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What it Means to be a Catholic Woman in Trump’s America

What it Means to be a Catholic Woman in Trump’s America

Last updated on: January 24, 2017 at 10:25 am by Guest Contributor

What it Means to be a Catholic Woman in Trump’s America 2017-01-24T10:25:04-05:00 Guest Contributor

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suffragette arrested, 1914, wiki commons

2016 was the year of my disillusionment.

The election of Donald Trump seemed like a very laughable bad dream, like being in middle school when we used to devise masked ways to cuss (“Twat, did you say? I cunt hear you!”), only in Trump’s case, he really did say it, he most likely did it, and, my gosh, the Middle School just elected him president.

And this was the candidate that I, as a Catholic woman who supports the protection of life from conception to natural death, was expected to line up behind. Hold your nose and vote for life, I was told.

If I were a graphic designer and wanted to come up with a one-word icon in support of abortion, it would be Trump: a man who cycles through women in marriage, discards women based on appearance, sells women as commodities in his own casino strip clubs, has been accused (but has eluded judgment) in the assault of women, profits off the weakness of others (see gambling), and sexualizes his own children.

He embodies every facet of the problem.

I am a woman who is Catholic. I am a Catholic who is a woman. I cannot separate the two. I’m never quite sure which comes first. But I know what it means to be both. And I understand why the Church is so hesitant to fully articulate the “special calling” of Catholic women.

Because that calling, by virtue of our nature and the theology that has emitted from it, are combined in a tremendous double blow, requiring you to lay down your life before men. To put your body and your security and that of your children into the hands of men who are sometimes very good and virtuous. But who are also sometimes foolish, imprudent, drunk, less wise than you, immoral, less temperate, narcissistic and any other human failing under the sun.

men heckling suffragettes and tearing their banner, 1914, wiki commons

These men are sometimes your fathers, sometimes your husbands, sometimes your priest, sometimes your political figures, but whoever they are, they have been ordained by invisible cosmic forces to hold dominion over your well-being.

For comfort, you may have private counsel with the only man who can do nothing to protect you physically, who can only give you a better model for dying, and food for the road. Take as your mother, the Blessed Virgin, who carries seven swords in her own heart.

This is what it means to be a woman and to be Catholic, to let your heart be broken again and again, to put yourself and your offspring at the mercy of the foolish. To let your body be ripped open repeatedly by childbirth, to be laid flat in the aftermath, bleeding out while still trying to care for those you love. And then, to call it all a blessing, to embrace the sword in your heart not as a sorrow but as cause for rejoicing.

This is the theology of woman, take it or leave it. But don’t pretend it’s easy. Don’t pretend everyone can do it.

This is why I have had to accept in my own understanding of my faith that the church is accidentally misogynistic, in that as it intends holiness for all people (which is good), it provides no lifeline to women but to say “Embrace your crucifixion.”

Men can choose their cross by will. Women, unfortunately can have no choice, because it is not how we are designed.

Celibacy is the only vocation in the church that allows women to exercise dominion over their bodies, and even if we embrace that vocation, there’s no guarantee we will be able to practice it. Our bodies are capable of receiving without our consent. And still, the church asks us to bear the offspring of our violations with love.

This is the actual calling of women in my faith, which I accept only as the fruit of long suffering, experience, and finally, choice. I cannot in good conscience expect anyone else to do this without the comfort of a Savior. I do not support politics that deny women both physical protection and spiritual succor.

Yes, the secular woman should absolutely protect herself from the effects of relationships with unreliable men—because we live in a culture that can produce nothing but—men who carry within them both the worst of the patrimony, Trumpian entitlement and misogyny, paired with the liberations of the sexual revolution, combined with the dignity erasing effects of pornography.

I want women to have the ability to inoculate themselves against this culture.

If they choose to embrace a theology of life-giving crucifixion, I welcome them. But that’s not something a free society can force on anyone. I can’t align myself with Christians who use politics as a bludgeon dragging women by their hair into our spiritual worldview.

And what about the unborn? Who will speak for them?

To that I say, we will be unable to ever hear the voices of the unborn without first acknowledging the concerns of their mothers. This is the model provided by our faith. Jesus said from the Cross, “Behold your mother.” Our salvation would have been impossible without the word of Mary. Christ himself passed through woman to become man. So we too have to pass through the waters of baptism—be washed in his pure blood that was formed in her pure womb—and humbled by her ensuing sorrow in order to meet her son.

There will always be passovers and slaughters of the innocent. The poor will always be amongst us, and for that we bear the communal weight of sin, and share communal duty in reparation. Before we can act purely in their regard, our first calling is to seek the narrow gate. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus alone. Not a community, not politics or ideology. Not our peer group or parish.

Jesus in the prayer and silence of our own hearts. Jesus who teaches us to die to self, to resist the the desire to give ourselves the OK. Rejecting self not only in seeking fame and fortune, but in even having the privilege of identifying with peer groups and ideological structures.

In knowing him, we come to know ourselves as wholly out of step with this world in all its trappings.

So it’s true, I don’t get to march for life without first marching for women. And I don’t get to march for women when I’m really asking them to die with me.

–E.D.

Confession

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