What does it mean to be a Catholic feminist today? These three papers offer views from Canada, the United States and Latin America. Together, they open a conversation about the wide range of viewpoints across the hemisphere, suggest new language for studying Catholic feminisms in the academy, and to explore the possibilities for new forms of Catholic feminisms to emerge from the ground up.
This paper examines “Catholic feminism” as a term and analyzes the meaning(s) of these words as various Catholic women theologians and leaders have used them throughout the last three decades (~1990 to ~2025). Through engaging Catholic feminist theologians such as Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elizabeth A. Johnson, and Ivone Gebara, this paper reveals how progressive Catholic women are defining Catholic feminism. Through engaging contemporary Catholic women leaders such as Abigail Favale and Josephine Garrett, this work also analyzes how conservative Catholic women are considering Catholic feminism. Bringing the progressive and conservative Catholic women into conversation with one another, this essay uncovers what each approach has in common with one another, while revealing key differences that may prove irreconcilable. This paper establishes the slippery nature of the term “Catholic feminism,” suggests the need to reconsider the use of the term, and proposes new language to use in scholarly conversation.
In the year 2000, the World March of Women (WMW 2000) organized a series of international events to condemn poverty and violence against women. Development and Peace – Caritas Canada (the official international development organization of the Canadian Catholic Church) financially supported the March and encouraged Catholics to participate as a sign of “courageous solidarity” with women around the world. WMW 2000 became controversial as some of the other groups that also supported the March called for greater access to abortion, which contradicted established Catholic moral teaching. Pro-life organizations in Canada called for a boycott of the March and for the Canadian Bishops to withdraw their support from Development and Peace. As bishops lined up on both sides of the issue, WMW 2000 became one of the most divisive debates in Canadian Catholic history. This paper explores why this event was so polarizing and explains its impact on contemporary Canadian Catholicism.
This paper explores contemporary Catholic feminism and abortion rights activism and advocacy in Mexico, Argentina, and the U.S., with a focus on three nongovernmental organizations: Catholics for the Right to Decide Mexico, Catholics for the Right to Decide Argentina, and Catholics for Choice in the U.S. Specifically, I examine how these organizations strategically employ saints and their hagiographies to advance abortion rights. In the wake of Pope John Paul II's "sustained programme of ... 'strategic canonization,'" Catholic feminists have demonstrated that the “many models of holiness” the pope sought to highlight to advance the Vatican's agenda can also be employed to challenge the Church’s official positions (Bennett, 2011, p. 441, p. 448). Ultimately, the use of saints in Catholic feminism points to the ways in which the Catholic tradition, perhaps paradoxically, sets the stage for Catholic feminism to emerge.