The #MeToo Movement is Knocking on the Vatican’s Door
A novel is never finished. After the book is written, edited for the umpteenth time and placed in the digital cabinet, waiting for discovery, the novel still churns, burns and begs for attention. During the writing of “Chanting the Feminine Down,” a two-year project of almost daily desk duty, the dreams kept coming in torrents, perhaps as a reminder to listen to the voice of my psyche and the anima within.
“Chanting” was not designed as a feminist novel, as an outside protest, though the seed was there from the very beginning in the guise of a dream. The dream showed Pope John Paul II slipping gently into the feminine earth while a female figure, turned away from the Catholic Mass by a priest, demands that the “Mother” figure should also be part of this ritual. The die was cast, in a way, as scores of dreams during that period, most about feminist themes, helped shape the novel from the inside. While “Chanting” moved through history and religion, documented in the centuries of church councils, the dreams are central to protagonist Colette McGovern’s psychological and spiritual growth.
I recognize my limitations as a white, British born male who is quickly aging here. For the last twenty years the psychology of Carl Jung has been central to my development. His psychology, as he stated many times, was intended as a tool for the second half of life, after the kids have gone and the job no longer offered salvation. If Freud’s focus was on the male, the animus principle, Jung’s focus was decidedly on the feminine, the anima. His charge to men was to look for the feminine in themselves rather than in women. Implicit in this charge, of course, is the warning about projection, need and power. Jung was telling guys like me to “grow up.” “Chanting the Feminine Down” is my attempt to do just that.
While writing the novel the #MeToo movement came into being and influenced my writing and my dreams. I had finished the novel for yet another time when I had a dream that put many issues in perspective. Here is how the dream appeared in the final version of the novel.
“That night Colette dreamed she had entered a vast space that looked like a museum with nun-like statues of the Black Madonna covered with hoods so their faces were barely visible. They were looking away. She then entered the interior of a palace entirely fashioned out of gold. She saw a gilded altar, gold plated organ pipes and piles of loose gold coins. The dreamer felt as if all the world’s gold had been melted down to create these religious icons, bedposts, living room furniture, picture frames and tinted windows. She felt no sense of prayer, worship or God. She found no spirit and no soul.”
I was thinking about this dream when I read in the March 2018 edition of “Women Church World,” a monthly women’s magazine of the Vatican newspaper, that nuns were treated by bishops and cardinals like indentured servants. While this observation is hardly news, it is highly unusual for an official Vatican publication to make this public. Lucetta Scaraffia, editor of the magazine, observed that “inside the church, women are exploited.”
In reference to this issue The New York Times wrote that the pope “was concerned about a chauvinistic mentality that persists in society that leads to acts of violence.” He continued: “And I’m concerned that in the church itself, the role of service to which every Christian is called, often in the case of women, slides into the role of servitude rather than service.”
Neither Ms. Scaraffia nor the nuns interviewed for the article mentioned earlier think change will be easy. After all, this is as much about money, power and the patriarchy as theology. But, as the editor told the Associated Press though, change won’t be easy. “We try to give a voice to those who don’t have the courage to say these words publicly.”
And these voices are coming to the forefront. In the U.S. there is the Women-Church Convergence, a coalition of “autonomous Catholic-rooted groups working to build social and ecclesiastical structures with shared power for everyone.” The groups represent a wide spectrum of communities: Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, Catholics for Choice, Sisters Against Sexism, National Coalition of American Nuns and many others.
Pope Francis’ differentiation between service and servitude no longer appears to be enough to appease women in the Catholic Church who represent “diverse feminist, faith-filled voices.” This is the church’s #MeToo, widespread, powerful and compelling.
In a sense “Chanting” became a feminist novel as forces of the protagonist’s psyche, such as dreams and other imaginings, took over and gave voice to the narrative. Toward the end of the novel Colette, who has become steeped in church history and overwhelmed by it, has an urge to give back to the church all the doctrine that demean and undervalue women. “I give you back the images richly praised at the councils and then flattened by doctrine so I can see with the eyes of mystic Marguerite Porete who was burned at the stake for imagining a feminine godhead.”
I encourage men to join this revolution. I have.
