Women theologians demand Church respect at Nairobi conference
Communications Network for Catholic Sisters / Youtube screenshot
Women theologians are treated as amateurs ‘dabbling in theology’, as if their work doesn’t have the same impact as that of male scholars, said Sr Mumbi Kigutha.
Theologians debated the place of women in the Church during a conference in Nairobi, with female participants protesting at what they said was their relegation from discussions.
Addressing the second African Women Theologians Conference taking place at the Hekima University College (HUC) in the Kenyan capital, Sr Mumbi Kigutha CPPS said complained that women theologians, and by extension all women, are still treated as “amateurs” in the Church.
“Whenever a woman brings up a point, people just go over it as if she didn’t say anything, but when a man brings it up, more attention is paid to it. As a woman, you’re not taken seriously,” said Kigutha, the director of the project Watawa wa Taa – meaning “Consecrated Women of Light” in Kiswahili – which convened the conference with HUC.
She said women theologians are treated as amateurs “dabbling in theology”, as if their work doesn’t have the same impact as that of male scholars.
She complained that women face obstacles getting academic positions, and that African women theologians are systematically locked out of opportunities to publish and engage with other theologians.
However, in his homily at the conference’s opening Mass on 3 September, Archbishop Philip Arnold Subira Anyolo of Nairobi insisted that women play a central role in the Church, contrary to the perception that it is patriarchal.
“I think of the Church as the Mother Church,” the archbishop said. “The inspiration of whoever first used that title touches us deeply, so that we may reflect on where we are, and feel at home where we are. It is a very big word: Mother Church.”
He continued: “The theology of the Mother Church is motherly. This way, the Church is not only patriarchal, it is also matriarchal.”
“God made man and woman in His image,” Archbishop Anyolo said. “The Church cannot be one without the other.”
He said women form the majority of Mass-goers and had “a very strong voice” in the life of the Church, including a vital role from it beginning. “Who can talk about the Church without Mary, Mother of God?” he asked. “Nobody can.”
Addressing the twenty-sixth International Mariological Marian Congress in Rome on 4 September, the secretary general of the Synod of Bishops Cardinal Mario Grech called for a greater role for women in Church leadership, observing that “the theme of women emerged forcefully from the synodal process, from the first to the last stage”.
He cited the words of the synod’s Final Document: “There are no reasons that prevent women from assuming leadership roles in the Church; what comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped.”
Cardinal Grech warned that “it is easy to rely on traditional arguments to defend a status quo that would perpetuate a clerical model of the Church, or to demand that the Church align itself with the tenets of contemporary culture”, calling for a distinct approach.
The congress on 3-6 September took the theme “Jubilee and Synodality: A Church with a Marian Face and Practice”, and concluded with an address by Pope Leo.
He told the 600 participants that a “Marian” Church “continually deepens its understanding of the hierarchy of truths of the faith, integrating reason and emotion, body and soul, the universal and the local, the individual and the community, humanity and the cosmos”.
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