University Times

In 1947, Ed Willock wrote for a leading lay Catholic magazine: "You cannot say that woman is the equal of man anymore than you can say an apple is the equal of man…. The difference between the sexes is not only physical but psychological, and it is because of these differences and not because of any ecclesiastical decree that man is the normal head of the family.

"The outstanding male tendency is to be objective," Willock continued. "The fields of theology, philosophy, mathematics and academic law have been and always will be the fields of the man. It is neither accident nor conspiracy that women have always been homemakers, nor is it male arrogance to say that that is their proper place."

In this essay on gender roles published in Integrity magazine, Willock was spelling out the accepted Catholic position in post-World War II America, one of 120 revealing documents in a new volume of primary sources titled "Gender Identities in American Catholicism" (Orbis Books, 2001).

Volume 5 of a 9-volume documentary history series on American Catholic issues, this compilation of essays, correspondence and reports covers 200 years of archival material.

"Gender Identities" focuses on the ever-changing social construction of masculinity and femininity (as opposed to the biological term "sex") and the social relations between Catholic men and women, including the rules, ideologies and institutions that define, regulate and enforce what it means to be a man or a woman.

Paula Kane, Marous Professor of Catholic Studies at Pitt, collaborated in compiling and editing the documents with James Kenneally, professor emeritus of history at Stonehill College, Massachusetts, and Karen Kennelly, superior general of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet.

The two-and-a-half-year project produced some curiosities, some unexpected tussles with the publisher and some discouraging philosophical pronouncements, such as Willock's, Kane said.

"I think the most discouraging documents were some of those from the 1940s and 50s where men are giving advice," Kane said. "There's an air of such certitude that these Catholic men put out there about what was a male role, what was a female role and how the two should not get mixed up."

Kane pointed out, however, that Catholics were right in step with the majority of post-World War II America in embracing Willock's version of male and female roles.

"Attitudes about sex and sexual behavior and sexual identity have changed throughout the centuries and they always reflect the culture in which the religion is installed," Kane said. "In our time, we're growing more comfortable with men and women taking on roles traditionally of the opposite sex's domain, but we're also experiencing a certain amount of gender confusion in our identities, a certain amount of androgyny, of questioning what it is to be masculine or feminine, and I think that's a good thing. It's a revolution that's still underway.

"It was fun for us to see opinions changing from the 18th century to the present, but it was important to show how difficult it has been to introduce change, and how people who have been radical have come under such heavy critique from the Catholic hierarchy."

Kane said that not one document among the hundreds the editors perused was classified under "gender." "When we were gathering material from archives around the country, which varied from well-organized to papers tossed in a shoebox, we had to discern what about a town or a religious order or a region of the country would have been about gender: If Mother Jones came here and riled up the minors and was roundly lambasted by the press for being a woman speaking publicly, we had to know that in advance in order to focus our research."

The publishing process was not a smooth one, Kane maintained. The editors met with resistance from Orbis Books when they decided to publish excerpts from a 1982 report on Catholic gays and lesbians in San Francisco. The diocese's archbishop at that time, John R. Quinn, had published a pastoral letter in response to the report, which Orbis insisted be included in the book.

"We resisted that," Kane said, "because we felt the archbishop represents the kind of source that is readily available to Catholics, that of the hierarchy or official Church, and we represent voices that might not otherwise get into print. The compromise was we could have the report but we had to introduce the archbishop's official statement on homosexuality."

Kane said that the more contemporary the material, the stronger the objections the Orbis Books board registered.

"They wanted us to take out a lot of documents, which we refused to do. We kept saying, 'What is it you're fearing? We're historians not theologians, and people should be able to look at this material and see that the American Catholic Church was quite divisive in the late-20th and early-21st century, and there are a whole range of issues that got people riled up and those should be accessible.'"

But Orbis, a Catholic press headquartered in New York, evidently feared reprisals from the American Catholic hierarchy, Kane said, leading to a number of arguments. "I think you become very aware of the long arm of institutional power every time you study Catholicism, that people who get too far out of line do face severe consequences.

"Even in Pittsburgh, the bishop's solution to the recent revelations of sexual abuse is not to talk to priests about psychological counseling, it was to say, 'Well, we're getting rid of anybody who may have had a complaint leveled against them.' That's no way to operate. It's very strange," Kane said.

"And you know these moments remind you of a throwback to a much more feudal power structure. I would say the Church's power is tremendously diminished, but many of the leaders don't know how to deal with that new status quo and are still trying to operate by the old rules."

Kane said most of the documents in "Gender Identities" reveal the repressive nature of the male-dominated American Catholic Church. "For us it was important to present evidence that nuns were treated as second-class citizens, were paid far less than male counterparts, had to fight for every dollar they got from their local dioceses even to pay for their clothing, their firewood or their utilities, and that was important just as an issue of equity."

Still, she pointed out, there is considerable evidence among the documents that even within this patriarchal society, men and women did find creative ways to get around the rules or in fact to actually resist authority.

"Yes, there were rules and regulations to keep nuns in their place, mothers in their place, school girls in their place. And there were also confining rules for men: Every man inside a priestly order operates in a hierarchy of power as well. So there were humiliations along the way for both genders," Kane said.

"On the other hand, we found many examples of collaboration between men and women, the often very affectionate relationship between nuns and the parish priests who were confessors in their convent. The nuns were willing to tell the priests all their troubles, personal as well as spiritual, and clearly there was a lot of respect, even friendship. And when you consider that these were celibate groups, that was the only place where you could have a friendship with someone of the opposite sex. These documents I found to be the most heartening."

Kane said she and her editor colleagues hope that one outcome of "Gender Identities" will be to encourage students to use substantially underused Catholic archival resources.

"Twenty-year-old Catholics have no knowledge of the institutional apparatus, so they don't perceive the intuition as one thing or another, they're just apolitical. They don't recognize that they come upon things from a guilt-free perspective, unlike my generation and my parents before me."

That lack of historical perspective has paved the way for an American Catholic Church resurrecting its conservative past, Kane said.

"We're seeing that among a lot of young married Catholics: They're going back to church with their babies in their strollers, saying, 'Isn't this interesting: novenas, rosary devotions?' They're bringing back a raft of things that were never central to Catholic belief, but now they're making them central as a way to latch on to some identity.

"I feel discouraged that the whole tradition of social activism is being suppressed by the Vatican in its attempt to simply make a very conformist institution defined by very narrow standards. It frightens me that the wonderful liberalizing spirit of Vatican II has never been fully implemented and is now threatened to disappear by a generation that knows nothing about what Vatican II changed.

"The good part is that Catholics are more tolerant. The bad part is they don't know there is a whole history of intolerance that they should be aware of. I keep telling my students this: If the Catholic Church wants a leaner, meaner institution, that's exactly what it's going to get."

–Peter Hart