Is there such thing as a Catholic feminist?

My sister-in-law and I were joking around recently about discovering that we practice Child-Led Weaning. You know, feeding your baby real table food when they are ready for solids, rather than formula, cereal, and mush? That’s what I grew up with, so it seems funny that there is a special label for it, and people selling books about it. I mean, I feel like I could sum up how I introduce solid foods in about two paragraphs, if I needed to.

But on one of my mom groups, I’ve witnessed a woman agonizing about what was and wasn’t safe for her to give her son. The whole idea that a baby won’t automatically choke and die if given something other than pablum was completely new to her, and she didn’t have all the years of observation, experience, and instinct that I have from growing up with this as just-the-way-we-do-things. Even though mothers have been feeding their children without manuals since the dawn of time, for this particular mother it wasn’t readily or obviously apparent how to reconcile this way of feeding her children with her desired identity as a “Good, Responsible Mother.” She just knew that the way she’d always assumed things would be didn’t seem like enough.

It’s similar, I guess, to wondering why we need Catholic Feminists; if your experience of Catholicism has always promoted women’s dignity, those principles may seem natural to you–it IS natural, and it’s good to have that understanding flow organically and inevitably outwards. Catholic means “universal,” so there’s a sense in which every good comes under and flows out from that fullness of truth.

So I can understand thinking “why do you need a label or a movement for THAT” when you encounter something that feels utterly natural and normal to you. The tricky part is understanding that what you accepted long ago, without really much effort, might have been a huge accomplishment and battle for someone else to realize and accept.

Even if something seems inevitable and organic and natural to you–whether a parenting practice or the inherent worth and dignity of women’s voices and work–it’s good to be open to the reality that there are going to be people out there who need the connection made explicitly; who need to hear and be shown how a specific idea or practice doesn’t contradict the greater picture, but fits within it.

 And those people, who have won that realization and connection the hard way, through fighting and struggling their way through to it? Don’t begrudge them the right to claim it visibly, as an ensign and standard to call others in.