write:
A high-ranking and very powerful Vatican office suddenly and very publicly confronted us with forceful questions and negative assumptions about the foundation of our lives as Catholic sisters. The conflict grew more intense midway through those years (2009–2015). The Vatican office threatened the autonomy and even the existence of our organization, an organization on which the great majority of US women religious rely for many kinds of resources, supports, and connections. The experience rocked LCWR’s officers, its hundreds of members, and the approximately 60,000 women religious who belonged to member congregations at that time. Yet the ultimate resolution benefitted everyone. How did that happen?Footnote 8
In However Long the Night, members of LCWR leadership answer this question—“How did that happen?”—by sharing how they drew on processes of “communal discernment” and “more inclusive decision-making” that LCWR had already been cultivating for decades since Vatican II and that they implemented throughout the doctrinal investigation.Footnote 9 As Pat Farrell, OSF, writes, “We moved into decision-making in response to the doctrinal assessment out of much accumulated experience of how to listen together for the movement of the Spirit.”Footnote 10 She continues, “We have learned a lot over the years about staying with ambiguity, listening long and attentively, discovering a way forward together.”Footnote 11 These processes—sometimes termed “contemplative processes”—enabled the leaders of LCWR to engage the impasse between LCWR and the CDF. Such processes might be beneficial to Catholic feminist theologians and members of the Curia for attempting to enter into dialogue with each other in the hope of renewing the church so that it more fully reflects the rich complexity that is the people of God. Or, heeding Pope Francis’s call, such processes might bring forth “more profound” theologies of the human—including the relationships between human and nonhuman creation—that attend especially to the experiences of those who are marginalized.
Throughout this article, I use a Catholic feminist decolonial lens of analysis to examine how the LCWR’s contemplative processes can help bridge the impasse between Catholic feminist theologies and the Curia. In particular, I argue that there are resonances between the LCWR’s contemplative processes and the “path of conocimiento” found in the work of Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa.Footnote 12 For Anzaldúa, the “path of conocimiento” is a way of shifting out of dichotomous worldviews that reinscribe injustice. Although it may seem strange to bring Anzaldúa’s theory of “the path of conocimiento” into an analysis of the impasse between Catholic feminist theologies and the Curia, I think that it is important for Catholic theologies to attend to the insights that come from those who no longer identify as Catholic because Catholicism has wounded them.Footnote 13 Indeed, as Carmelite Constance FitzGerald’s analysis of impasse and John of the Cross’s work shows, contemplative processes often spring from the experience of suffering, of “darkness” in the sense of “oscuridad”—that which obscures meaning and hope.Footnote 14 Like LCWR’s contemplative process, Anzaldúa’s “path of conocimiento” is also attentive to the ways transformation—understood as always simultaneously personal and collective—must be rooted in spirituality. Both share the insight that careful listening to ourselves, “others,” and the divine (albeit by different names) is one of the first steps toward building understanding between seemingly opposed entities.
The article is divided into two parts. Because many Catholic feminist theologians, biblical scholars, and ethicists have already insightfully attended to the church’s understanding of “woman,” including critiques of its theory of gender complementarity evinced in OCMW and other documents, I do not retrace the development of US Catholic feminist theologies, biblical studies, and ethics in this article.Footnote 15 Therefore, I begin the first part by examining the contemplative processes engaged by the LCWR during the doctrinal investigation, looking at the processes as described by LCWR members in However Long the Night and at the work of Constance FitzGerald, OCD, that undergirds them.Footnote 16 The second part examines the resonances between LCWR’s contemplative processes and Anzaldúa’s path of conocimiento. Together, I argue, they can serve as powerful resources for healing the divide between Catholic feminist theologies and the Roman Catholic Curia and, in so doing, offer hope to our often polarized and suffering world.
The Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Possibilities of Contemplative Dialogue
The CDF’s doctrinal investigation of the LCWR occurred from 2009 to 2015. Sometimes confused with the “Apostolic Visitation of Institutes of Women Religious in the United States” launched by the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (CICLSAL) in January 2009, the doctrinal investigation came from the CDF.Footnote 17 Unlike the apostolic visitation, the initiation of this investigation was not, at first, known by the majority of US women religious who belong to congregations that are members of LCWR. As Marcia Allen, CSJ, and Florence Deacon, OSF, write:
[On March 9, 2009] the president of LCWR received a letter from the prefect of the CDF advising her that the CDF had appointed a US bishop to conduct a doctrinal assessment of LCWR’s activities and initiatives. The presidents [LCWR’s presidency is communal and composed of three persons: the past president, the current president, and the president-elect] resolved to keep this confidential and supplied all the documents he requested. The process seemed to be proceeding normally and in an orderly fashion. He occasionally asked for additional documents and LCWR provided them. By December 2011, his work was completed, and his report had been submitted to the CDF. LCWR did not receive a copy or any other notice from CDF after this.Footnote 18
Given that they had not received any copy of the CDF report or notice, members of LCWR leadership were shocked “when the CDF announced in 2012 that it had concluded its study and was appointing an archbishop who would be assisted by two other bishops to oversee a reform of LCWR as a result of its investigation.”Footnote 19 This announcement was shared with LCWR leaders in April 2012 during their annual visit to the Vatican. At that meeting, LCWR leaders received what they have come to refer to as “the mandate”—the document outlining the CDF’s critiques of LCWR and recommendations for its reformation. Perhaps even more shocking to LCWR leaders was that the mandate had already been published on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) website. Essentially, LCWR leaders learned about the mandate at the same time as everyone else in the world. LCWR—and the CDF’s questioning of it—was now in the public spotlight.
Despite a plethora of inquiries and invitations from the press and popular media, LCWR leaders did not immediately comment on the situation.Footnote 20 As Carol Zinn, SSJ, writes:
What became clear while we were still in Rome was that without time to think, pray, and meet with the LCWR board to seriously and strategically explore and plan how to respond on all these levels, we would be less than who we were and who we are called to be. We decided that we would say nothing until we had the opportunity to gather the board members. We asked our members to honor the many processes by which we work together as LCWR and to give the board an opportunity to meet prior to the 2012 LCWR assembly before saying anything on the national, regional, or local levels—at all.Footnote 21
Most striking about the LCWR’s decision to remain publicly silent initially is that it was rooted in, and reflective of, LCWR’s commitment to processes of contemplative dialogue that foster response rather than reaction. Indeed, Zinn notes: “The decision to maintain a silent stance during the immediate time after the release of the mandate and a discreet stance throughout the journey of responding to the mandate came from a deep place of contemplation.”Footnote 22 This deep place of contemplation—and the practices engaged to enter into it—are essential to the LCWR’s way of being in the world. As Mary Hughes, OP, writes: “Contemplation has become an integral part of the way in which the conference operates.” She continues, “Contemplation changes the ways in which we do things. It enables us to go deeper. It slows us down. It stills us and better enables us to hear the voice of God.”Footnote 23 That LCWR members were able to be still so as to listen for the voice of God in the midst of what some might perceive as a public and powerful attack on the integrity of the organization—and frankly, on the women religious themselves—can be read as a testament to the seriousness with which LCWR members take cultivating contemplative practice both individually and communally.
The cultivation of contemplative practices has been an integral part of the LCWR’s ethos for decades. From national assemblies to regional meetings, LCWR leaders have often relied on processes that invite members to center themselves in the present moment and ready themselves for careful listening to one another in small and large groups. A guide to one such contemplative process called “‘Behold, I Am Doing Something New’” is shared in However Long the Night.Footnote 24 It involves small group work in which participants take a moment to relax their bodies and to reflect on the statement, “Behold, I am doing something new.… Can you not perceive it?” as they nonjudgmentally review the time they have spent thus far at the gathering.Footnote 25 It then leads them in listening to one another’s sharing and pondering further questions. Although there are many different processes, the emphasis tends to be on grounding oneself in the present moment to open oneself to the possibility of listening to oneself, others, and God. Such practices have been at the heart of LCWR’s style of leadership and community-building for decades. Even the “Joint Final Report” issued at the conclusion of the investigation notes “the centrality of a communal process of contemplative prayer practiced at LCWR Assemblies and other gatherings.”Footnote 26 Through their use of contemplative practices throughout the doctrinal investigation, LCWR leaders and members were able to engage in—and model—a nonreactive style of listening, processing first “in the silence of [their] hearts” what they had heard before responding.Footnote 27 “This kind of listening, although often painful and difficult, began to create deeper and wider spaces in which dialogue could take place.”Footnote 28 And through that contemplative dialogue, they were able to provide hope for the possibility of bridging impasses in the church and wider world.
Although contemplation is not new to Christian tradition, relying on it to engage contemporary impasses such as racism, sexism, and “the woundedness of the earth” was brought to the forefront in the 1980s through the work of Carmelite Constance FitzGerald, who read the then contemporary moment as a collective dark night in her essay “Impasse and Dark Night.”Footnote 29 For FitzGerald, these social evils and the powerlessness and meaninglessness with which they threaten us—the impasses that they create in our lives—call “with particular urgency in our own time for the integration of contemplation and social commitment.”Footnote 30 Drawing on “John of the Cross’ concept and symbolism of ‘dark night’” to interpret how to engage impasse, FitzGerald makes two main arguments: “First, our experience of God and our spirituality must emerge from our concrete, historical situation and must return to that situation to feed and enliven it.” Second, she claims that “there is not only the so-called dark night of the soul but the dark night of the world.” And she asks: “What if, by chance, our time in evolution is a dark-night time—a time of crisis and transition that must be understood if it is to be part of learning a new vision and harmony for the human species and the planet?”Footnote 31
Taking FitzGerald’s idea of a collective dark night, I would argue that the LCWR’s experience of being investigated by the CDF was firstly a collective dark night experience for the LCWR, one that threatened to tear the organization and its members apart. It is crucial to note that not everyone makes it through the dark night. As FitzGerald writes:
Instead of realizing that the impasse provides a challenge and concrete focus for prayer and drives us to contemplation, we give in to a passive sense of inevitability, and imagination dies. We do not really believe that if we surrender these situations of world impasse to contemplative prayer that new solutions, new visions of peace and equality, will emerge in our world. We dare not believe that a creative revisioning of our world is possible. Everything is just too complex, too beyond our reach.Footnote 32
Dark nights, and the impasses characteristic of them, are disorienting and disempowering particularly because our usual ways of dealing with the perceived issue or conflict continually fall short. The danger is to succumb “to a passive sense of inevitability,” believing that the perceived issue/conflict can never be resolved because we cannot yet imagine any solutions. Yet, according to FitzGerald:
It is only in the process of bringing the impasse to prayer, to the perspective of the God who loves us, that our society will be freed, healed, changed, brought to paradoxical new visions, and freed for nonviolent, selfless, liberating action, freed, therefore, for community on this planet earth. Death is involved here—a dying in order to see how to be and to act on behalf of God in the world.Footnote 33
The fundamental question, then, when we are in the midst of a dark night is: “Do we really expect anything at all of the contemplative process of prayer in our world today?”Footnote 34 Do we really trust that prayer can change us? Importantly, this is not a type of prayer that is divorced from a commitment to acting for justice—it is not the status quo “our thoughts and prayers are with you” echoed by politicians and other leaders in the face of violence and disaster who simultaneously refuse to address the systemic inequities and issues that contributed to that suffering in the first place. No, this is a radical type of prayer, a contemplative one that affects both the individual and the collective because it pushes against the boundaries of our imaginations and expands them. It can change consciousness.
In the case of LCWR, the members believed (and believe) that surrendering their impasse to contemplative prayer would allow “new solutions, new visions of peace and equality” to “emerge in our world.” To be clear, they had much to lose—being questioned about their interpretation of, and obedience to, church teachings was no small accusation on the part of the CDF. Sisters worried that their entire way of life was being held suspect by the church to which they had given their lives. It would have been understandable for them to fight the investigation by launching a counterattack on the CDF, highlighting its problematic lack of transparency when it first investigated the sisters, and the USCCB’s disrespect in publishing the mandate online before the LCWR leadership had had an opportunity to receive it themselves. But the sisters did not follow this course of action. Instead, they maintained a public silence while they met privately together to pray and discern how to best move forward. Although some might interpret this silence as a form of gendered submission—women remaining silent in the face of being oppressed by powerful men in a patriarchal structure—it can also be read in light of what this initial silence enabled the sisters to accomplish once they did speak. This is the fundamental difference between a holy and unholy silence: a holy silence enables one to ground oneself in God so as to find the strength to speak out against injustice, while an unholy silence succumbs to, and perpetuates, the injustice by refusing to question it. As with most things, holy or unholy silence can be known by the fruits they produce. In the case of LCWR, the sisters’ turn to contemplative prayer produced an unexpected fruit: a model for how seemingly opposed groups in the church might engage one another in ways that do not diminish the integrity of each group.
This was particularly important given that the LCWR’s experience of being investigated by the CDF was a collective dark night experience not only for LCWR, but also for people who see in LCWR a vision of Catholic identity that stands with those most marginalized not only by society, but also by the church itself: namely, women, LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities (which of course can overlap with each other). In her 2012 analysis of the ecclesiological implications of both the apostolic visitation of US women religious and the (ongoing at that time) doctrinal investigation of the LCWR, Colleen Mary Mallon, OP, draws on FitzGerald’s work as she writes, “Women religious need to know and claim this dark night as an ecclesial dark night.”Footnote 35 For Mallon, it is imperative that this “ecclesial dark night” function as a path toward “a reclaiming of a truly inclusive ecclesiology and a deepened commitment to sustain a dialogical stance in the face of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and even betrayal.”Footnote 36 She argues that the doctrinal investigation of LCWR cannot be read simplistically as yet another moment where “magisterial authority is painted in broad strokes as a monolithic, out-of-touch, power-jealous episcopacy that attempts to reign in intelligent, compassionate, and prophetic believers.”Footnote 37 Yet she also argues, “Strategies that cut off dialogue cannot claim to be prophetic. If we [women religious] are truly the midwives of a new form of graced existence, we must be helping to birth a new consciousness as ecclesial persons.”Footnote 38 Indeed, as LCWR then-president Florence Deacon, OSF, also noted in her 2013 address to the annual LCWR assembly:
Our situation reflects larger questions and concerns such as the ongoing implementation of the Second Vatican Council; the ecclesial roles of women religious and of the laity, especially women; understandings of authority, faithful dissent, and obedience; and the need for spaces where honest, probing questions about faith and belief can be raised and discussed.Footnote 39
Official church teachings like the refusal to ordain women to the priesthood and the idea that engaging in same-sex sexual relations is “objectively sinful” have left many Catholics looking for an interpretation of their tradition that allows them to be a part of it.Footnote 40 Significantly, this is not an embrace of relativity where anything and everything is acceptable, but a genuine questioning and discerning of what teachings are fundamental to Catholic tradition and what are vestiges of a particular time and place.Footnote 41 It is an exercise in being “ecclesial persons.” Many Catholics in the United States—and around the world—see in LCWR’s ministries and public statements a vision of the church that fosters an adult faith informed by the complex, lived realities of people’s lives in an ever-changing world. Perhaps this is mostly because LCWR speakers and publications have often highlighted the prophetic dimension of the baptismal call—a recognition that the way things are, including some church teachings, may be more reflective of human prejudice than God’s love.
Because such an understanding of prophecy opens the space for dialogue—including dialogue about what church teachings may or may not be entirely authoritative—it is no wonder that the CDF was particularly concerned about this concept. Indeed, the mandate was critical of how some LCWR “speakers claim that dissent from the doctrine of the Church is justified as an exercise of the prophetic office.”Footnote 42 Troubling for the CDF is that this “‘prophecy,’ as a methodological principle, is here directed at the Magisterium and the Church’s pastors whereas [according to the CDF] true prophecy is a grace which accompanies the exercise of the responsibilities of the Christian life and ministries within the Church, regulated and verified by the Church’s faith and teaching office.”Footnote 43 The CDF continues: “Some of the addresses at LCWR-sponsored events perpetuate a distorted ecclesiological vision, and have scant regard for the role of the Magisterium as the guarantor of the authentic interpretation of the Church’s faith.”Footnote 44 In addition to its critique of how dissent and prophecy are understood in LCWR-sponsored events and addresses, “the CDF [also] notes the absence of initiatives by the LCWR aimed at promoting the reception of the Church’s teaching, especially on difficult issues such as Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and Church teaching about homosexuality.”Footnote 45 Interestingly, the CDF refers to the ban on women’s ordination and same-sex relations as “difficult issues,” but one wonders if the CDF sees them as “difficult” because of the pain they cause in the lives of many Catholics or if it sees them as “difficult” because to support these church teachings means going against what many US Catholics already believe.Footnote 46
The CDF’s critique of the LCWR’s interpretation of prophecy returns to a fundamental question in this article: namely, can the impasse between US Catholic feminist theologies, biblical studies, and ethics and the Curia be bridged? “Some of the addresses at LCWR-sponsored events”Footnote 47 that the CDF critiques were given by US Catholic feminist theologians, biblical scholars, and ethicists whose scholarship names sexism a sin, questions the exclusion of women from ordained ministry, and challenges the church’s theory of gender complementarity that perpetuates both.Footnote 48 Much like the impasse between Catholic feminist theologies and the Curia, the impasse between LCWR and the CDF seems fundamentally connected to differing interpretations of authority, gender, and sexuality. Per the CDF, the LCWR and its members did not do enough to counter Catholics who call for women’s ordination and the affirmation of same-sex relationships. Although the CDF frames this “silence” and “inaction” as an error on the part of the LCWR, one might wonder how the sisters’ ministerial experiences of working with people, accompanying them, and seeing the suffering caused by these teachings informs their purported silence. One wonders if their silence is a result of their listening to “the signs of the times”Footnote 49 that may have led them to question whether such teachings serve all members of the Body of Christ—the Christ who “entered this world to give witness to the truth, to rescue and not to sit in judgment, to serve and not to be served.”Footnote 50 In other words, could the LCWR’s silence regarding women’s ordination and same-sex relations be a reflection of their attempt to live out the call of the Second Vatican Council to attend to “the joys and hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the [people] of this age”?Footnote 51
On the other hand, the CDF’s primary role is “to promote and defend the doctrine of the faith and its traditions in all of the Catholic world.”Footnote 52 One could argue that the CDF’s critique of LCWR was simply a function of its office, defending “the doctrine of the faith” as it currently stood at that moment regardless of the ways contemporary theologians might be reinterpreting it.Footnote 53 Yet, from the perspective of Catholic feminist and other liberation theologies, all theologies—and the doctrines they inform—are contextual; they arise from particular sociocultural contexts and are thus marked by them. This also means that they can change as they are reinterpreted. The Catholic feminist theologians, biblical scholars, and ethicists who addressed the LCWR at assemblies were often reinterpreting theologies and doctrines in light of the “signs of the times.”Footnote 54 Indeed, attending to the contexuality of theologies and doctrines is perhaps one of the most striking differences between Catholic feminist theologies, biblical studies, and ethics and the CDF and speaks to the differences between their respective roles and authority.
As Richard R. Gaillardetz writes, “The ministry of theologians shares with the ministry of the bishops a common commitment to the Word of God, but the principal responsibility of the bishops is to safeguard the integrity of the apostolic faith.”Footnote 55 He continues, “The work of the theological community is, by its nature, more tentative and experimental than that of the bishops. It is oriented toward deepening the church’s apprehension and assimilation of that faith.”Footnote 56 Theologians—like those who gave addresses at LCWR assemblies—are often trying to bring church teachings and traditions into conversation with contemporary questions. Some of these contemporary questions have to do with gender and sexuality and how they are understood by the church and how they function in the church. And this can mean asking difficult questions of the church such as: Is the exclusion of women from the priesthood inherently sexist? Is the referral to same-sex relations as “objectively sinful” damaging to members of LGBTQIA+ communities? Furthermore, though LCWR addresses offered insights from current Catholic feminist theological, biblical, and ethical studies, they did not mandate that all members of the LCWR (and their respective religious congregations) had to accept them. As Gaillardetz notes, “Frequently, when a theologian publishes a work, the assumption is not that she is offering the final word on a topic but that she is offering an approach or insight to the theological community for its assessment.”Footnote 57 LCWR addresses offered ideas to be contemplated, not dogmas to be definitively accepted, aligning with the LCWR’s existing ethos of careful discernment and practice of contemplative dialogue.
The CDF’s approach was, in many ways, the opposite. It saw in LCWR addresses challenges not only to current doctrines regarding women’s ordination and same-sex relations, but also, and perhaps more troubling, challenges to magisterial authority. It then exercised this very magisterial authority to launch a doctrinal investigation into the LCWR, one that threatened the LCWR’s official standing in the Catholic Church. It was a somewhat ironic way of pushing against feminist theological critiques of church power dynamics because it publicly highlighted those dynamics: ordained men wielding ecclesial power over women who could never have it precisely because they are banned from ordination by those very men. Importantly, this is not to criticize or dismiss the individual clerics who undertook the investigation, but to show how ecclesial structures perpetuate sexist power dynamics. The CDF was “defending the doctrine of the faith and its traditions” in the face of what it perceived as a threat to church teachings, but in doing so it also signaled an unwillingness to listen to the questions emerging from the everyday struggles of the people of God, “especially on difficult issues.”Footnote 58 Given these tensions between the LCWR and the CDF regarding authority, gender, and sexuality, it is all the more remarkable that the doctrinal investigation was able to conclude in mutually positive ways. How did this happen?
In addition to the contemplative processes engaged by LCWR leadership, it was also, I argue, the change in church leadership that contributed to this outcome. The investigation began during the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, but it concluded during the pontificate of Pope Francis. As James F. Keenan, SJ, notes, “The pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI were known for instructing and demanding assent to their teachings on matters regarding beginning-of-life and end-of-life issues as well as on matters of sexuality.”Footnote 59 Whereas Pope Francis, Keenan argues, “[spent] far less time than his predecessors in critiquing culture and in proposing strategies for resistance.”Footnote 60 Instead, Francis “[seemed] less interested in ‘othering’ culture; rather than resisting, he [sought] to promote encounters.”Footnote 61 Indeed, one of the main characteristics of Francis’s papacy was his understanding of leadership that emphasized listening. Such an emphasis on listening undoubtedly led to his Synod on Synodality: Communion, Participation, Mission 2021–2024.Footnote 62 This emphasis on listening—and modeling of it—likely also enabled the dialogue between the LCWR and the CDF to go well because Francis offered a different vision of ecclesial authority, one that is open to being challenged and changed. In reflecting on what she refers to as the “ecclesial ethics” of Francis’s papacy, Elyse J. Raby argues “Mercy [was] the touchstone and motto of Bergoglio/Francis’s episcopacy.”Footnote 63 She continues:
As an ecclesial virtue, mercy resists abstract dogmatism and rigid legalism, and it embraces humility, discernment, and pastoral sensitivity. It is a “style” of being Church—an attitude or disposition of listening, solidarity, and accompaniment. It fosters a “culture of encounter” rather than a culture of condemnation.Footnote 64
Significantly, in relation to church teachings regarding gender and sexuality—the issues highlighted by the CDF in its doctrinal investigation of LCWR—Francis did not officially depart from the teachings of his pontifical predecessors.Footnote 65 But, as Megan K. McCabe writes, “Francis [prioritized] the encounter with persons over enforcing a strict orthodoxy on the topic of gender.”Footnote 66 Although he issued “warnings against [what he termed] gender ideology,” he also publicly recounted “meeting with a Spanish trans man and his wife, whom he welcomed after receiving a letter” thus “[making] clear that the primary goal is to accompany rather than condemn people.”Footnote 67 Francis’s modeling of a “style of being Church” that emphasizes listening, mercy, and accompaniment, especially of those most marginalized in society, undoubtedly impacted the outcome of the CDF’s doctrinal investigation into the LCWR because he opened a space for other members of the Curia to do the same and thus be opened to the possibility of change. Listening, especially in the midst of profound difference, is hard work because it is the work of change. It offers the possibility of transformation.
Contemplative dialogue is fundamentally about opening ourselves to the possibility of being transformed. LCWR members have been practicing this style of leadership for decades. When faced with the doctrinal investigation by the CDF, they turned to their contemplative processes, trusting that a radical openness to God and one another would sustain them through this dark night experience. Importantly, this does not mean that the experience was not painful and disorienting. As FitzGerald reminds us about dark nights, “Death is involved here—a dying in order to see how to be and to act on behalf of God in the world.”Footnote 68 LCWR members were not guaranteed that their organization would survive this experience; it could be torn apart and radically restructured in a way that would threaten its integrity. Still, they chose to engage in the contemplative practices that had sustained them, having “learned a lot over the years about staying with ambiguity, listening long and attentively, discovering a way forward together.”Footnote 69
Such ambiguity is a hallmark of the risks associated with impasses—we are not sure where we will land or if we will make it through. And if we do make it through the impasse, we are changed in the process, thus becoming different from who we were before the impasse. Impasses are often experiences of suffering. Although feminist and womanist theologians have rightly critiqued the problematics of redemptive suffering, the reality of suffering and the desire to understand it remain for many people.Footnote 70 In her reflections on FitzGerald’s engagement of John of the Cross, Mary Catherine Hilkert, OP, notes that in some cases “our participation in the mystery of the cross is a more direct share in what those who have experienced it have called an ‘unwanted wisdom.’”Footnote 71 She continues, “These witnesses of faith testify from their experience that it is possible for wisdom and compassion to be born from experiences that in themselves cannot be attributed to God’s will. In each case there is an experience of impasse, but the Spirit may be at work in quite distinct calls to transformation.”Footnote 72 In many ways, the LCWR’s experience of being investigated by the CDF yielded unwanted wisdom: the knowledge that organizational structures—whether ecclesial or secular—are always precarious and that in the end, we are fully and utterly dependent on God who paradoxically is most often revealed to us in the midst of human precarity. Ambiguity indeed.
The unwanted wisdom that can come from the LCWR’s contemplative practice of “staying with ambiguity” has deep resonances with the work of Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, particularly one of her last writings, “now let us shift … the path of conocimiento … inner work, public acts.” In the next and final part of this article, I trace three major resonances between LCWR’s processes of contemplative dialogue and Anzaldúa’s “path of conocimiento” arguing that taken together they can model for us what it means to enter into impasse and emerge with a new way of being in the world that is capable of transforming suffering.
Contemplative Dialogue and the Path of Conocimiento
Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa is most famous for her theory of borderlands or mestiza consciousness as theorized in her 1987 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.Footnote 73 As I have previously written, in Anzaldúan thought “the term ‘borderlands’ refers to the national border between the United States and Mexico as well as to the tension of living between seemingly contradictory markers of self.”Footnote 74 Anzaldúa refers to this borderlands as “‘una herida abierta’ (an open wound), recognizing the pain inherent to living with conflicting markers of self but also pointing to the possibilities for transformation that can stem from ‘[living] sin fronteras’ (without borders) and thus ‘[being] a crossroads’ between seemingly disparate worlds.”Footnote 75 Although Anzaldúa was not a theologian, per se, I find in Anzaldúa’s theories of self and suffering, her attention to spirituality and transformation, and her hope for a more just and inclusive world important insights for Catholic feminist decolonial thinking.Footnote 76 Significantly, Anzaldúa was critical of organized religion, especially the Catholicism in which she was raised. Catholicism had been a source of profound suffering for her: because of a rare hormonal imbalance she began menstruating at three months of age, a situation that her mother interpreted as divine punishment for having conceived Anzaldúa prior to marriage. As Anzaldúa grew older and became aware of her sexual attraction to women, there seemed to be no place for her as a queer Chicana woman in a religion that showed little welcome to members of the LGBTQIA+ community and was often used to justify heterosexist, patriarchal ideas of familia in Latine communities.Footnote 77 For Anzaldúa, Catholicism—and its interpretations—were sources of suffering that led to her own dark nights of the soul.
For the purposes of this article, I want to focus on one of her later writings, “now let us shift … the path of conocimiento … inner work, public acts,” highlighting three aspects of the path of conocimiento that I think resonate with the contemplative processes engaged by the LCWR: (1) they both aim to move through impasse by emphasizing a need to listen deeply to oneself, one another, and the divine; (2) they both push against dualistic ways of thinking and being in the world; (3) they both share a radical (though not naïve) hope that transformation is possible precisely because they are willing to sit with ambiguity.
In her theorization of “the path of conocimiento,” Anzaldúa draws on her earlier works’ insistence that “dualistic thinking” is the root of violence and continues her search for nondualistic epistemologies.Footnote 78 She shares this search with “you,” inviting a reader to know (conocer) this other, nondualistic way of knowing by detailing the seven stages of conocimiento.Footnote 79 Many of these stages are initially conceptualized in Anzaldúa’s earlier writings; what is unique to “now let us shift” is that she explicitly puts them into relationship with one another by listing them as stages. Yet, these stages are not necessarily progressive. Anzaldúa writes, “All seven [stages] are present within each stage, and they occur concurrently, chronologically or not.”Footnote 80 Because each stage can be found within each other, in this article I am not going to give a detailed examination of each stage. Instead, I am tracing three resonances between the path of conocimiento as a whole and the LCWR’s contemplative processes, looking specifically at how they understand and process impasse, push toward nondualistic thinking, and offer hope that transformation is possible.
Anzaldúa’s initial descriptions of the path of conocimiento echo FitzGerald’s reflections on impasse and the contemporary moment as a collective dark night. Anzaldúa writes:
At the crack of change between millennia, you and the rest of humanity are undergoing profound transformations and shifts in perspective.… We are experiencing a personal, global identity crisis in a disintegrating social order that possesses little heart and functions to oppress people by organizing them in hierarchies of commerce and power—a collusion of government, transnational industry, business, and the military all linked by a pragmatic technology and science voracious for money and control. This system and its hierarchies impact people’s lives in concrete and devastating ways and justify a sliding scale of human worth used to keep humankind divided.… We are collectively conditioned not to know that every comfort of our lives is acquired with the blood of conquered, subjugated, enslaved, or exterminated people, an exploitation that continues today.Footnote 81
For Anzaldúa, it is coming up against this major individual and collective impasse—the individual and collective are always in relation to each other in Anzaldúan thought—that pushes us to “stand at a major threshold in the extension of consciousness.”Footnote 82 But standing on the edge is terrifying and painful, especially when we feel that we have been pushed to the edge by experiences that we cannot control. Think here of the LCWR leaders learning about the doctrinal investigation at the same time as everyone else in the world. Such an experience of arrebato, of being “snatched” out of one’s usual way of being in the world “turns your world upside down and cracks the walls of your reality, resulting in a great sense of loss, grief, and emptiness, leaving behind dreams, hopes, and goals. You are no longer who you used to be. As you move from past presuppositions and frames of reference, letting go of former positions, you feel like an orphan, abandoned by all that’s familiar.”Footnote 83 Or as FitzGerald also describes: “At the deepest levels of impasse, one sees the support systems on which one has depended pulled out from under one and asks if anything, if anyone, is trustworthy.”Footnote 84 At an impasse, one is no longer able to make sense of the world using the categories through which one used to create meaning. The temptation is to give up, fall into what Anzaldúa refers to as the Coatlicue state, a state of desconocimiento. Named after the Aztec earth goddess known for her powers of birth and destruction, the state of desconocimiento is marked by a “plummet into depression and unremitting sorrow.”Footnote 85 Like the danger of the dark night, the danger of desconocimiento is that one can get stuck there rather than coming to see that “this detour is part of the path” of conocimiento.Footnote 86
The movement from desconocimiento to conocimiento, the movement through impasse, requires one to “sit quietly and meditate, trance into an altered state of consciousness, temporarily suspending your usual frames of reference and beliefs.”Footnote 87 It means learning to “stay with ambiguity.” As you meditate, as you stay with ambiguity, you begin to engage in critical self-reflection. “Seeing through these cracks [in your conception of self, in your worldview] makes you uncomfortable because it reveals aspects of yourself (shadow-beasts) you don’t want to own.”Footnote 88 Yet, as Anzaldúa notes, “A paradox [emerges]: the knowledge that exposes your fears can also remove them.”Footnote 89 During the doctrinal investigation, LCWR leaders had to listen to critiques of their organization. They had to ask hard questions regarding their perceived infidelity to Catholic tradition and magisterial authority. As Farrell notes, “As women religious, our love for the church, though questioned by some, was deep and undeniable for us … to feel apart from or at odds with the institutional church was painful and unacceptable.”Footnote 90 But this questioning also opened a space to ask larger questions, such as: Can church teachings ever be completely separate from the sociocultural contexts from which they emerge? How does one discern what is intrinsic to the tradition and what might be subject to human bias? Where are the contemporary needs of the people of God calling the church to go? Although contemplative processes of communal listening and discernment led LCWR leaders to sit with these questions and to voice them to CDF investigators, church leaders also had to open themselves to these questions. Initially, this meant that “the process stalemated in an impasse for which there was no evident way forward. It was a moment of great disillusionment for the LCWR presidents and executive director who had been so intensely engaged in the dialogue.”Footnote 91 Then, something shifted. As I argued earlier in this article, Pope Francis’s style of leadership with an emphasis on listening significantly contributed to the eventual positive outcome of the CDF’s doctrinal investigation of the LCWR. Although this does not mean that Pope Francis radically changed official church teachings on issues such as women’s ordination or same-sex unions, his modeling of listening to others—especially those with whom one disagrees—further opened the space for continuing dialogue in an ever-increasingly polarized church and world.
The opening-up of space for dialogue, especially dialogue between seemingly opposed entities, speaks to the second resonance between Anzaldúa’s path of conocimiento and the LCWR’s contemplative processes: the push against dualistic ways of thinking and being in the world. Anzaldúa writes:
You turn the established narrative on its head, seeing through, subverting, and resisting its assumptions. Again, it’s not enough to denounce the culture’s old account—you must provide new narratives embodying alternative potentials. You’re sure of one thing: the consciousness that’s created our social ills (dualistic and misogynist) cannot solve them—we need a more expansive conocimiento. The new stories must partially come from outside the system of ruling powers.Footnote 92
Although Anzaldúa and LCWR leaders use different language, they both point toward the necessity of pushing against dualistic thinking. For Anzaldúa, “dualistic thinking” means binary or dichotomous thinking that privileges one identity or aspect of identity over another. It negates the ways in which we—nos—are always in relation to one another—otros.Footnote 93 For her, “we” are nos/otros: we are inextricably connected to one another. In the case of LCWR leaders, they were careful not to frame their impasse as an “us”/LCWR versus “them”/Vatican dichotomy. As LCWR leaders wrote in their 2015 public statement after the mandate concluded: “Admittedly, entering into a commitment to regular and consistent dialogue about core matters that have the potential to divide us can be arduous, demanding work, but work that is ultimately transformative. However challenging these efforts are, in a world marked by polarities and intolerance of difference, perhaps no work is more important.”Footnote 94 For both Anzaldúa and LCWR, the push against dualistic thinking is a step toward transforming the world into a more just and loving place.
The hope that the world can be transformed into a more just and loving place is the third resonance I see between Anzaldúa’s path of conocimiento and the LCWR’s processes of contemplative dialogue. At the end of the path of conocimiento:
You commence the arduous task of rebuilding yourself, composing a story that more accurately expresses your new identity. You seek out allies and, together, begin building spiritual/political communities that struggle for personal growth and social justice. By compartiendo historias, ideas, las nepantleras forge bonds across race, gender, and other lines, thus creating a new tribalism.Footnote 95
Anzaldúa believes that those who have learned to question dualistic constructions of self and world, those who have learned how to live between worlds—las nepantleras—are able to come together to create a “new tribalism” where we “define who we are by what we include.”Footnote 96 One might argue that this is her eschatological vision of sorts—a world where people acknowledge their differences as strengths and come together to work toward justice. It is resonant with the LCWR’s concluding statement at the end of the mandate, committing “to regular and consistent dialogue about core matters that have the potential to divide us” and its belief that such work “is ultimately transformative.” Admittedly, both can initially sound like a naïve hope, especially when we consider the multiplicity of intersecting injustices that we face in this world.Footnote 97 But I think there is a radicality to the hope shared by Anzaldúa and LCWR because it is a hope that comes only through walking the path of conocimiento, stumbling through the dark night, with their detours into desconocimiento and despair. It is the hope that comes from “unwanted wisdom.” This hope is radical because it is ambiguous; it knows that justice and transformation are not guaranteed, but it nevertheless dares to push toward them. In doing so, it pushes us, too.
Conclusions
In this article, I have argued that there is an impasse between US Catholic feminist theologies, biblical studies, and ethics and the Roman Catholic Curia. Searching for a way to engage this impasse, I turned to the LCWR’s use of contemplative processes during their investigation by the CDF as a model for how one might engage impasse. These processes are connected to the work of Constance FitzGerald and her engagement of “dark night” in John of the Cross. Believing that we can learn from those who have left Catholicism because it has served as a source of suffering in their lives, I turned to the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and traced three resonances between the LCWR’s contemplative processes and her path of conocimiento. I argue that they both aim to move through impasse by: (1) emphasizing a need to listen deeply to oneself, each other, and the divine; (2) pushing against dualistic ways of thinking and being in the world; and (3) sharing a radical hope that transformation is possible precisely because they are willing to sit with ambiguity. Together they can serve as powerful resources for healing the divide between Catholic feminist theologies and the Curia and, in so doing, offer hope to our often polarized and suffering world.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
