A spiritual theological giant has died. Rosemary Radford Reuther lived 85 amazing, creative years. Doubtlessly, she is one of the most prominent theologians in the last half century. She was popular in the sense of being very well-known---a scholar on the global scale. Ruether was popular in the sense that huge numbers of folks within the Catholic Church, the Christian Church and the interfaith tradition have been influenced by her thought. And she was popular in the sense that many people were put off by her theology and her faith claims for life. She was a divisive person because she was willing to take a stand and to work for change in her own faith tradition and in her own country.
I cannot claim Ruether as a friend. I have met her and been with her on occasion. She was an exquisite scholar whose primary focus in graduate school was also my focus. She was trained in the classics as an undergrad and had a graduate degree in historical theology. So she knew her history. And some people wished she has stayed with that history! Sometimes in the Catholic Church tradition is the sole truth, along with Scripture, of course. But I think it is fair to say that Ruether believed in a God who continued to inspire and reveal new things to people in the world. Ruether sought that God, knew that God and tried to obey that God. And she wrote about it.
Rosemary Ruether was a remarkable woman. She was not simply a scholar. She was a mother. As one writer put it, “Her academic accomplishments are all the more remarkable, as she was also raising three children during her graduate work, having married political scientist Herman J. Ruether in 1957.” I got a Ph.D., but I did it without having kids. They came later. True to form, Ruether went on to her teaching career on her own terms. Most of us are too timid to be our authentic self. See how Ruether did it.
I like the story of Ruether’s commencement as a faculty person. We are told she lost out on her first job. “After losing out on a job offer from a Catholic school in the 1960s because of an article she had written for The Washington Post Magazine titled "Why a Catholic Mother Believes in Birth Control," she learned her lesson: "Don't work for a Catholic institution," she told Conscience, the magazine of Catholics for Choice, on whose board she served for many years.” A number of lessons can be gleaned from this story.
In the first place Ruether must have known how tricky it would be to publish that article. As a woman Catholic theologian in the 60s, to come out in favor of birth control would not have been the way to impress one’s superiors. Ruether not only didn’t care. I suspect she took some delight in the publication of that piece. She combines that with the audacity to suggest that you should not work for a Catholic place. I could well imagine she would have figured out how to be successful, even if she did not get to teach. But we are all grateful that she did teach. And she did write. She wrote a huge amount over her career.
I have read a good bit of what Ruether wrote. She described herself in this way. “My Catholicism is the progressive, feminist liberation theology wing of Catholicism. That is the Catholicism that I belong to, that I am connected to around the globe…”. She did write from a feminist perspective. All this was new to me when I was in college and graduate school. Even though Quakers had always held women to be equal to me, nevertheless I knew that practically speaking women were not always afforded equal status. Quakers had been infected by our American culture, too. Often we need someone like Ruether to help us get back to where we say we want to be.
Ruether also wrote from the perspective of what was known as liberation theology. This particular kind of theology arose from the poor folks in Central and South America, who were mostly Catholic. Some theologians and bishops were alert to this spiritual experience and challenged the status quo in the Church to return to a gospel way of living. Theologians such of Boff, Gutierrez and many others developed a critiqued that was supported and furthered by Ruether. She also became involved in the Civil Rights movements of her time and worked for racial justice.
Whenever I ran into Ruether at a conference or somewhere, I was always impressed by how she combined her scholarship and her witness. She never came off as uninformed. She was so smart and well-read that no one ever saw her as a lightweight and to be dismissed. In fact, she usually seemed intellectually more impressive than any man who might be in dialogue with her. But she also seemed to be in touch with reality. Sometimes academics can be marginalized as pointy-headed and out of touch. Not Ruether.
It was easy to believe she might somehow be in cahoots with Jesus and somehow was on earth doing exactly what he had been doing. She usually was a challenge to the way folks thought about things and did things. She did not judge as much as challenge. I appreciated this about her. The good news is she wrote so much and it is still so timely, that her challenge can go forward even though her life has ended.
For that I am grateful and offer my appreciation for Rosemary Radford Ruether.
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