Anne E. Patrick was, as her friend and ethics colleague Charles E. Curran wrote in his foreword to her book, “a significant figure in Catholic moral theology” (vii). In this capstone volume, she focuses on conscience, church, and social change during the turbulent times after Vatican II and in the awakening to women's equality in the church and the world. She draws on literature, philosophy, the social sciences, and shared human experience to illuminate moral matters and create useful theology.
Her decades of teaching undergraduates show in this clearly and carefully written text. Her topics are chosen and arranged thoughtfully, and the range of her ethical concerns is clear. Oh that she had lived longer to tackle some of the present-day theo-political dilemmas such as immigration policy and runaway greed.
Patrick offers five synthetic sections in this volume. She begins with “History in the Making,” laying the feminist foundations that can lead to global justice. In the second section, “Insights from Imaginative Literature,” she pulls from her deep reading of great writing to address questions of moral theology, missiology, and feminism. She focuses the third section, “Theological and Ethical Concerns,” on feminist theology. She weaves the ethics of spirituality, updated understandings of vocation, and some hard questions about consecrated life into a strong case for theological change in a feminist direction.
In section four, “The Status of Women,” she includes both the conservative case for women's ordination and a hopeful, if so far unrealized, suggestion that Pope Francis’ reticence on the ordination of women may be a prelude to real change. Finally, in the fifth section, “Postlude,” she reflects on the unfinished nature of everything and concludes with a homily. It is a fitting coda for a woman of deep faith who loved community and believed in spiritual power.
Professor Patrick models generosity in the ethical quest. For example, she explores “the symbolism of the abortion debate” to illuminate how Catholics have been fighting “what seems to be the wrong battle.” But after looking at theological doctrines of creation, providence, and salvation she is able to understand why “generous and devout believers can see the issues as differently as they do” (155). That is a significant contribution to a thorny debate where polarized positions harden irreconcilably.
As a Catholic nun, Anne E. Patrick saw up close and personal the discrimination against women in that faith community. Her classic essay, “A Conservative Case for the Ordination of Women,” published in 1975, is a creative response. She juxtaposes the fact that many Catholic women minister with the reality that they are not ordained so they are prohibited from presiding validly and licitly at the Eucharist and administering other sacraments. Her early position, though it evolved to a more fulsome embrace of women's priestly ministry in later writings, was that this sacramental aspect so central to Catholicism was in jeopardy as long as women were kept from being ordained. Rather than arguing the matter of equal rights, she focused on equal rites. The institutional church at its peril has ignored her sage insights. Many Catholic women have gone on to ordained ministry in other traditions or in noncanonical versions of Catholicism. Meanwhile, mass attendance in official parishes and other metrics of institutional Catholic participation show a precipitous drop, proving her prescient.
Professor Patrick included an insightful overview chapter in this collection on the early contours of feminist theology. The content and bibliography of that chapter form a helpful springboard for students and scholars who seek to understand the context of her thinking. This kind of foundational work is hardly glitzy, but it is the stuff of which new thinking is made.
Anne Patrick believed in the wisdom of everyday life. She included her 2009 Honors Convocation address at Carleton College in which she described a favorite painting of a half-done Navajo weaving. To her, it conveyed the power of the unfinished, the imperfect, the partial. She advised students to “get comfortable with our unique creative process and celebrate the beauty in what is not quite here but on its way-into-being” (292).
She concluded the book with a deeply personal piece, a homily she offered at a healing service at Carleton in 2002 following her diagnosis with a rare form of breast cancer. She said, “This is an occasion for me to draw strength for whatever lies ahead, and to reflect theologically on a problem that occupies us all, namely the mystery of suffering” (298). She did that, and a lot of other potent theological work, for the more than fourteen years that followed until her death in 2016.
Like the Navajo illustration on the cover, Anne E. Patrick crafted this marvelous collection for students, scholars, and activists alike. Readers are implicitly invited to pick up the threads of her “unfinished” work and weave on.
