Chapters: Mujeres para el diálogo, “Reflections for a Church of Liberation”, 1979

Much analysis has been done in Christian groups, as preparation for the CELAM Assembly in Puebla, about the situation of the Latin American countries and about the responsibility that the Church has there.

We will not repeat what has already been said.

In this paper we would like to point out one aspect of this reality which frequently is not explicit and which, therefore, is never understood in all its profundity. We refer to how the present systems relate to women and how women are situated within them.

In our Latin American countries the present systems use different aspects of the one determined ideology in order to claim the loyalty and support of the members of both sexes, and they reserve different methods for the situation of each of them. At the present moment the socio-economic system counts of women as an army of cheap manual labor in the mechanics, electronics and food industries and in gathering the harvest; just to give some examples: they use women as a reserve work force to adjust in a convenient way to the tides of growth and depression proper to the system; it makes them responsible for the daily renewal of the workers energies for the needs of capitalism, without giving them a salary. The drug industries use the bodies of all women and above all those of third world women to experiment on them and to increase their profits. The governments traffic with their bodies in order to advance the politics of population. All of them try to manipulate their mentality and their identity with false images of what they should be as women: virtuous but sexual, submissive, feminine, and wrapped in the privacy of the family, that is to say, apolitical–in order to increase sales and to support and reinforce the present structures.

It has been said that the Church evangelizes specific “men” who live in determined socio-economic and political structures. It would be better for us to say that the Church evangelizes specific women and men, who besides living different realities of the social class to which they belong, play different sexual roles. On this basis we also find different ways in different systems (education, sex, work, etc.) of a given social class.

And how has the Church acted in the face of these different situations of women in society? There are many things to be said. Perhaps the best way of summarizing her position is to define woman principally as wife and mother. (The preliminary Document of the CELAM Assembly speaks of women only when the family is mentioned). The official Church has encouraged the enclosure of women in a world without change and, therefore, has marginated them from the process of transformation.

Marlene Dixon says in “The Subjugation of Women Under Capitalism: The Middle Class Morality”[1]:

“The principal definition of women as wife-mothers has been the reason of the curse of class consciousness and of the meager political development of women workers, because, when they work, they are identified more as wives (or future wives) than as salaried workers. Consequently, women relate with their husbands and not with capital, with their children and not with their struggle with capital; with their sexuality and with the subjugated world in which they are passive, dependent and excluded. The woman of the house–alienated and isolated, the wife-mother–scab, the apolitical passive and submissive industrial worker are in part the result of the ideological subjugation of women to middle class morality, reinforced by masculine prejudices and by the reality of over exploitation of women … Historically, this subjugation has produced consciousness of the very low class and of resistance to political development. To refuse to face the reality of the oppression of women is good only to perpetuate the desires of capital: not to have to fear the militancy of the feminine half of the proletariat.”

On the other hand to deny them the juridical participation in almost all the functions of the direction of the Church and to give them little presence in the commissions and official congregations, the Church has prevented women who still consider themselves members from effectively making over their condition as much inside as outside the structure.

As a consequence of this, if we want women, at some time, as men, to understand the Gospel as a truly freeing reality, we should first capture deeply the reality that they are living now. We should understand how they perceive the world from the place of “the other”, the one who is not at the center but almost always on the periphery; with the sentiments of acceptance and courage, and with the alienation that has always been considered proper to minority groups which have been permitted little opportunity to determine their own future.

At this moment we would like the official Church to listen to the voice of women in order that the ecclesiastical structures be a support for them in order to find new forms of integral liberation for themselves and for all people.

[Translated to English in 1979]

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Women in Dialogue: Inter-American Meeting. Notre Dame, Catholic Committee on Urban Ministry, 1979

January 27 to February 13, 1979, in Puebla, México, gathered the bishops of the Latin American and Caribbean Roman Catholic Church for a conclave that would decide the future of Christian commitments on the continent. Meanwhile, “an international group of Catholic women met for three intensive days in Cuernavaca, Mexico [… working] over the preliminary Working Document the bishops would be using. The sessions continued in Puebla, during which many more Latin American women participated in the dialogue” recalls Ruth McDonough in the Forward, “We named ourselves ‘Mujeres para el Diálogo’.” That group bussed to Puebla city to intervene and make sure that women would not be ignored in the episcopal conference as they had been in the past.

The English translations here were the work of The [U.S.] National Assembly of Women Religious, in collaboration with the Catholic Committee on Urban Ministry, who published this text for English-reading audiences who might join in solidarity with the women of the Latin American and Caribbean churches facing violence on all fronts.

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