Conference addresses divided culture in Church on mission of women

In honor of the upcoming 30th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s “Letter to Women,” the McGrath Institute for Church Life (MICL) and co-sponsor, the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture (dCEC), hosted a conference entitled “True Genius: The Mission of Women in Church and Culture.” The three-day conference ran from March 26-28 and drew over 258 registrants, with additional non-registrants sitting in on some sessions.

According to the MICL website, the conference centered around revisiting and extending the letters of John Paul II, with an “aim to offer a positive countervision to, on the one hand, the growing anti-feminism in some Catholic circles and, on the other hand, the widely-held perception that the Church is anti-woman.”  

Theology professor Abigail Favale directed the conference. Favale, whose scholarly work focuses on “the meaning and dignity of women,” recently taught a course titled, “Catholicism and the Sexes” this fall semester. In an interview with the Rover, Favale explained the purpose of the conference, which focused on the polarizing conversations surrounding women in the Church: “A lot of women have never heard pro-woman defenses of certain church teachings, like contraception and abortion, that tend to be at odds with secular feminist views. So there’s a need to speak about the Church’s vision in that area.” 

The conference also addressed the increasingly heterodox views about women’s roles circulating in Catholic circles, occurring on both the left and right. Leftist circles attempt to erase all differences between men and women, seeing motherhood as a burden. Favale noted, on the other hand, that more right-leaning circles offer a narrative “that women should be subservient to men and should never work outside the home, even [suggesting that Natural Family Planning] is illicit.” 

Favale continued, “The Church’s vision, especially as articulated by John Paul II, really offers an alternative to both of those extremes, and I think there’s a need to recover that vision, but also deepen it.”

The three-day conference featured six plenary sessions, three panel discussions, and a speaker roundtable that allowed for interactive engagement from the audience. Each day centered around a specific theme: “From the Heart of the Church,” “Sentinels of the Invisible,” and “New Feminism.” According to the MICL website, the conference tackled each of these themes of dialogue with the approach of “reflecting on the past and revitalizing the present.” 

Thursday featured Melissa Moschella, Notre Dame McGrath philosophy professor, who delivered a keynote address titled “The Female Body and A Culture of Life.” During her speech, Moschella outlined the confusion in our culture regarding the relationship between the rights of women and children, especially unborn children. Moschella remarked, “It turns out that a culture that sees sexual expression, as before personal identity, is necessarily also a culture that rejects womens unique biological capacity for motherhood.” 

Moschella continued by highlighting the popular false narrative that there is a conflict between protecting the rights of women and protecting the rights of unborn children. Moschella told the Rover, “Women’s rights are actually things that have been bad for women, both individually and for society, things like the promotion of birth control or abortion on demand have in a variety of ways, led to situations both in terms of romantic situations and in terms of healthcare that have actually been contrary to women’s true interest and rights.” 

On Friday, the final day of the conference, discussions and events focused on a “new feminism” within the Catholic Church. Helen Alvaré, professor of law at the Antonin Scalia Law School and consultant to various Holy See initiatives concerning women, delivered the keynote address,“New Feminism, Then and Now.” Alvaré recounted her experience as a woman who worked intimately with the Holy See in the frontlines of the “new feminism” phase thirty years ago. 

Alvaré critiqued the hyper-focus on worldly justice for women, arguing that the culture demands a greater emphasis on the eternal vision within the Church. She called for a new era of feminism that she coined “Feminism 2.0.” This new era embraces a woman’s indisputable gift of sharing her capacity for vulnerable life. Further, Alvaré emphasized that Christian feminism is not primarily about mankind, but should instead be centered around God, remarking, “If we breathe new life into the Great Commission begun in Genesis, then a new feminism 2.0 will be truer to God’s will for us and assist some of the dilemmas that feminism 1.0 left standing.” 

Other invited speakers included scholars from Notre Dame, Fransician University of Steubenville, St. John’s Seminary in Boston, as well as sisters from the Sisters of Life and the Sisters of the Little Way of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, along with other scholars from different universities and institutions.  

Notre Dame senior and conference attendee Maria Murinova told the Rover, “I was really excited because I’ve been talking to a lot of my friends just about feminism in general, like is it all a bad thing? Are there redeeming aspects of it? How do we think about ourselves as women in the Church today and what does that look like in society?” 

Murinova continued, “What I appreciated the most was that it wasn’t just intellectual conversation, there was a lot of practical knowledge being given and it was from women who were married, single, have an academic life, religious life, or just speaking to their experience as a mom.” 

Maureen Ferguson, wife and mother of a current student, traveled from Washington, D.C. for the conference. Ferguson, who grew up in the generation of “JPII Catholics,” has always been interested in the role of women in the Church, a topic John Paul II emphasized during his papacy. 

Ferguson told the Rover, “The conference was excellent and gave me much material to think about on the education of future generations of Catholic women. I was fortunate to grow up at a time when this was a topic that received a lot of attention from a beloved and popular pope, but I think it’s one that still needs scholarship and thought from Catholic scholars. The speakers and panelists did a fantastic job of presenting a genuine portrait of the Catholic woman.”

She added, “My advice for young women at Notre Dame is to read John Paul II’s ‘Letter to Women’ and Mulerius Dignitatem so they can come to understand the meaning of ‘the feminine genius’ and the description of women as ‘sentinels of the invisible.’”

Information on the conference, including recordings of lectures, can be found on the MICL . 

Allison Bowman is a sophomore studying economics and constitutional studies. She can be reached at abowman9@nd.edu.

Photo Credit: McGrath Facebook

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