by Massimo Faggioli*
I have lived for seventeen years in the United States, which has involved family life, church life, and academic life. What has been most enriching, but also most challenging, are my mental habits and expectations. It has been the presence and contribution of women, and the way this contribution manifests itself (which is more radically than in Catholic Europe). It is not something a Catholic scholar of my generation could naturally carry with them from Italy.
I have seen this foundational and original contribution from my female colleagues who teach theology and religious studies at a Catholic university, but also from female students. Most of whom take our courses as required classes in order to graduate in any discipline at a Catholic university. This requirement often means students are less interested in the subject. However, it also means we get to hear and read from them a broader range of experiences and perceptions of Catholicism in the United States.
The experience of theology I have learned from my students is no less important than what I have learned from my colleagues and from the theologians who formed them. The issue of the role of women in the Church is, in their eyes, the number one issue, because it reveals (and more so than any other issue) the Church’s potential for difference, a potential that exists but is not always realized, in contrast to the mass economic and cultural system. Pope Francis addressed this in his most recent encyclical, Dilexit Nos, when he spoke of the need for “all actions to be placed under the ‘political dominion’ of the heart”.
Women’s theology is no longer simply a matter of liberal or progressive approaches, but of the Church’s ability to respond to the new revolutions, even the industrial one, as Pope Leo XIV said in his May 10 speech to the cardinals. The theology of women is developing, not by chance, with particular energy in a country shaped from its very founding by a vision of social relations as raw power dynamics between peoples and ethnicities, between social classes, and also between men and women. This aspect of America can be studied in books, but it is also seen in the eyes of young women who know that their future is determined -and more so than men’s- by those same power relations.
*Professor in the Department of Theology, Villanova University (Philadelphia, USA)