Mike Mastromatteo | OSV News
Women of the Church (What Every Catholic Should Know)
Bronwen McShea, Augustine Institute, Ignatius Press (2024)
224 pages, $16.95
Many Catholic publishers of late are coming out with titles shedding more light on under-appreciated elements of church history from its earliest days to contemporary times.
One such effort is Bronwen McShea’s “Women in the Church,” which, as the title suggests, examines the influence of both religious and lay women in supporting the life of the church in big and small ways.
The book looks to fill a void in the popular understanding of the role of women, saints, martyrs and the laity, in protecting the church from external threat and internal lassitude. It also celebrates, without diminishing, the classical view of women as the nexus of family, faith formation, humility and quiet sacrifice.
Divided into six chapters ranging from the patristic era to the early 21st century, this slim volume offers a brief yet illuminating survey of Catholic Church history with special emphasis on the less prominent female characters.
To be sure, there are a number of big names in McShea’s study — Mary Magdalen, St. Joan of Arc, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Thérese of Lisieux and Mary Ward to name a few. But 20th century women such as Dorothy Day, Mother Angelica of the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), St. Edith Stein and Sister Thea Bowman also come to life in the pages.
An author and historian, Bronwen McShea today serves as the Teilhard de Chardin SJ Fellow in Catholic Studies at Loyola University Chicago. She has also taught and conducted research at a number of institutions including Columbia University, the University of Nebraska in Omaha, and Princeton University in New Jersey. The author’s work focuses primarily on the Christian faith as a shaper of culture.
The book is especially effective in describing women’s influence over changing historical eras. During the Renaissance for example, a number of women scholars, artists and theologians overcame cultural barriers to take on creative and intellectual work traditionally reserved for men.
Women also played important roles as the church responded to Reformation upheaval and to the liberal revolutionary impulses of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. McShea notes the efforts of “ordinary Catholic peasant women” who during France’s post-Revolutionary era worked to protect priests and nuns from the dangers of anti-clericalism and the suppression of religious orders. “These women were committed to ensuring that the Catholic Mass was properly offered — covertly in their homes if necessary — while regime-approved clergymen performed counterfeit services in churches that had been co-opted by the radicals,” she writes.
McShea outlines as well the significance of Catholic women in the age of colonialism, as European powers looked to empire building in the new world. In the spirit of “making disciples of all nations,” women religious became major players in missionary work in North and Central America.
An early example of women’s missionary work comes by way of St. Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680) who, along with other indigenous women in New France, supported Jesuit missionary priests in bringing the Gospel message to new frontiers. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980 and was canonized in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI — the first Native American woman raised to such honors.
Women’s influence in the growth and reach of the Catholic Church became even more meaningful in the United States throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. “Religious women proved to be essential to the moral, social, and intellectual formation of a significant Catholic population across the ever-expanding American republic,” McShea writes. “That population grew exponentially in the nineteenth century as millions of immigrants poured in from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Poland, and other countries.”
One of the more compelling contributions of Catholic women was the desegregation of religious orders. McShea says Black Catholic lay and consecrated women were often on the front lines of desegregation. “This was the case when the Jesuits, pressed by black sisters who desired a better education as part of their vocational formation, permitted black students to enroll for the first time at Spring Hill College in Alabama. Additionally, African American sisters from orders such as the Oblate Sisters of Providence … were the first black students to enroll, in the face of angry opposition, in various Catholic colleges in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.”
Although Catholic women from the earliest times were instrumental in educational, artistic, theological and faith formation pursuits, this effort to open up religious communities to all peoples can be considered one of their most important, Christ-centered contributions.
McShea presents the sterling example of Sister Thea Bowman (1937-1990), a convert from Methodism, who became the first woman of color to enter the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
In the late 1950s, Thea Bowman went on to become a respected Catholic liturgist, evangelist and proponent of the National Black Sisters’ Conference, which promotes African American women in consecrated life.
“Bowman was devoted to serving poor students of color throughout her career and employed the influence she developed over the years, including with many US bishops, to advance this goal,” McShea says.
Overall, this new work sets an appropriate tone in considering the impact of women Catholics over the last two millennia. It neither exaggerates nor downplays their role, but makes a case for more attention being paid to it. McShea argues that current studies of Catholic women in the church make little reference to leadership roles undertaken by Catholic women, sometimes at high levels.
While celebrating the work of better-known Catholic women achievers, the author appears to have a soft spot for what might be termed the “unsung heroes.” In a closing message, McShea invites readers, particularly women readers, to take inspiration from their forebears.
“Most [readers] will live their faith with quiet, unassuming and unsung courage, sometimes amid great suffering,” McShea says. “They can take at least some consolation in knowing how many other women have gone before them and are praying for them and with them on the other side of death, in the eternal light of God.”
Mike Mastromatteo is a writer, editor and book reviewer from Toronto.