Generous Lives: American Catholic Women Today. - book reviews

Jane Redmont's Generous Lives was "timed to coincide with the 1992 Bishops' Pastoral Letter on Women," says a publisher's note on the back of the galleys. Ironically, the timing offers an opportunity to compare two approaches to women's concerns--one successful (Redmont's) and one (the bishops') whose credibility problems eventually overwhelmed and defeated a well-meaning enterprise.

Redmont, who has a master's in divinity from Harvard Divinity School, uses lengthy interviews with more than a hundred Catholic women of all stripes to explore the question: "How contemporary women define their religion." Redmont discovers that "what these women who call themselves Catholic actually believe--and how they live--defies easy correlation with the dictums of the church."

This, at least in part, was what the U.S. Catholic bishops discovered when they set out to draft a pastoral letter ten long years ago. In the earliest drafts, women's voices--some contradicting church teaching, others defending it--received prominent play. But subsequent drafts muffled those voices, while amplifying and explicating church teachings such as the ban on women's ordination. Besieged by objections from both sides of the ideological spectrum, the bishops failed to muster the two-thirds majority vote needed to pass the pastoral at their November '92 meeting.

Redmont's volume, by contrast, not only tolerates the gray areas that color so many women's lives, but celebrates them. The author intersperses women's stories--told in their voices--with chapters on key aspects of the church and life through Catholic women's eyes. The author does not exclude the "experts" often quoted in the press; but most of the women interviewed could be your doctor, your coworker, or the homemaker next door.

The book is refreshingly honest. It may therefore disappoint conservatives hunting for "radical feminists," or progressives expecting women to clearly reject the trappings of ecclesial power. The cross-section of women here is anything but stereotypical; their views reflect the contradictions so often ignored in debates about the church, and yet so much a part of our lives. As Redmont puts it, "I found that the lines between religious or political liberals and conservatives were not as clearly drawn as the media or our own hasty descriptions of each other would have us believe."

The author invites readers into the lives of women who are black, Hispanic, Asian, and white, old and young, married and single, heterosexual and lesbian, poor and rich, urban and rural. Among them: A corporate executive who disagrees with the bishops' "let government do it" economic pastoral, but supports women's ordination; a mother who sees nuclear arms as necessary for defense, but says priests should be allowed to marry; a community organizer who thinks the church should spend more on scholarships for lay people but opposes women's ordination; a grandmother who wants abortion banned but is open to women priests.

Many other women--who include a police officer, a journalist, a nun, a theologian, and an ex-convict--are woven into chapters examining topics such as sexuality, work, social justice, and image of God (most women see God as more a "being" than a person).

Of the more than one hundred women interviewed by Redmont, almost none supports the church's ban on contraception; only half support its teachings on abortion, homosexuality, and divorce. Yet they struggle with these issues, especially abortion, where women's views reflected a mixture of prolife and prochoice sentiments rarely captured in press coverage of the debate. Most morally opposed abortion, yet many felt it should remain legal.

If there is one area where dissatisfaction is most acute among the women in Redmont's book, it is divorce. To a person, the divorced women in this book spoke of their pain. Some said they stayed in abusive relationships because of church teaching. But others found healing through the church's annulment process. A few fully supported church teaching on divorce and remarriage, with one woman arguing the church had become too lenient.

All these women, despite their differences with the church and with each other, share a commitment to doing good in the world. Thus the title Generous Lives. Redmont introduces a woman who has adopted children, another involved in social activism in San Antonio, and another who struggles with being a Christian in the corporate world.

Generous Lives has a "ring of truth" some found lacking in the drafts of the bishops' pastoral. In many ways, Redmont's portrait has a richness that necessarily eluded the bishops, who had to balance women's concerns with church pronouncements. Indeed, even within Redmont's volume, it is the women's voices that speak most powerfully; the non-narrative chapters tend to be slow-moving.

By the way, the author seems to go overboard with footnotes, anticipating a non-Catholic audience it seems unlikely the book will attract. There are definitions of "pastor" and "ecumenism," for example. Then again, footnotes on the rosary and on the church's teaching on divorce and remarriage may prove enlightening for the growing number of us who missed the Baltimore Catechism.

Perhaps the secret to Redmont's book is buried in a short quote from Marie Augusta Neal, SND, in the preface: "Who defines the situation?" Redmont lets women define themselves, and then lets the chips fall where they may. Perhaps it was too much to expect the U.S. bishops to do the same.

Redmont's effort may not get the broad readership the footnotes suggest, but it ought to find a place in Catholic seminaries and on the shelves of anyone involved in ministry. Most of all, it's a book for Catholic women who wrestle with what it means to be a Catholic amid the curves life so often throws. Many will find a bit of themselves in these pages.

COPYRIGHT 1992 Commonweal Foundation
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