Slowly, slowly I began to ask myself a different question: Could a woman really be a Catholic at all? The fullness of the faith was surely not meant for us. And that, according to Roman catechesis, was because God wanted it that way, and much as they might like, they could not do otherwise. So surely God, too, does not really want us. Not really. Not completely. So why would a woman be there?

The answer came out of the stuff of the question itself: God. I no more believed that God made women half human, half capable of grace, half available to the divine than I believed that no one else except Catholics went to heaven or that those who were not white were not fully human or that we could perpetrate whatever violence we chose on anyone else we named lesser than ourselves and call it holy. I did not believe in a God who created half the human race in order to reject it.

Until the church answers the women’s question in a way that makes the Gospel real and all of humanity human, the integrity of its sacraments, its theology, and its structures are all at stake.

It is the question that will not go away, for it makes every other dimension of the faith either true or false. Either baptism makes new people of us all or it does not. Either we are all receptacles of grace or we are not. Either incarnation redeems all of us or it does not. Either what the church teaches about the redemption of the flesh—all flesh—female as well as male—in Jesus is true or it is false. Either Jesus became flesh or he became only male. Either we are all responsible for the deposit of faith or we are not.

When the women’s movement emerged from the hibernation caused by the gain of the vote, women with questions were standing there waiting for it. When Pope John XXIII named feminism as one of the signs of the times, and a church that had forever denied women found itself with the biggest women’s question of them all, women were standing there waiting for the church, which had taught them the answer to their own question, to make real a theology that until now had been only theoretical. We were all waiting all our lives, whether we realized it consciously or not. And we are waiting still. I among them.

—from from the writings of Joan Chittister: ON WOMEN (Benetvision)