BOOK REVIEW

Good Catholic Girls - How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church by Angela Bonavoglia, Harper Collins (Regan Books), 2005

There's a particular kinetic energy among Catholic women - in itself, somewhat of a phenomenon. After all, many Catholics and non-Catholics have wondered for decades why women stay in one of the largest and oldest discriminating institutions on the planet. Angela Bonavoglia puts the question to rest in this invaluable recap of who stays, what they're doing and where they're taking the rest of us. When the company is this good, the work becomes compelling, empowering and, yes, healing. Good Catholic Girls is about the women who are moving toward full equality in the Roman Catholic Church. Bonavoglia has not written an academic treatise or a scholarly feminist argument. Better - she has added with clarity and conviction to the "good news" that is our Gospel.

Bonavoglia grew up in the 1950s/60s, uniformed, obeisant parochialism so familiar to baby boomers. Equally familiar, her path led to the itinerant mode of Catholics in exile - but not without a deep-rooted connection to the liturgy and the restorative grace of her faith. Her personal revolution grew out of despair in the institutional "demonization of sexuality …. I saw the Church as depriving women of authority not only in the public sphere, by forbidding women's ordination and access to the highest levels of sacramental and jurisdictional power but also in the private sphere, by usurping a woman's right to her own conscience and moral voice on matters sexual, marital, and maternal." Thus began Bonavoglia's journey, pretty much where so many others, including Christ's, began-amongst women. Indeed, she says, that is an elephant on the altar.

Bonavoglia's interviews vivify a sweeping panorama of women in the Church from Mary Magdalene to Sr. Joan Chittister and from Catherine of Siena to Elisabeth Johnson. Together with the likes of Edwina Gately, Frances Kissling, and Mary Ramerman - what we hear seems to rest and grow on the obscure and the obscured, the silenced and the banned until we recognize the bold stillness of a mountain revealed. Conferences and symposia, statements and resolutions, new organizations and old, the courageous, the dismissed and the excommunicated - all share the language and the hope of truth revealed.

One might expect a few angry outbursts among these women. Regardless the grist, anger is not a player in Good Catholic Girls - educated conviction is the driver. Some of the more blatant efforts to marginalize women have made the case against full equality in the Church something of a caricature - for lay people in general, but women in particular. Consider the liturgical calendar that gives such short shrift to female voices and, effectively, fuels the preposterous thinking that because we don't hear women's voices in our practice, there weren't any or, worse, they don't "count"; the shallow dismissal of women's ordination based, in part, on dissimilar genitalia; the befuddled response of the all-male hierarchy to open dialogue with all of those whom Vatican II called the "people of God"; and the curiously narrow understanding by Church "fathers" of vocations among the "living Body of Christ." Were misogyny intelligent, it might have done better than this.

In the end, like so many before them, the women mentioned, quoted and/or interviewed in this book are with us despite the Church of clericalism and secrecy, arrogance and power mongering. The Church of the 6th century's spin on Mary Magdalene was, centuries later, corrected by Biblical scholarship, restoring Mary to her rightful place in the forefront of Christian history; the 14th Century Catherine of Siena and 16th Century Teresa of Avila were finally "recognized" in 1970 as Doctors of the Church. Inevitability leaves a fascinating paper trail.

The whole question of women in the Church has become so fraught with wisdom and common sense that the current Pope found the very discussion of women's ordination to be a closed case. It seems that Church leadership has been so undone by the prospect of women priests, that the Vatican "expanded Canon Law so that Catholics who refused to accept certain Church teachings - including the Church's refusal to ordain women - could be excommunicated." The sex abuse crisis and its cover-up, as well as recent and current political events, underscore the extent to which this papal administration is prepared to go in keeping things just the way they are. And lay Catholics are demonstrating ever more forcefully the extent to which they are refusing to acquiesce.

Regardless the revolutionizing research of academics in feminist theology, the change to a fully inclusive Church will be the work not of scholars whose brilliance seems most at home in its own milieu but among the messengers who carry their words, like Angela Bonavoglia, and among the marginalized who find ways to live their vocations. That challenge exists for both women and men; it has found a rich variety of iterations in the lives of the women named and in the many organizations Bonavoglia notes, among them Voice of the Faithful, Call To Action, and the National Coalition of American Nuns.

The women we meet in Good Catholic Girls are not leaving the Church and yet they are not staying - they are changing the Church while their work moves and alters everything and everyone it passes. These good, Catholic girls embolden the vision of inclusivity and animate the very word "Christian." Bonavoglia deftly interprets the law of conscience articulated in the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: "For woman has in her heart a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of woman; according to it, she will be judged."

Dignity restored is what Good Catholic Girls is all about.

P.L.Thorp

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