Abstract
This chapter looks at social activism among Roman Catholic women as a form of spirituality. Whereas there have always been some Catholic religious orders that have stressed activism within their rules of life, historically lay spiritualities have been preeminently devotional, at least until the rise of the Catholic Worker movement. The women in Holtmann’s sample, however, are primarily post-Vatican II Catholics, who are used to greater democratization within the life of the church – including spirituality. For some of these women, social action, particularly in terms of social change, has led to contradictions between their spirituality and Catholic social teachings. Some of the women in Holtmann’s sample show that spirituality does not always turn inward, hence that it is wrong to assume that everyone who speaks of him- or herself as “spiritual, not religious” is necessarily avoiding engagement with the larger world in spiritual terms. At least some of the women Holtmann has interviewed consider engagement with the world as a direct result of their spirituality.
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Notes
- 1.
In the nineteenth century the Canadian government used church-run residential schools to assimilate aboriginal children into society. The government provided the facilities and resources, and churches provided the teachers and staff. Sixty percent of the schools were run by the Catholic Church. Details of the mistreatment of students surfaced, and the schools were closed by the 1960s. Today, knowledge of widespread physical and sexual abuse, overcrowding, poor sanitation and lack of medical care for the students have resulted in allegations of cultural genocide by First Nations people in Canada.
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Holtmann, C. (2011). Workers in the Vineyard: Catholic Women and Social Action. In: Giordan, G., Swatos, Jr., W. (eds) Religion, Spirituality and Everyday Practice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1819-7_10
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