Women in a Divided Church: Liberal and Conservative Catholic Women Negotiate Changing Gender Roles

Abstract

The Catholic Church in America is deeply divided, and gender issues ( espeeiaUy reproductive choice and women's ordination) have become a symptom of this division. This paper examines the language used by liberal and conservative Catholic women to talk about gender, h is argued that although similar clivisions over gender xist within Protestantism and Judaism, Catholic women ate in a unique position to confront hem. Unlike conservative Protestants d Jews who have separated themselves from their more liberal counterparts by forming independent Evangelical and Orthodox denorninations, conservative Catho//cs co-exist with liberds in the same church. The paper shows that being … to confront hose divisions has resulted in a tendency towards polarization the one hand, and towards m, xteration on the other, both of which have important implications for thefuture of the Catholic Church. Roman Catholicism in America is becoming a divided church. In the past, this division has usually been conceptualized as laity and women on the liberal side versus male leadership on the conservative side. There is thus a substantial body of literature on the growing division between the increasingly liberal American Catholic laity and the conservative Vatican bureaucracy (e.g.,