In the wake of national controversy over the selection of Joan Chittister as the closing speaker for the National Catholic Education Association’s 2001 convention because of her views on women in the church, some speculated that Chittister would deliver an innocuous speech so as to avoid any further unpleasantness from church hierarchy.
But mincing words is simply not her style. Addressing the vast audience Apr. 20 in Milwaukee, Chittister did not hold back an ounce of conviction or vigor.
She began with a story of missionaries in the 1600’s. The map they were given showed California as an island. When the missionaries crossed California heading East, and found no water boundary, they reported back to Europe that the map was incorrect. But no one would believe them. The Spanish Crown said it must be the missionaries who were in the wrong place. So, “For 50 years,” she said, “those maps went unchanged because someone continued to work with partial information, assumed the inerrancy of tradition and then used authority to prove it.”
Chittister focused on inspiring Catholic school teachers to go back to their schools with new vision, but she did not limit that vision to the typical goals. She challenged them to ask the questions people don’t want them to ask, and to write new curricula, freshly connected to the Gospel.
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| CTA staffer Tara Dix greets Joan Chittister at the CTA booth in the NCEA convention exhibit hall. |
“Lead [your students] to scrutinize our own centers of power in a world where few of the privileged...cry out for the 30 million Americans without enough to eat, those three million without shelter...Remind them that it was on the road to Jerusalem that Jesus told the Pharisees, ‘Stop these ones from shouting and even the stones will cry out.’ Teach them that crying out for the other is, in the end, what spiritual leadership is all about.”
With controversy swirling around Chittister, CTA was a welcome presence for liberal-minded Catholics at the conference. CTA made and distributed hundreds of buttons with the words, “ I support Joan Chittister,” and the CTA logo. Even extra production could not satisfy the requests for “more Joan Chittister buttons!”
CTA booth draws crowds
Several conference attendees stopped by the CTA booth just to say, “I’m glad you’re here.” CTA staffers raffled off Joan Chittister books, collected hundreds of names for the CTA mailing list, and promoted the CTA/FutureChurch joint projects like the Celebrating Women Witnesses packet and the Mary of Magdala prayer services.
Efforts to ban or discourage attendance seem to have made the crowd bigger. NCEA leaders were expecting around 10,000 people. Final attendance neared 14,000.
One attendee said, “I wasn’t going to come, but after the Peoria and Pittsburgh dioceses banned their people from attending, I said to myself, ‘Nobody is going to tell me what to think,’ and I sent in my registration.” The reaction bodes well for attendance at CTA's national conferences in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Chicago later this year (ad below). Chittister will be the closing speaker at all three.
Much of the media coverage of the event focused only on Chittister’s comments on women and gender equality. In a letter to the editors of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Sr. Andrea Peters said their article had missed the point. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” she wrote, “if the other issues that Chittister mentioned — economic justice for all, ecological issues, how we treat the poor, those with AIDS, immigrants, the imprisoned, and globalization — would create such passion in our society that they would find their way to the headlines just as the issue of women in the church does?”
The full text of Chittister’s talk is found at www.eriebenedictines.org