A nun’s letter to the new Pope for a Church without gender hierarchies

by Marinella Perroni

“Dear Brother Pope Leo”. Thus begins a long and passionate letter that, on the very day of his election, Sister Martha Zechmeister, of the Congregation of the English Ladies and professor of Systematic Theology at the Central American University (UCA) in El Salvador, wrote to the new Pope.

This is the kind of letter that cannot simply be summarized. Instead, it must be read and meditated upon, commented on and discussed throughout the Church, because although addressed to the new Pope, it is truly written for the entire Church.

Many Catholics, and not just women, are suffering as they witness how deep and wide the current schism has become: not the much-threatened schism stirred up by certain bishops clinging to a tradition stripped of history, but rather “the slow and unstoppable exodus of women (and men) who no longer find themselves at home in a Church who remains symbolically and structurally male”.

With evangelical clarity and frankness, Sister Martha calls on Pope Leo to do what he, of all people, should be especially equipped to do—because, as a canon lawyer, “he knows how much of the entire ‘apparatus’ of the Catholic Church is not simply due to ‘divine law’, but has grown historically, has been shaped by its context and its particular cultural situation; and how much, therefore, it can also be changed”.

Sister Martha, for her part, does not claim access to ordained ministry for herself, but even for her -as for many others- the origin of her vocation lay in “an evident, perhaps naïve trust that it would be only a matter of a few years before finding full fraternity in the Church; a Church in whom there would no longer be hierarchies based on gender”.

Today, fifty years after the Second Vatican Council gave rise to such “evident” hope, she and many others are instead forced to acknowledge that “the true scandal” is that “the representation of Jesus is still staged as a male privilege”.

These are clear and, precisely for that reason, courageous words, which are strengthened by the realization that women in the Church can no longer and must no longer remain silent. If they do so, then they will become complicit “in disfiguring the face of Jesus in the Church”.

These words are rooted in the gender consciousness that many Catholic women have developed over the years, and which leads them to reject continuing to be “well-behaved and conformist women who keep the system running”.

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