Real Radical Feminists Wanted

In Praise of Radical Feminists

American women religious and the call to service

Kevin McCardle | AUGUST 27, 2012 

http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=13548 

 

I n an interview with John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, Cardinal William Levada, the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, expresses the opinion that the Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious is “effusive in its praise” of American women religious. All Catholics should join Cardinal Levada in this effusion.
I was fortunate to be taught in elementary school by Franciscan Sisters and in high school by Benedictines, Sisters of St. Joseph, School Sisters of Notre Dame, and Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. My children have been taught by Sisters of St. Joseph and by Daughters of Mary and Joseph. I owe much to these women.
One point of contention in the Doctrinal Assessment, and one for which the L.C.W.R. receives a reprimand, is the prevalence of “radical feminist” themes in some programs sponsored by the L.C.W.R. An alternative view, however, is that it is exactly their radical feminist nature for which American Catholic women religious should be praised.
A radical is someone who maintains strong principles and acts on them. What makes Catholic women religious so radical? Nothing more than the fact that they gave up their former lives and followed Christ.

Called Forth

Reading from the charter or mission of a congregation gives a sense of the charism that calls those women forth. These statements are Christ-centered. Consider for example, the following mission statement taken from the Web site of the Daughters of Mary and Joseph:

We, the Daughters of Mary and Joseph, are an international community of vowed women religious. We are committed to deepening our relationship with Jesus Christ. This relationship manifests itself as an individual and corporate response to the needs of today's world.

Our mission is to be a compassionate, joyful presence which enables each person to recognize his/her value and dignity. We are dedicated to sharing the merciful love of God with all who experience brokenness and poverty in any form.

Observe that they are not just interested in doing good but in being “instruments of mercy in the hands of God.” They are explicit about this difference:

To be a D.M.J. in California is not about personal enhancement or individual fulfillment, but about mission. It is about "growing in all ways into Christ" (Eph. 4:16) so that the compassion of God might be more fully manifest—through our work and our presence.

Or consider the mission statement of the Sisters of St. Francis, the order to which Pat Farrell, O.S.F., the past president of L.C.W.R., belongs:

We, the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, choose to live the Gospel in the prophetic spirit of Francis of Assisi and our foundress Mother Francis Bachmann. With Jesus Christ as Brother, we live as sister with one another, with the entire human family, and with all creation. Calling ourselves and one another to continuous conversion of heart we commit ourselves to a life of contemplation, poverty, and humility.

Notice the radical nature of the call in both the D.M.J and O.S.F. mission statements and their clarity that it is a religious call, not one of personal fulfillment. It is a call to community, prayer and action. It is not a call to power and glory, but to service in the name of Christ and his church.
Let us now turn to the second aspect of the Doctrinal Assessment’s expressed concern: feminism. A feminist advocates rights for women equal to those for men. Feminism also provides a proactive approach to women’s place in society and church. Historically, women have been shut out from meaningful participation in the magisterium of the Catholic Church, much as until recently they were shut out of political and economic leadership in civil society. In the Catholic Church, women cannot be ordained to the priesthood nor to the diaconate. Feminist Catholic women religious therefore face a choice: leave the church or adapt. By and large, the religious communities in the United States have adapted. Some of these congregations were feminist before the term was even coined.
Janet Mock, a Sister of St. Joseph and the executive director of L.C.W.R., has also been in the media spotlight recently. The founding documents of her order exhort the sisters to do “all of which women are capable” to care for the “dear neighbor, without distinction.” (Their founding charter was also radical in that the sisters were not to live in cloister but in small apostolic communities; and they were not to wear habits, but to dress in the style of a widow of their station.)
The phrase “all of which women are capable” does not set arbitrary limits on service, does not acknowledge restricted abilities, does not set up a lesser comparison of women to men. “All of which women are capable” is a call to a sister’s full actualization of self in Christ. “All of which women are capable” is a positive feminist call to service. “Without distinction” treats the poor equally with the wealthy, the disenfranchised equally with royalty, the laity equally with the clergy, women equally with men. “Without distinction” is a democratic feminist ideal. The Sisters of St. Joseph have not wavered from this ideal in over 350 years.
Of what, then, are these religious women whose congregations are represented in L.C.W.R. capable? They have been and are C.E.O.s and board chairs of some of the country’s largest hospital systems. They have been and are presidents of universities, deans of colleges and principals of schools. They have founded and run service centers for the homeless, counseling and retreat centers, food pantries and thrift stores. They manage parishes without a resident priest.
Note that many of these roles were ones that were not open to women in their non-Catholic counterpart organizations at the time. It is small wonder, then, that American Catholic women religious have a feminist view that equates the roles of women and men.
By their very charism, professed Catholic women religious are both radical and feminist: radical in their response to Christ’s call; feminist in their carving out a role for themselves in the Catholic Church. For the L.CW.R. to deny the radical feminist nature of its existence, or worse yet, as the Doctrinal Assessment seems to demand, to renounce the radical feminist nature of its existence would be, I think, a dishonor to the hundreds of thousands of Catholic women religious who have served the U.S. church. It would also be a disservice to the Roman Catholic Church, its laity and its magisterium. For wherever the American Catholic Church presents an organized response to Christ’s call in Matthew 25: 35-40, there you will find member congregations of L.C.W.R. at the forefront. These are the exact roles that the Doctrinal Assessment “effusively” praises.
Let us all pray for a speedy resolution of the assessment of the L.C.W.R. so that the sisters can go back to the work to which Christ and their church have called them. Let us pray that these women who have committed their lives to the Lord, who trusted in Him, will see Him act, so that their justice will break forth like the light, their cause like the noon-day sun (Psalm 37).

Kevin McCardle is a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management in Los Angeles, Calif

source of graph from previous post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/28/republican-national-convention-the-one-graph-you-need-to-see-before-watching/

You want to see this graph

Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Let's get serious people.

PELL GRANTS CUTS MEANS TROUBLE FOR CATHOLIC STUDENTS

Published on National Catholic Reporter (http://ncronline.org)

 

 

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Pell Grant cuts would spell strife for Catholic students

by Kate Childs Graham [1] on Aug. 23, 2012

• 
  

Like millions of Catholic college students, Ryan Fecteau is excited to return to campus this week. His junior year at the The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., is filled with promise. Fecteau is a political science major whose focus on politics extends past the classroom. An aspiring policymaker, he was recently elected to the position of city commissioner in his hometown of Biddleford, Maine. On campus, he is speaker of the university's Student Association, communications director of CUA College Democrats and executive director of CUAllies.
Fecteau is also a recipient of a Pell Grant, a program that helps millions of low-income students afford college.
Twelve percent of students at the university are Pell Grant recipients. With tuition at $35,000 per year and room and board at $13,000, "Pell Grants are incredibly important to make college affordable," Fecteau said.
However, not all share this view. Rep. Paul Ryan, a Catholic, has sculpted a budget endorsed by Mitt Romney that limits Pell Grant eligibility, cutting the Pell Grant program by $170 billion in the next decade. According to Education Trust, a national education reform organization, this could lead to more than 1 million students losing their Pell Grants entirely in the next 10 years.
One of these students could be Fecteau. His dad is a small-business owner, his mom a nurse. As a child, he says, Fecteau was challenged to "shoot for the stars" and expected to "build a better tomorrow." To reach those lofty goals, he set out to go to a Catholic college. Facing mountains of debt, his family applied for federal funding and qualified.
If they had not, Fecteau said, "I would have needed larger loans with more long-term costs in interest. Without these federal loans, there would be a significant strain on my family."
Fecteau's story is remarkable but not uncommon. Take Nhu Huynh. She graduated from Boston College in 2008 and is currently studying theology at Harvard Divinity School. At Boston College, she was involved with campus ministry. She went on retreats and led immersion trips abroad. She interned with Catholic Charities of Boston. Like Fecteau, Huynh received Pell Grants every semester she attended the university.
"If I did not receive the Pell Grants," Huynh said, "I would have attended the local community college and transferred to an in-state four-year institution."
However, Huynh, who became Catholic while at Boston College, would not have traded her experience there.
"Boston College is the place in which I flourished as a human being, not only from the liberal arts curriculum in which a love of learning is equated with a love of thy neighbor, thus, reflective of a greater lover of God, but from the great desire to challenge structures which oppose justice," she said. Both Fecteau and Huynh stand to lose if the Romney-Ryan budget becomes reality and the Pell Grant program is cut.
A moral budget
Ryan said his budget was crafted "using my Catholic faith."
In their college classrooms, at one point or many, Fecteau and Nuynh studied Catholic social teaching. For each of these students, it's clear the Romney-Ryan budget is not in line with what they studied.
"It's baffling to me that Ryan would say that his budget is at all aligned with Catholic social teaching," Huynh said, "and it is offensive to mask his budget plan as anything but a violent systematic attack upon the most vulnerable of our society."
Fecteau quoted the Gospel of Matthew: "For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink."
"I would challenge," Fecteau said, "that the Romney-Ryan plan does not reflect this passage in any way, shape or form."
Catholic women religious and bishops have shared similar sentiments.
In a letter to Congress, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said the Romney-Ryan budget "fails to meet" the moral criteria of the church, writing, "A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons."
The bishops instead favor the Obama administration FY 2013 budget "to strengthen programs that serve poor and vulnerable people, such as Pell Grants."
Ryan replied he shared the bishops' "commitment to a preferential option for the poor."
Catholic sisters, through NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby, organized a 15-day bus tour coined "Nuns on the Bus." On the tour, they educated communities about the impact of the Romney-Ryan budget.
The budget "rejects church teaching about solidarity, inequality, the choice for the poor, and the common good. That's wrong," said Social Service Sr. Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK, at the end of the first trip. The sisters are planning a second trip [4] after Romney selected Ryan as his running mate for November's election.
For Fecteau, the Romney-Ryan budget and its proposed cuts to Pell Grants has given him renewed motivation for the election.
"Catholic college students must educate ourselves before we head to the ballot box this November," Fecteau said. "There is so much at stake for us. And we've got to stand up for what our Catholic faith tells us -- to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. The Romney-Ryan budget just doesn't make the grade."
[Kate Childs Graham is an activist in the progressive Catholic movement. A graduate of the Catholic University of America and the U.N. mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica, she currently serves as speechwriter for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).]
Editor's note: We can send you an email alert every time a Young Voices column is posted to NCRonline.org. Go to this page and follow directions: Email alert sign-up [5]. If you already receive email alerts from us, click on the "update my profile" button to add Young Voices to your list.

Copyright © The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company
 

Fitzsimmons "By My Side" from tonight's "Rookie Blues"

William Fitzsimmons "By My Side" from a good scene of "Rookie Blues."    

Catholic Bishops tell the truth on their "Poverty USA" website!

     


Poverty USA is a must website!!  Catholic Bishops tell the truth!

http://www.povertyusa.org/

Yo Paul Ryan: Jesus or Ayn Rand?

Jesus tells us to love one another, to help one another, to transcend ourselves in forming a civilization of love

Here's Paul Ryan's favorite philosopher Ayn Rand: "Rand wholly rejected religion. She called it a weakness, even a parasite — one that convinces people their purpose is to work for the betterment of others. In fact, she says, for man, the truth is just the opposite."

On Capitol Hill, Rand's 'Atlas' Can't Be Shrugged Off

by Andrea Seabrook

 November 14, 2011

These days it can feel like the country is unsteady — politically, economically. In a search for the way forward, scholars and politicians often turn to their fundamental beliefs. NPR is taking a look at some of the most influential philosophers whose ideas molded the present and could shape the future. You might not know all their names, but you're certainly familiar with their ideas. They are woven into the fabric of our society.

Ayn Rand is best known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. The ideas behind them — her philosophy — have sunk so deeply into our political thought, most people don't even recognize them as her ideas anymore.
But Rand does have important admirers, like House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Recently, House Speaker John Boehner channeled Rand when he said, "Job creators in America basically are on strike."
Underpinning that statement is a philosophy Rand introduced through her best-selling novel Atlas Shrugged.

I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy.

- Ayn Rand

However, when it was released in the late 1950s, the book wasn't exactly embraced.

Rand's 'Objectivism,' Explained
CBS News journalist Mike Wallace interviewed Rand years before he first appeared on the program 60 Minutes.
"Throughout the United States, small pockets of intellectuals have become involved in a new and unusual philosophy, which would seem to strike at the very roots of our society," he says, introducing the 1959 segment.
Wallace is in a chair, on a stark set, holding his notes and a cigarette. Across from him sits Rand, a native Russian, small and sharp and a little nervous. Wallace asks her to outline the idea she calls "objectivism."
It is, she says, a system of morality "not based on faith" or emotion, "but on reason."

Rand wholly rejected religion. She called it a weakness, even a parasite — one that convinces people their purpose is to work for the betterment of others. In fact, she says, for man, the truth is just the opposite.

"His highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness," she says. Wallace asks Rand how her philosophy applies to politics and government. And his question reveals a journalist's assumptions about the America of that time — with Eisenhower in the White House and Leave It to Beaver on TV:
"One of the principal achievements of this country in the past 20 years, particularly — I think most people agree — is the gradual growth of social, protective legislation, based on the principle that we are our brothers' keepers."
Like welfare. Social Security. Fair labor standards. Public health programs.
"How do you feel about the political trends of the United States?" Wallace asks.
"I feel that it is terrible that you see destruction all around you, and that you are moving toward disaster until and unless all those welfare state conceptions have been reversed and rejected," Rand answers.
These programs are destroying individual liberties, Rand says, especially the freedom of producers, entrepreneurs, businessmen. The government has no right to take their property, she says.
 I imagine that you're talking now about taxes," Wallace says. "And you believe that there should be no right by the government to tax. You believe that there should be no such thing as unemployment compensation, regulation during times of stress."
"That's right," Rand replies. "I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy."
By now, these ideas should sound familiar.

You can read the rest...  http://www.npr.org/2011/11/14/142245517/on-capitol-hill-rands-atlas-cant-be-shrugged-off 

AJAN. Jesuits respond to AIDS epidemic in Africa

Great work by Jesuits in Africa.

New Jesuit "Ap"

Try this out.   The Society of Jesus goes boldy where few Jesuits have gone before... into the worlds of Social Media!