Some Catholic Witches have hard Time Controlling Spin about Explosive Books

THE Book: Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism

Religious News Service

July 17, 1993
SECTION: RELIGION; 

HEADLINE: Feminists say pope's attack was based on 'disinformation'

SOURCE: Religious News Service

BYLINE: TOM ROBERTS

BODY:
The debate over the place of women in the Roman Catholic Church was pushed to a new level of visibility earlier this month when Pope John Paul II urged American bishops to counteract Catholic feminists who engage in such practices as nature worship and other rituals that depart from traditional Christianity.

Catholic feminists in the United States agree that to venture into ancient goddess and nature worship departs from traditional Christianity. But many feel that they have been driven to explore such alternatives because they have been denied full participation in a "patriarchal church."

"There is a real absence of religious agency in the Catholic Church for women," said Mary E. Hunt, a theologian, ethicist and co-director of WATER (Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual) in Silver Spring, Md. So women begin looking at a wide range of ways "to be religious" but "as Catholics." 

The critics, of course, say that Catholic is Catholic and to venture into pagan rituals is to leave Catholicism behind.

One of the most aggressive anti-feminist activists is Donna Steichen, of Ojai, Calif.

She said she can't be certain that her campaign influenced the recent papal statement. But she knows, she said, that "the Holy Father has a copy of my book" because a friend "handed him a copy."

Her book, Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism, has been dismissed by Catholic feminists as "libelous, defamatory and an intentionally malicious misrepresentation of the persons, movements and writings which this book purports to describe." Since its publication in 1991, Steichen has been a regular on a lecture circuit that has taken her across the United States and into several European countries.

How high up Steichen's influence runs is a matter of conjecture. But her conviction, that Catholic feminists are on a downward path toward paganism and even satanism, has certainly found an agreeable seedbed in the Roman Curia.

More than one Vatican official has lashed out against "radical feminists" in the U.S. church and voiced concerns over rituals that invest credibility in the goddesses of mythology or other religious traditions. And the pope, in his July 2 statement, made during an audience with two American bishops, urged active opposition to "a feminism that polarizes along bitter, ideological lines."

While not naming any specific groups, the pope said some feminist groups go well beyond the debate on women's ordination. "In (feminism's) extreme form, it is the Christian faith itself which is in danger of being undermined."

Steichen said the pope's comments "sound perfectly accurate to me."

Some feel that the pope was responding to reports of an April conference in Albuquerque, N.M., of WomenChurch, a rather diverse gathering with a heavy Catholic feminist emphasis that met for the third time since 1983. To end the three-day conference, participants could choose from among more than a dozen worship services - Catholic and Protestant, but also Native American, pagan or Buddhist.

But Ruth Fitzpatrick, head of the Women's Ordination Conference, a Catholic feminist group in Fairfax, Va., and an organizer of the WomenChurch conference, insists the pope was responding to Steichen's book.

The pope, she said, was a victim of "very bad disinformation." In an interview Wednesday, Fitzpatrick compared Steichen's campaign with the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. She is convinced, she said, that since the fall of Communism, conservatives in the church have been looking for a new "scapegoat" and found it in feminism.

"We are just looking for different ways to hang on to the hem of god," said Fitzpatrick. "That doesn't mean we are pagan or goddess worshipers."

Dan Turner, an associate of controversial theologian Matthew Fox [occultist/New Age] and editor of Creation Spirituality Magazine, said, "I think what we're seeing coming from Rome is an attempt to marginalize and trivialize the whole feminist movement. It's a defensive reaction against the increasingly popular and strong movement for greater involvement of women in the church."

Creation spirituality, said Turner, is an "appreciation of the magnificent diversity of God's creation and reminds us of who brought all this into being." The emphasis on nature and its significance, he said, runs from a long tradition that includes such figures as Francis of Assisi, Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas, who saw natural law as the basis of moral theology.

Hunt sees the pope reacting to two influences that have been at work over the past two decades. One is the "shift in the whole theological question of religious language." Scholars, she said, have come to a "fairly wide consensus that language influences social life," including life within the church. So, women began to change the language and images referring to God.

The second force is what she calls "theo-politics," which have figured into the resolution of virtually every major theological controversy in the history of the Catholic Church.

"My contention is that most of what goes on is not theological, but theo-political," she said. "For instance, I can't sit down and write a definitive theological work on the defense of ordaining women. All that has been done."

What's left to do, she argues, is the theo-political work, with the emphasis on politics. 

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