Book 32: New Catholic Women: A Contemporary Challenge to Traditional Religious Authority by Mary Jo Weaver

I first discovered this book about a year ago when I explored the Loras College library. As a rule, I won't purchase a copy of a book that I haven't read, but this was a rare exception. After skimming it for around a half hour, I knew that I needed my own copy! This was my first time reading it.

What's so significant about this book is Weaver wrote about the development of Catholic feminism while it was happening; I haven't encountered any other books that did this. She compared Catholic feminist theologians to each other during their careers, as well as the ongoing impacts of the Goddess movement. I have a few books that treat this period in the mid-80's as history, but Weaver was an analyst of this movement in real time. 

My two main experiences while reading this book:
1) I know what happens after its publication, I know where the careers of these theologians went and I know that most of them are now dead. Weaver writes with a few vague predictions of the future, including the prediction that congregations of women religious will continue to decline but Catholic feminists will create new kinds of religious communities. I read New Catholic Women balancing between the knowledge of what happened next and the imagining of myself in Weaver's shoes.

2) New Catholic Women is as old as I am; I was already aware of most of the events, organizations, theologians, and books Weaver describes but I had to work hard to learn about this things on my own only within the past decade. Chicago was a major hub of Catholic feminists, and that's where I grew up. Nobody taught this to me, and my childhood parish acted as though none of them existed (reflecting on the hostility of the elderly nuns in that parish, I believe they knew about these Catholic feminists and resented them to the degree of keeping future generations as ignorant as possible). I so often feel like I'm reinventing the wheel because of the generational divide between those who created this movement and myself, and I can't help but wonder how differently things would've gone if I had been taught all this. 

And, as expected, it's very white. Weaver writes as a white person about white people with the expectation that the reader is white. This will be a recurring trend in my Catholic feminist books for the next decade.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1519869.New_Catholic_Women 

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