Sorority: being there while standing on the threshold

In this time that we consider as a “threshold”, while we question how and whether to feel the Church and search for different spaces, we are accompanied by a biblical verse from the Book of Wisdom: “Those who rise early for her will not labor in vain; they will find her sitting at their doors” [6:12-16].

We are sisters of the Order of Sorority, a female life project that aims to make the presence of women in the Church and in society effective and visible (art. 4 of the Rule). The Order was founded in Mantova in 1996 by Ivana Ceresa.

Ivana, a woman, Christian, feminist, and theologian, defined it as “a group of women called by the Holy Spirit to live the Christian faith according to the female difference within the local Catholic Church” (art. 1). “From the moment we gather among ourselves”, she was clear at the time of the founding of the Order, “we distinguish ourselves from the neutral church, which is actually the church made and managed only by me. We do what secular feminism did and still does, which is an operation of separation that is, temporarily gathering only among women. In so doing, we recognize ourselves as believers only among women, and in this way, we attempt an exodus, a departure from the sexism of the ecclesial reality as it is”.

Ivana Ceresa recounts that at a certain point she experienced the need for a transition. “To continue living within the church, I had to create the Sorority, in the sense that the support of other women who experienced the church like me became essential. We experience it in a dramatic, conflictual, and at the same time deep and necessary way, as I do too”.

A crucial turning point was a request made to the bishop for recognition of the Sorority, as in the Church; after all, what is ecclesiastically recognized is real. In the founder’s view, the request was part of the strategy to establish the female symbolic; recognition meant that the Church acknowledged her male nature and desired her birth in the female. Bishop Egidio Caporello of Mantova recognized the Sorority in 2002.

Ivana Ceresa had to deal with misunderstandings, resistance, and misinterpretations—both within and outside the group—regarding ecclesiastical recognition. She maintained the repeatedly affirmed conviction that the vision of a believer pushes the desire to root oneself in the reality they believe in to its fullest extent. Not to obtain permission to exist, but to give birth to a female Church, which is still occupied by the male symbolic order, while aiming to be a thorn in the side of the Church herself.

Over these thirty years, many events have occurred. Today in Italy, there are five Sororities in the Mantova area, one in Milan, and three are emerging in Tuscany. A history where listening to and exercising female authority has nurtured and preserved relationships among women in a search between mysticism and politics in that liminal space where we find ourselves with various positions. Among us, there are sisters who have loved the Church, who feel gratitude for what they have experienced and still love it. They collaborate with a critical and attentive eye where they feel it is possible to open up new perspectives, fissures, and gestures; sisters who have left the Church; sisters who have distanced themselves, no longer recognizing themselves in tired liturgies, in complicity over abuses and mistakes; and sisters of other faiths who contribute to and enrich the common search for each individual’s spirituality. The diversity of our search has also led us through difficult times of struggle and misunderstandings, as if standing on the threshold in dialogue among differences had become too challenging, as if hope had waned. We have been sustained by the Ruah, the divine breath, which has propelled us like the prayer we say together in our meetings.

Come, Ruah / Spirit who renews / breath of life, breath that nourishes our heart / divine energy, which gives wings to our desire / hand that supports us in times of struggle / light of wisdom, water of health, fire of energy / open our eyes so that we may understand to which hope you have called us / and safeguard the treasure you have given us. / Tender Consoler, fire of passion who lifts us on eagle’s wings and breathes upon dry bones / pour upon us, your sisters, your breath of life. / Come to aid our weakness / scrutinize the depths of our hearts / draw us to you in truth, peace, joy, and love.

We have just completed a journey through prayer, titled Pregare donna [Praying as a Woman], which has been a practice of relationship and openness in various directions—a dialogue with theologians, scientists, poets, women from different faiths and spiritualities in the region, where we have created new liturgies related to the body and the symbolic, while being aware that today demands finding bolder words and gestures.

In the introduction to Ivana Ceresa’s book Mie carissime sorelle - Scritti sulla Sororità [My Dearest Sisters - Writings on Sorority], Luisa Muraro, a philosopher of the thought of difference, writes, “The practical response of a personal gain of freedom with a commitment to create a world and a Church, which the Sorority aims to achieve, characterized the beginnings of Christianity”. 

If it is true that we are still in the early stages of female freedom in the Church, the challenge remains for women to return to and revive those beginnings.

By Martina Bugada
Order of Sorority, Mantova