The Wages of Tolerance - Catholic Women Who Stay

(Hat tip: FreeRepublic)

From Boston College Magazine:

The wages of tolerance
Catholic women who stay

By Alice McDermott

I could no more stop being Catholic than I could stop being a native New Yorker or of Irish descent, my parent's child or my children's mother. Being Catholic is a condition of my being. It might as well be genetic. Catholicism is my faith, my culture, my heritage. The Church is my social community and my spiritual sanctuary. It is the source of the very language with which I contemplate life, and death, give thanks, seek comfort, define and comprehend the substance of things hoped for.

To leave the Church for another—less sexist, less maddening—religious institution would save me a lot of anguish but also place me in what would feel like a permanent state of exile. There would be, for the rest of my days, a lingering disappointment, a loss of authenticity, a sense of failure—the failure of my love for the Church, as well as the failure of the Church itself to hear the voices of those who love it.

Simply put, women choose to stay because we love our Church. Because it is and will always be our Church. But to say we cannot leave does not eliminate our anguish as we stay. Rather, it is our longing to stay in the Church that makes our appeals for change all the more urgent. It is our full understanding of how losing the Church would diminish us that fuels our passion for its reform.

I—and many of us, I believe—will not leave the Catholic Church. What I, and many of us, fear is that the Catholic Church will leave us.

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My Comments:
This woman is rather presumptuous to believe that she speaks for all Catholic women. The sad thing is, she probably really does believe that all Catholic women think just like she does - that all Catholic women seek to "change" and "reform" the Catholic Church in the same fashion she would like to.

It reminds me of the time when I was having a political discussion with a female local government employee who was very liberal. At one point in the conversation, she looked over at Sarah and asked, "How can you stand him?", assuming that, as an "oppressed" victim of the male patriarchy, Sarah must be liberal, too. The woman was quite incredulous when Sarah answered, "Are you kidding? I'm more conservative than Jay is."