The Church of Patriarchy is Falling Down
I was a child of patriarchy, aka a good little Catholic girl, until I wasn’t. And despite the Confessional, a 16th century invention that offered a divine intercessor—a man, of course—who could pardon you with the wave of his patriarchal wand, my sins haunted me for many years.
During my formative years, I had two choices as a good little Catholic girl. I could grow up to be:
The virgin (think the Virgin Mary), or
The whore (think Mary Magdalene).
If I failed to conform to the proper role patriarchy dictated—guess which one that was?—the price of admission was guilt.
Mea Culpa
Up until my fifties, guilt was my constant companion. Little did I know then that this very personal feeling was a psychological tool used by a society, in this case patriarchy, to keep its subjects in check. Freud believed this and had no use for religion noted religious studies professor Robert C. Fuller in Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality.
It took seven years of deep therapy, and a graduate program that included patriarchy’s opposite—feminist theory and women’s prehistory—to show me this. That was when I saw how the beliefs of patriarchy had been mainlined into my personal belief system through the Catholic Church.
The Sins of the Fathers
What I never quite understood was why my Catholic upbringing had such an impact on my life and why the guilt never quite left. Then I read James Carroll’s The Truth At the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul, and understood why.
Carroll, a former Catholic priest and op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe, shows where the teachings of Jesus got off track. He also labels the Catholic Church for what it became: a power structure of patriarchy designed specifically to encourage misogyny and male supremacy.
The Catholic Church is one of patriarchy’s most powerful tools. That is because, notes Carroll, “…it claims nothing less than divine authority for itself.”
It wasn’t always like that, notes Carroll. The true teachings of Jesus related to love, compassion and healthy erotic pleasure. But when patriarchy’s power took over the pen, 1,000 years after Jesus’ death, the story was rewritten to include judgment, sin and sex as evil (and women the evilest of all). Hence, the Confessional.
But the church of patriarchy is falling down and with it all the institutions, religious and otherwise, that anchor it. Each of us has a role in this evolving story: to take back the narrative by examining our personal beliefs to be sure they are ours and not someone else’s.
M. Carolyn Miller, MA, designs narrative- and game-based learning. She also writes and speaks about the power of story in our lives and world. www.cultureshape.com