St Jerome’s University Lectures in Catholic Experience presents Dr. Tricia Bruce - Her Place in the Church: Gender, Power, and Authority in Contemporary Catholicism-Review by Cathie Pead
Attending this lecture, I heard my life story in the church played out before me. It was an experience of total recognition, and I am so grateful to have attended. Now I know I was not alone. In the heady days after Vatican II, upon completing my undergraduate degree in 1977, I felt a powerful call to ministry in the church. My emerging gifts were affirmed by my university chaplain and by others in the ecumenical campus ministry office in which the Catholic Campus Ministry was located. These trusted mentors encouraged me to venture south (US) to study pastoral theology. Father Sean Byron, chaplain and spiritual director, told me “Cathie, there are dozens of programs on offer in the US that are training lay people (and lay women!) in lay ministry!” He pulled out the NCR and opened it at the pages advertising such programs to make his point. I took my mentors’ advice and was blessed with the opportunity to study with some of the foremost theologians and scripture scholars of the 20th century. Just as importantly, I did so in a community made up of every vocation (secular priests, religious priests, vowed religious men and women, other lay people) from every continent (Latin America, Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa, as well as North America). It was such an alive and spirit-filled environment, I could not imagine anyone not wanting to prepare for ministry in this way. Innocently, perhaps, I returned to Canada believing this WAS the Church that I belonged to. Fast forward to the early 90’s and I was sensing strong forces pulling the church in a different direction. Listening to Dr. Bruce’s research, I now understand why. God is faithful even when human institutions are not. My path since leaving active ministry has been rich and spirit-filled and I have learned much about how God works in the world outside of the church. In these later days of my life, with new leadership in place in the person of Pope Francis, I have returned to ministry that is consistent with how I hear God speaking to me. I have no regrets- just sadness that in spite of official church teaching which says the church is the whole People of God, our leaders seem to have difficulty listening to the Spirit speaking through the vast majority of its members.
About the Lecture
Gender has long prescribed the roles of men and women in the Catholic Church, refereed formally via ordination and informally via social norms. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, Sociologist Dr. Tricia Bruce compares the prospects and parameters of women’s leadership at two moments in the Church: following Vatican II (six decades ago) and today.
About the Speaker
Tricia C. Bruce (PhD, University of California Santa Barbara) is a sociologist of religion with expertise in Catholicism and the contours of organizational, attitudinal, and generational change. Her award-winning books and reports include Parish and Place; Faithful Revolution; American Parishes; Polarization in the US Catholic Church; and How Americans Understand Abortion.
Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal; Time Magazine; Science Advances; Review of Religious Research; U.S. Catholic Historian; and more. She is President-Elect of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, Past-Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion Section, and an affiliate of the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society.
You can watch Dr. Bruce’s lecture here.