Religious Liberty, Reproduction, and Women’s Voices

Maura Casey, writing in the Hartford Courant (and reprinted in the Beacon today) is encouraging Catholic women to raise their voices and

“…acknowledge the vast disconnect between Catholic teaching and the reality of our lives, and we need to do it now. We need to support the availability of birth control in letters to the editor. We need to write to the White House and Congress. And, we need to say, with respect, ‘I disagree, Father. I use birth control, and I’ve told my children to use it, too.’ Otherwise, the priests, bishops, Republican presidential candidates and scores of male commentators will get away with the pretense that they are speaking for us.”

Maura Casey, like me, is in her 50s.  Unlike me, and unlike the priests, bishops and male commentators denouncing birth control ‘in the name of religious liberty’ Maura Casey is a woman and a mother. 

That makes her, in concert with millions of other women, the real “authorities on the importance of birth control to our health and freedom.”  She is one of the 98 percent of Catholic women who report using birth control and she tells us that many of those women

“would consider themselves irresponsible mothers if they did not tell their children to ignore the church’s teaching on birth control—particularly when using birth control makes abortions are less likely.”

As I read this I was reminded of the many powerful Catholic women who have touched my life.  My cousins, schoolmates, and friends have each taught me much about sacrifice and selflessness and love.  While not without struggle, most have remained part of a church that still cannot find it in its heart to reject the notion that preaching the gospel (when necessary using words) is not a gendered activity. 

My maternal grandmother lived a life of joyful and laughter-filled service, exemplifying a love that puts the needs of others first.  My own mother even more so, in that saintly fashion of a person living a life so fully and lovingly engaged in the real world that she is the most important person in the life of everyone who knows her.  Even when I was my most rebelliously unkind…to her…her love never wavered.  I have never seen a more powerful voice for living as Jesus calls us to live.

My eighth grade nun has spent her life teaching and serving the deaf community. Two very close friends have spent years teaching Sunday school in the basement. Yet all these contributions and sacrifices remain largely marginalized, certainly in terms of the prerogatives of leadership to say what being Christian means.  Their experiences are still to be interpreted by a hostile and unrepentant hierarchy that has a very poor track record of living the gospel itself. 

Thanks Maura Casey.  I have never met you, but it feels like I have.  Most of what is good and meaningful about my life would not have been possible without a small army of women like you, and by no means just Catholic women, who have nurtured and taught, ministered and mentored, countless women and men like me.  I applaud your commentary today and I believe that the church and our communities will be stronger and more loving to the degree that we all “hear from the great, as yet untapped voices of sanity” whom you are calling to selfless service once again.