Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "We Also Want Men--Including John Allen, Michael Sean Winters . . . --to Realise That There is a Problem with the Role of Women in the Church Today"

Writing in response to Dennis Coday's "Morning Briefing" column in National Catholic Reporter yesterday, which links to an op-ed statement by Elizabeth Tenety in the Washington Post about what Catholic women want, Sara_TMS_again says,

'New conversations' is indeed what many Catholic women want--that's a good article by a Catholic woman in the Washington Post. 

We also want men--including John Allen, Michael Sean Winters and many of the other men who write for the NCR--to realise that there is a problem with the role of women in the Church today, and to stop ignoring and belittling it in their writings. Women have advanced massively everywhere in the world since the 1980s--in education, in employment, in politics. But in the Church, their advance is blocked, and that looks weirder and weirder as the years go on, and hurts the Church more and more.

We also want men--including John Allen, Michael Sean Winters and many of the other men who write for the NCR--to realise that there is a problem with the role of women in the Church today, and to stop ignoring and belittling it in their writings: I wonder if those who run NCR can or will hear the point Sara is making here. 

Who, after all, gave John Allen and Michael Sean Winters that high perch from which they pontificate? Who keeps them in power?

What kind of people run NCR? What's their gender make-up? Their racial or ethnic background? Their socioeconomic status? The geographic regions of the country they represent? Their marital status and sexual orientation?

What kind of people establish and enforce NCR's censorship policies, which are far from transparent in the case of NCR comboxes? In their top governing structures of power, do our leading Catholic journals model something countercultural (something catholic and truly inclusive)? Or do they pretty much mirror the top governing structures of power of most other old-boys' networks throughout the business community, the journalistic community, etc., in the U.S. and elsewhere? Of old-boys networks that still allot primary power to heterosexual (or pretend-heterosexual) white males, while keeping everyone else at the second tiers of power, if they even include anyone else with the exception of token others?

The conversations to which these questions point are the kinds of necessary conversations, centering on fundamental honesty, that we absolutely have to have in the Catholic church, if we're ever to get anywhere down the road of real reform and real catholicity. Unfortunately, I don't see American Catholics really having those conversations at places like NCR, Commonweal, or America, etc.

Not so much.

It's altogether too easy to say that it's time for the movers and shakers of American Catholicism--those who control the conversation that makes its identity--to start listening to those they've helped shove to the margins, including women and gay and lesbian people. But that easy rhetoric means nothing unless those same movers and shakers take steps to open up their tightly controlled dialogic spaces and permit the voices of those they've treated as other to be heard on the same plane as the voices of the big boys (of both genders, in some cases) who have always dominated and continue to dominate the American Catholic conversation.

P.S. See this subsequent posting which provides a footnote to the preceding commentary.