According to the wisdom of Indian Country on my own continent, it takes four generations to heal one act of violence. What if Americans had heard the Prophet in the Diner?
VI.
In 1978 Father Harvey Egan, pastor of St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Minneapolis, invites me to join him on a Sunday morning and give the homily or sermon to his congregation. This isn’t as surrealistic as it sounds. He has invited other laypeople, from union organizers to peace activists, and at least one woman, Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers. He also welcomes gays and lesbians into his congregation, supports peace movements from here to Latin America, and generally behaves in a way that he and many other Catholics believe Jesus had in mind. Though it’s just a coincidence that his church bears the name of a woman who was burned at the stake for being a heretic who wore men’s clothes (not for being a witch, as Hollywood told us), I think Father Egan enjoys inviting someone who’s been regarded as a jeans-wearing heretic, too. He himself prays to God the Mother to make up for centuries of Catholic priests and popes who pray only to God the Father.
Needless to say, Father Egan is not a favorite of the Catholic hierarchy, but he has the biggest Catholic congregation in the state. People want to come home to the church of their childhood without having to leave their adult selves behind. “There are two churches,” as Cesar Chavez, leader of the farmworkers, always said, “one of buildings and one of people.” Father Egan’s church is definitely the people. They love him; it’s his landlord who is the problem.
I’m worried about getting him into even more trouble, since I’m more of a pagan than a monotheist, but pagan just means nature, and Father Egan, too, believes that God is present in all living things. Since most American Catholics live, vote, and act more like the rest of the country than like the Vatican, I figure Father Egan knows what he’s doing. I decide to say yes.
When I arrive on our appointed Sunday, it is clear Minnesota right-wing groups have been working overtime. Cars are circling St. Joan of Arc with huge blow-ups of fetuses mounted on their roofs, and loudspeakers are blasting, “Gloria Steinem is a murderer, Gloria Steinem is a baby killer.”7 There are police to keep demonstrators at the distance required by law, but it is not a peaceful scene. It’s also familiar after being picketed over the years. Repetition can take the surrealism out of anything.
Once inside, Father Egan tells me not to worry, the positive response has been overwhelming. There is a waiting list, even after he doubled the capacity of this large church by holding two masses. The news that I’ll have to speak twice makes me more nervous than the presence of protesters.
As I wait alone in this cavernous space, stage fright hits in a very big way. A pulpit in a Catholic church is nowhere I ever expected to be. My heart thumps, my mouth gets dry, my mind goes blank, and I wish I were anywhere but here. Father Egan finishes introducing me, lifts his arms so his vestments billow out like a butterfly, and says with a mischievous smile, “Glory be to God for Gloria!” The congregation bursts out laughing—and so do I. Suddenly, I feel okay. Laughter is a rescue.
I’m not talking about the Catholic position on abortion. Most people here have their own ideas, and thanks to honest Jesuit historians and to Catholics for a Free Choice (now called Catholics for Choice), they may well know that the Catholic Church not only didn’t oppose abortion but actually regulated it until the mid-nineteenth century. It was made a mortal sin mostly for population reasons.8 Napoleon III wanted more soldiers, and Pope Pius IX wanted all the teaching positions in the French schools—plus the doctrine of papal infallibility—so they traded. Also, Catholicism is hardly alone among patriarchal religions in controlling women’s bodies. Patriarchy evolved as a way of giving men control over women’s bodies and reproduction. It seems more hopeful to talk about what came before patriarchy—and could show us a way beyond it.
So I talk about original cultures that saw the presence of god in all living things—including women. Only in the last five hundred to five thousand years—depending on where we live in the world—has godliness been withdrawn from nature, withdrawn from females, and withdrawn from particular races of men, all in order to allow the conquering of nature, females, and certain races of men. Though patriarchal cultures and religions have made hierarchy seem inevitable, humans for 95 percent of history have been more likely to see the circle as our natural paradigm. Indeed, millions still do, from traditional Native Americans here to original cultures around the world. The simple right to reproductive freedom—to sexuality as an expression that is separable from reproduction—is basic to restoring women’s power, the balance between women and men, and a balance between humans and nature. So when Father Egan prays to a female as well as a male god—and invites women as well as men to speak from the church pulpit—he is taking a step toward restoring an original balance.
My homily seems to go over just fine. People nod at the idea that when God is depicted only as a white man, only white men seem godly. They laugh at the idea that priests dressed in skirts try to trump women’s birth-giving power by baptizing with imitation birth fluid, calling us reborn, and going women one better by promising everlasting life. Indeed, elaborate concepts of Heaven and Hell didn’t seem to exist before patriarchy; you just joined your elders or kept being reincarnated until you learned enough. There is the laughter of recognition.
Altogether I sense curiosity and openness, not hostility or opposition.
As people leave, there is a long line to shake hands, to share comments, and to thank—even to bless—Father Egan and me. He asks me to call him Harvey. I think we both feel bonded by this experience of both opposition and support.
Outside, the cars with pictures of fetuses are still circling, and bullhorns are still blaring. Minnesota is home to the Human Life Center, a think tank headed by the delightfully named Father Marx, who often warns that “the white Western world is committing suicide through abortion and contraception.” His use of “white Western” is a big clue to the reasons for preserving patriarchy and controlling reproduction. But still, the parishioners streaming out of St. Joan of Arc don’t seem alarmed. This isn’t their first brush with local extremists. Harvey and I feel we have dodged a bullet.
In New York a few days later, I hear the news that Archbishop John Roach, Harvey’s superior in the Catholic hierarchy, has reprimanded Father Egan and apologized in public for him. This is a big deal. It’s all over the media, from the front pages of newspapers in Minnesota to national television.
The next time I see Harvey is two days later—on a TV screen. He is a disembodied head being interviewed in a Minneapolis studio by CBS Morning News. I am sitting in a studio in Washington, D.C. Neither our TV questioners nor the reprimanding archbishop ever quote anything I said, or cite any complaints from parishioners. The controversy is entirely directed at my being invited to give the homily at all.
I’m worried that I’ve endangered Harvey, but when I phone him, he seems to be his usual gentle and unrepentant self. From now on, he explains, he is supposed to invite speakers only from a list of names preapproved by the archdiocese. Later, I read his response to a reporter: “So far, they have found Mickey Mouse, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Peter Rabbit and Lawrence Welk.” I laugh—and stop worrying.
Then a couple of weeks later, I’m in my apartment between travels, sitting peacefully with my cat on my lap, drinking my morning coffee, and I pick up The New York Times. Above the fold on the front page, a place usually reserved for wars and presidential elections, there is a headline:
POPE FORBIDS HOMILIES BY LAYPEOPLE
Nothing in my life quite prepares me for feeling directly addressed by the pope. I try to talk myself down—after all, many laypeople have given the homily; maybe I’m just being paranoid—and call a reporter who covers the Vatican. He says that at a minimum, Father Egan and I have provided what is known in the media, and perhaps also in the Vatican, as a news peg.
After that, Harvey is almost always present whenever I vi
sit Minneapolis. He turns up because we really do like each other and I think also because he’s protecting me. Whether it’s a campus lecture or a YWCA benefit or a political rally, there he is, beaming from the sidelines with kindness, friendship, and his trademark enthusiasm. Though the controversy never quite goes away, he isn’t in the least put off by it.
He also works around the pope’s dictate by renaming the homily “a Sunday presentation” and inviting laypeople his congregation admires. He remains public about his support for “women and their participation in the liturgy,” for artificial birth control, for the right of conscience that actually does exist within Catholicism, and for peace and justice movements around the world. Even far from Minnesota, Catholics tell me he provides hope amid the hierarchy.
When Harvey retires in 1986, St. Joan of Arc is still the most popular Catholic church in his and many other states, with a thousand people attending every mass. Father Egan continues to write about everything from the injustice of current wars to the past and future of Catholic mysticism. In the Catholic Reporter, he publishes an article titled “Celibacy, a Vague Old Cross on Priestly Backs,” and explains that it started “only in 1139 when the church no longer wanted to be financially responsible for the children of priests.” He opposes the so-called Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, even though the Catholic bishops advocate it. “Prohibition was a disaster,” Harvey explains, and we shouldn’t be pushing for “another Constitutional amendment based on a moral conviction.”
In 2006, at the age of ninety-one, Harvey’s unique life comes to an end. It’s been twenty-eight years since he invited me to give the homily, yet whenever I’m in Minneapolis I always feel he’s just around the corner. I miss him.
In his honor, I try to be as courageous and outrageous as he was. I add to speeches something I learned from historians of religious architecture but left out of my homily: the design of many patriarchal religious buildings resembles the body of a woman. Think about it: there is an outer and inner entrance (labia majora, labia minora) with a vestibule between (an anatomical as well as architectural term) and a vaginal aisle up the center of the church to the altar (the womb) with two curved (ovarian) structures on either side. The altar or womb is where all-male priests confer everlasting life—and who can prove that they don’t?
This surrealism of patriarchy goes on after Harvey’s death. In 2012 the Vatican announces an investigation—not of the sexual abuse of children by priests that has been exposed as epidemic, but of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a group that represents 80 percent of the nuns in North America. They are accused of asking for greater decision-making roles in the church for themselves and for women in general, of “remaining silent” on homosexuality and abortion, of spending too much time working against poverty and injustice, of promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith,” and of supporting President Obama’s health care legislation that includes birth control. Indeed, the success of that health care bill seems to have been the last straw. Some members of Congress cited support for the bill by nuns as giving them the courage to vote against the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which was the major force opposing the bill. The Vatican investigation declared that bishops “are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” As the Bible says, “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.”
Even I am surprised to find this is so literal. The name of the Vatican body investigating the nuns is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the same body that conducted the Inquisition, which came to be known as the Holocaust of Women because as many as eight million women healers and leaders of pre-Christian Europe were killed by torture and burning at the stake over more than five hundred years. Chief among their sins was passing on the knowledge of herbs and abortifacients that allowed women to decide whether and when to give birth.
After a period of shock and conferring, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious issues a statement. It condemns “unsubstantiated accusations,” offers to go to the Vatican for a dialogue, and observes that just by following the teachings of Jesus, many in the church might also be called “radical feminists.” Also some of the nuns get their rebellious act together and take it on the road. They begin touring the country to highlight poverty and injustice and become known as the Nuns on the Bus. I start to see men and women of all descriptions wearing T-shirts that say, WE ARE ALL NUNS NOW!
If Harvey were alive, he would be wearing one, too.
—
A FEW YEARS LATER, I’m waiting for a friend on a snowbound street in Minneapolis. A skinny boy of twelve or thirteen, with a backpack almost as big as he is, is standing nearby. I realize he’s trying to get up the courage to say something, so I say hello. All in a rush, he says he knows I was at St. Joan of Arc Church, it’s where his family goes, he’s part of a group there called Awakening the Dreamer, and it’s trying to help indigenous tribes save the rain forest. He wants to go to Latin America one day, just like Father Egan did.
I look at this boy who wasn’t born yet when I spoke there—maybe his parents weren’t born yet either—and ask how he knows me or Father Egan. He says he read all about us on the big St. Joan of Arc website. I realize it’s a new day.
It turns out that his family are Hmong refugees from Laos, people who were first displaced by the Vietnam War. Though Minneapolis has been mostly blond and Scandinavian in its immigrant past, it now has become the American city with the largest Hmong population. Indeed, I’ve read that a Hmong woman has just been elected to the city council.
I ask him why he cares about such a long-ago event. He says he’s shy, his parents have a hard time with English, he is trying to help them and also to speak up in school. He read on the church website that I was the most protested speaker Joan of Arc ever had, and he wants to speak up for his family.
I tell him that he just took that power. Now no one can ever take it away. I also tell him that the rain forest is beautiful, like where his family came from, that Father Egan would be proud of him, and that I am proud of him, too. The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves.
As I watch him trudge off in the snow, I think for the millionth time: You never know.
COURTESY OF ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
WITH WILMA MANKILLER AND CHARLIE SOAP’S TRUCK, TAHLEQUAH, OKLAHOMA, 1991.
What Once Was Can Be Again
I used to think there were only two possibilities. The first was what many believed: that equality between males and females was impossible and contrary to human nature. The second was what many hoped: that equality would be possible in the future for the first time. After the Houston Conference and spending more time with women and men from Indian Country, I thought there might be a third: this balance between females and males had existed in the past, and for a few, it still did. There were people to learn from.
When new people guide us, we see a new country.
I.
It’s the fall of 1995. I’m at the Columbus, Ohio, airport, waiting at the baggage claim as instructed. I’m going to speak at a conference of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, a national group that teaches Native students science and engineering by using Native examples—thus allowing them to excel without feeling they have to abandon their history and cultures. Since Native students often prosper in cooperative rather than competitive classrooms—as do a lot of female students, regardless of where they come from—I’ve been asked to talk about the feminist movement and efforts to change classrooms into learning circles. Actually, boys, too, often do better when they aren’t always in a hierarchy, so the ideas of this group could improve education in general.1
After a few minutes of waiting, I notice a heavyset man in a windbreaker leaning against the wall. I walk over and ask if he’s waiting for me—and he is. Holding up a sign seemed like an invasion of privacy, he says, so he’s been waiting patiently for the crowd to thin out.
On the long drive to the co
nference center, we pass a turnoff with a small sign: SERPENT MOUND. I ask what this is. He doesn’t seem surprised, but he just explains that it’s an ancient earthwork, one of the many around this country. Some are shaped like enormous birds and animals, others are circles or pyramids, some are as tall as a three-story building and surrounded by a hundred smaller mounds you can see only from the air. This one is a snake about three feet high and a quarter of a mile long; the oldest surviving mound of its kind, maybe two or three thousand years old.
I’m into my third decade of traveling around this country, and I know none of this. I tell him my family comes from southern Ohio, yet the Serpent Mound is news to me. As if to make me feel better, he says he has friends who went to England to see Stonehenge, and when he asked if they would like to see even older sites here, they said no. He says this not with an edge but with a smile.
Because I ask, he tells me that the mounds around this country were spiritual centers or astrological observatories or burial sites. Most are pyramids, with openings inside for viewing solstices and equinoxes, but others are flat mounds at global magnetic points where seeds were spread out to make them more fruitful. All were centuries in the making, with digging up and moving tons of earth. Sometimes those basins were turned into lakes or fish hatcheries. Burial mounds tell us the most, because they contain seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, or obsidian from Wyoming, or carved mica from the Carolinas, or even the teeth of Rocky Mountain grizzly bears inlaid with pearls—also bowls and jewelry made of silver and copper from Canada, turtle shells from the Atlantic, carved semiprecious beads from Central America, and textiles from everywhere. They tell how far the ancients traveled or traded.
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