Do Christian Feminists exist?

On October 19, 1997, the hundredth anniversary of St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s death and entrance into eternal life, Pope John Paul II proclaimed St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face a Doctor of the Church. The third woman to be thus honoured, Thérèse is also the youngest and the closest to us in time. For these reasons and a host of others, not the least of which is the pope’s conviction that St. Thérèse is so timely because she shows the wisdom of what the Holy Father calls ‘feminine genius’, it may be fruitful for us to use the occasion of the pope’s declaration to look at this remarkable woman as we ask ourselves the question: Can there be an authentic Christian feminism?

The fear of feminism

Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me. How many of us have employed this childhood ditty to ward off the attacks of schoolmates who made fun of our size, our skin color, our awkwardness, our whatever? To some, the mere mention of the word ‘feminism’ will raise hackles, eyebrows, and blood pressure. To those who feel this way, all I ask for is a bit of patience and an open mind. Embedded in his monumental 1995 encyclical, The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II has already answered the question for us, and in the affirmative, as we read in paragraph 99: In transforming culture so that it supports life, women occupy a place in thought and action which is unique and decisive. It depends on them to promote a ‘new feminism’ which rejects the temptation of imitating models of ‘male domination’ in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation.

Two French women and the modern age

Marie Françoise Thérèse Martin, youngest in a family of nine, was born at Alençon in the north of France on January 2, 1873; exactly a hundred years later, January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States of America struck down all anti-abortion laws in each of the fifty states and made abortion the law of the land. Clearly, an awful lot has happened in those hundred years between the birth of a saint and the birth of a culture of death. To help us understand, it will prove most illuminating if we compare Thérèse Martin whom history would later know as St. Thérèse the Little Flower, with another famous French woman, Simone de Beauvoir.

Some similarities

Though Thérèse died eleven years before Beauvoir was born, and despite the fact that Simone de Beauvoir attended the finest French schools and universities while the youngest of the Martin children had at most a basic junior high school education, there is much in their lives that is common to both. Both are daughters of France, both come from middle-class – some might call them thoroughly bourgeois – backgrounds, both possessed brilliant, inquisitive minds, and both were raised as Roman Catholics. As precocious teenagers, both Thérèse and Simone wrestled with important religious questions such as belief in God and the ultimate destiny of the human person. Both wrote of their lives in works that have become famous in our day: Beauvoir has written four autobiographical volumes, while Thérèse – in obedience to the charge given by her religious superior – has given us The Story of a Soul, a true classic of the spiritual life.

A Tale of Two Confessions

Interestingly enough, it is in these writings that we discover another similarity: each recounts that one of the most important formative events in her life revolved around the reception of the sacrament of reconciliation – ‘going to confession’ would be their way of saying it. As Beauvoir recounts the episode in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, her confessor, Abbé Martin, was told what to say to the young Simone in the confessional by her mother. The high-strung, perceptive teenager easily saw through the subterfuge and came to regard the priest as nothing more than a busybody. Her faith in God was weakened and before long gave way completely. By contrast, Thérèse Martin’s experience of the sacrament was vastly different. As she writes in the first part of The Story of a Soul, when her confessor, Father Pichon, solemnly assured her that she had never committed a mortal sin, Thérèse regarded these as the most consoling words she had ever heard, words that always remained perpetually engraved on her heart. We cannot help but marvel that our age has been shaped to a large extent by the simple scene of two teen-age French girls going to confession and each girl’s reaction to that experience with the sacrament. One saw the compassionate Christ, the other found a meddling mother. Each lived the rest of her life shaped largely by what she found in this encounter with a priest.

Beauvoir and the ‘old feminism’

At around the same time as Pope John Paul II was issuing The Gospel of Life, I was putting the finishing touches on a book that examined the thought of Beauvoir and three American feminists – Mary Daly, Carol Gilligan, and Beverly Wildung Harrison – who urged women to embrace abortion as the cornerstone of women’s liberation, the ultimate freedom. After reading what the Holy Father had to say in The Gospel of Life about the ‘new feminism’, I realised that my work corroborated what the pope said by providing readers with a window into the world of the ‘old feminism’. While it might sound odd to regard feminists such as Beauvoir and her American followers as representing the ‘old feminism’, – after all, isn’t feminism supposed to be the wave of the future? – I believe Pope John Paul II puts his finger precisely on what it is that animates this old feminism: it is the patterning of women’s demands for justice and equality on ‘models of male domination’ rather than looking forward to women’s true genius, that of reconciling people with life. The Christian feminism the pope envisions will serve to build up a true civilisation of love, not find ways of propping up what the pope calls ‘the culture of death’.

The Culture of Death

Whatever else it may be, ‘the culture of death’ is an attitude of mind that considers killing as a solution to the problems of living. We find it in the abortion mentality, when inconvenient young life is deemed expendable and to be killed; we find it in the euthanasia movement when the oldest, the frailest, the sickest, those at the outer edges of human life, are deemed expendable and hence candidates for what our age euphemistically calls ‘death with dignity’. If proof were needed that Beauvoir’s feminism, this old feminism, is part and parcel of this culture of death, Beauvoir herself provides it in a chilling text we find in The Second Sex. After asking herself the question, why have men always (supposedly) been superior to women? Beauvoir answers in this way: It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills. Here we have the key to the whole mystery (of women’s subjugation).

At the heart of contemporary secular feminism, then, we find the male as model theory espoused by Simone de Beauvoir leading directly to the culture of death since she says, in effect, that women can be equal to men only if they have the power to kill. It is this precise error – falling into male models of domination – that the pope says the new feminism must avoid.

It is important to note that atheism is an essential element of Simone de Beauvoir’s view of reality. Those who follow her down this path of the old feminism, secular feminism, if you like, will sooner or later emulate her in this atheism as well. If God does not exist, man...or woman... will have to serve as a sorry substitute. Note how American feminist leader Gloria Steinem puts the matter: We will, by the year 2000, teach our children to believe in human potential, not God. Atheism and the culture of death are components of the ‘old feminism’.

Towards a new feminism

While the old feminism, patterned on the male as model, is unfortunately very much with us, the new feminism, as the pope points out, is yet to be fashioned. We have at most a bare outline of what it will and will not contain. Whatever shape it will take, the new feminism will not regard killing as a solution to the problem of living, that is to say, it will not be part of the culture of death. It will offer life to both women and their unborn children. It will not say that one must be sacrificed for the other. Is it possible that the insights of the Church on male-female relations are more valuable and perceptive than the works of feminists such as Beauvoir, Daly, Gilligan, and Harrison? Is it conceivable that we learn more about how to go about creating a truly just human society from a patriarchal Church than from these proponents of matriarchy? I believe so with all my heart. Their brand of feminism, the old feminism, if you will, is a dead-end for women, for their children, and for society. The new feminism, whatever its ultimate shape and composition, will regard living as the solution to the problems of life. As Christian women go about fashioning this new feminism, I pray that St. Thérèse, newest doctor of the Church, may help them find the way to a proper understanding of true feminine genius, a genius that, in transforming culture so that it supports life, builds up a civilisation of love, not a culture of death.