Women

Forum participants with placards asking candidates to take a stand on reproductive health rights

QUEZON CITY, Philippines — The church's catechism opposing the Reproductive Health Bill, which is now before Congress, has silenced election candidates on women's rights, a leading advocate of the proposed law says.

Politicians seem to have "all meekly acquiesced to the dictates" of the Episcopal Commission on Family and Life, which issued the "Catechism on Family and Life" for the 2010 elections, former Health Secretary Alberto Romualdez said. National, provincial and local elections will be held nationwide May 10.

Apostolic visitator Mother Mary Clare Millea (right) and president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious Franciscan Sr. Marlene Weisenbeck at a Jan. 14 reception opening the "Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America" exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. (Ben Sullivan)

A little over a year ago, Mother Mary Clare Millea became the most talked-about nun in America almost overnight. In December 2008, the Vatican tapped Millea, a Connecticut native and superior general of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to run arguably the most controversial "apostolic visitation" ever carried out in this country: A sweeping review of women's congregations, capping decades of tension about the state of the soul of religious life in America.

Sometime in the next few days, the first wave of letters will be reaching a sample of women's orders to say they've been selected for an on-site visit, with those visits slated to begin one week after Easter and to continue throughout the spring and fall of 2010. The visits mark "phase three" of the process, after exchanges between Millea and major superiors (phase one) and the collection of written responses to questionnaires sent to every congregation in the country (phase two).

The fourth and final phase will be the preparation of detailed reports on all 420 "units" of women's religious in America, meaning congregations as well as their individual provinces, to be shipped off to Rome, plus a comprehensive report at the end. What the Vatican may do with all that input, of course, is the great unknown.

Julian of Norwich is depicted in a niche beside the main door of the cathedral in Norwich, England. (Sally Scott-Robinson)

My life has been largely spent at home, caring for my family. It is a small world, but a rich and complex one, for all its short distances from stove to bed and bathtub to couch. Perhaps that is why I am drawn to these writers -- they are women -- who observe the contours and appreciate the significance of the daily and the domestic.

Anne Tyler’s characters rarely leave Baltimore, or even the houses where they were raised. In Tyler’s novels, the houses, like the city itself, become characters in the narrative. Those who do leave home remain bound by the ties, both glorious and grim, of place and blood and story. When elderly Daniel Peck begins to travel, in Tyler’s Searching for Caleb, it is not because there is any site outside Baltimore worth exploring. He’s looking for his brother, Caleb, who disappeared from their Roland Park home one day in 1912 leaving “no trace except for a bedroom full of hollow, ringing musical instruments and a roll-top desk with an empty whiskey bottle in the bottom drawer.”

The following is an excerpt from Free to Leave, Free to Stay: Fruits of the Spirit and Church Choice, by Jana Marguerite Bennett and Melissa Musick Nussbaum. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

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I was nearly 20 when I left the Methodist church of my childhood. My maternal great-grandfather was a circuit rider, one of the itinerant preachers who brought Methodism to Texas. I grew up less than a block from church, and I spent every Sunday there: first Sunday School, then the worship service, and then home for dinner. After dinner I was back for youth group and the evening service. Until I met my husband, I had never dated a boy outside my church.