Quote for Day: Mary Hunt on Most Important Takeaway of Vatican Attack on U.S. Nuns — "Women's Equality in the Church Is No Longer Negotiable"

Mary Hunt at Religion Dispatches in a post-mortem statement about the Vatican attack on American nuns:

It is not enough to stop injustice. It is necessary to change once and for all the conditions that give rise to it, in this case a church, even with an admittedly pleasant pontiff, that is structured for inequality and run exclusively by clerics who have restricted understandings of relationships among people 

First, women's equality in the church is no longer negotiable. Two insulting engagements with women religious are two too many. It is simply intolerable that women are not equal partners in decisions that affect our lives. Without in any way blaming LCWR, let me stipulate that it was not they who investigated the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; it was not the women who vetted the men's awardees (read: bishops) or had any input into choosing the speakers for their synods. Mutuality is a two-way street. Self-respecting women and women-respecting men will not tolerate the kyriarchal structure of Catholicism any longer. 

Coming to a new understanding of women as full human beings is the sine qua non of church change. Moreover,  the current pope’s recent reiteration of the virtues of gender complementarity showed that he is not tuned in to contemporary scholarship, both scientific and humanistic, on gender, its fluidity, and variety. No one can be certain how constructed our gender identities are, or what grounds them biologically. Being "created in the image of God" is a better bet.