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3 The Seventh Annual Graduates' Association Lecture: pure Malone magic On Friday, November 15, 1991, the Seventh Annual Graduates' Association Lecture was held in Siegfried Hall. Some 200 people assembled to hear well-known lecturer, catechist and teacher Dr. Mary Malone speak on "Women's Voices in the Catholic Mosaic: Design for a New Creation." With the grace, wit, and insight that have made her a much-sought after speaker and a distinguished scholar, Dr. Malone set about capturing the minds and hearts of her eager audience. She began by drawing attention to the title of her lecture and what it suggests. "It implies," she said, that "the story of our Catholic past is multi-faceted, that women have featured extensively there ... that their voices can offer us clues to our creative survival, and that the recovery of these voices can bring about a new creation in our Church." It also means, she pointed out, "that men and women in the Roman Catholic tradition have had different histories and that we have been flying on one wing, so to speak, or, to use an image of Pope John Paul II, breathing with one lung. ..." Malone called attention to the historical gap that has resulted from this "half-story". She noted that our history has not only been "falsely defined," but that this "false past" was created by way of a "serious political and religious decision". In effect, this decision has created a history of omission, born as it was of a mindset that claimed "what women did and said was insignificant and that we could know the workings of God, and the history of our salvation, without paying any attention whatsoever to God's workings in and with women." Malone then introduced her audience to some of the women who, throughout the ages, had given lie to the assumption that women had not made their own significant contribution to the history of our salvation. The task of uncovering the work and the voices of these women is an essential one, Malone told her audience, because these are the key to renewing our present life of faith and community within the Church. "We have constructed a false past for ourselves," she said. "The present Catholic Church is standing on very shaky foundations because they have never been more than half built. When the foundations are finished, when the building is on a more even keel, when God's will, expressed in the life and teachings of Jesus, is taken seriously in regard to women, then our Mary Malone captivates audience at the Seventh Annual Graduates' Association Lecture. (Photo: Courtesy UW Central Photo) present shaky structure may, in fact, be renewed. This does not imply," said Malone, "that women are holier than men, or more Christian than men," but, she pointed out, it does imply "that the future of the Roman Catholic tradition - in fact the whole of Christianity - depends on recovering both its lungs." "there are enormous feats of imaginative reconstruction demanded of women." With that as her starting point, Malone then highlighted five contexts - "out of dozens of possible contexts" - that represented an extraordinarily active response of women to the Christian message as it was preached at particular points throughout history. Each of these contexts also highlighted the "response of the institutional church of the time to an outpouring of women's spiritual energy." The five areas that served as the focus of Malone's reflections were the biblical context, in particular the recovery of the voices of Mary of Magdala, and Mary the Mother of Jesus; the monastic context, the dramatic rise in the number of women who chose lives of virginity as monastics; the mystical context, an area in which much research is taking place in an attempt to unearth new translations and interpretations of the writings of these marvelous women of history; the context of Post-Trent activism, or the legacy of the "militant virgins", women like Mary Ward, who proposed new alternatives to enclosed female monasticism, and who fought for new ways of living community as women; and finally, the context of Christian feminism, the ongoing efforts of those women who "work to make us aware of the many ways in which patriarchy has hindered and continues to hinder our response to the Gospel." Having outlined several contexts in which women's voices had sounded, but often went unheard, Malone pointed out the direction we must take as Church, and as community, if we are to design a new creation. Women's voices, she said, must be "heard, not by accident, but by design." She pointed out that there are "enormous feats of imaginative reconstruction demanded of women to move beyond the patriarchal ordering of ritual everything from the sacred ritual space to the sacred ritual language and music." We must make an effort " 'to see through' the exclusionary symbols to the powerful richness of the Eucharistic symbols themselves - bread and wine broken and shared." There is "no need," added Malone, "to remind many women of the sacrificial dimensions of Eucharist." Malone concluded her lecture by calling on women to make the Eucharist a celebration of the "consciousness of new ecclesial community," or, as she put it, "the gathering of outcasts and strangers in 'anticipatory fidelity,- to use a term coined by Roman Catholic theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether. "Medieval women mystics claimed the Eucharist as their own and changed forever Eucharistic devotion. We need to do the same," said Malone. Such a task is not about the issue of ordination, she noted, "but about the dimensions of sharing and thanksgiving which need to be reclaimed and celebrated as the core of Christian life." If we can do this, said Malone, we can be assured that "God will be pleased with us." Cassette tapes of Mary Malone's lecture are available for $6.00 each through the St. Jerome's Centre for Catholic Experience, (519) 884-8110, ext. 242.