When I was in office, I helped organize a Day of Prayer for an End to Violence Against women. Several groups, including Catholic Charities of Oklahoma, participated in this. My bishop, Archbishop Beltran, stepped right up to participate. We got the leaders of all the organized denominations in Oklahoma to come to the capitol for a lunch and sign a pledge against violence against women. Archbishop Beltran authored a pastoral letter on the human rights of women. I have the greatest respect for this good man.
I did all this because I had spent my entire adult life advocating against violence against women. I had passed so many laws on the topic that I honestly do not remember them all. But nothing changed. One in four girls is still a victim of sexual assault. The number one cause of death for pregnant women is still that they are murdered. Rapes and murders are still the entertainment on true crime shows. Girls and women still live in fear of violence everywhere they go.
I managed, because of the forgiveness and love that I had received in the Church, because of the healing power of the Eucharist, because of the truth and constancy of the Church’s teachings, to stay the course with gratitude and peace in spite of these things. I stayed the course even when I realized that nothing had changed or would change.
It was and is possible to ask a bishop or bishops to make a statement against violence against women and get them to do it. But that’s where it ends. It’s just a statement. It is necessary to go back, repeatedly, to keep reminding them of the issue. Because as soon as you stop reminding them, they drop it and are done with it.
I saw this and I knew it. I knew nothing had changed.
I love the Church. I sill believe what the Church teaches. I go at night and sit alone with the Eucharist because He is there and I am healed and comforted by that Presence. I have, throughout this, never felt any distance between me and the Holy Spirit. I wish with all my heart that the bishops would take a stand against violence against women that is commensurate with the massive problem that it is. But I don’t believe that will ever happen, and it tears at me.
The distance between me and the bishops who find violence against women a nothing much that is just a bothersome whiney woman thing and not important like men stuff, is a pain and a sorrow that wears away at my faith in the fidelity of the Church to Christ.
I am a believing Catholic who does not believe that the institutional Church and the most of the men who run it really care if women and girls are raped, tortured and murdered. I’ve struggled with this for a long time, and the struggle has rendered me mostly mute. I haven’t been able to write because of the inner conflict involved.
If being Catholic means cherishing and believing in the sacraments and believing what the Church teaches, then I’m Catholic. But if it means believing that the bishops as a group actually care about the female half of the people entrusted to them, then I am not Catholic.
I know bishops who are good men. I know bishops who are good people and sincere Christians. But as a group, they have failed the women and girls in their flocks with their utter indifference and disregard for the endemic, socially-accepted violence directed against them.
The Church’s misogyny is not of Christ. I do not accept it. I do not believe it. And I will not be governed by it.
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