Women-Church Convergence Members Respond To Challenging Times With Spirituality and Calls for Justice

For Immediate Release: April 6, 2017

Women-Church Convergence Members Respond To Challenging Times With Spirituality and Calls for Justice

Women-Church Convergence (W-CC), a coalition of autonomous Catholic-rooted feminist organizations, gathered in Chicago last weekend for its annual meeting and expressed its extreme dismay about the present United States administration and its destructive policy positions on many urgent issues.

W-CC held a public panel in conjunction with its annual meeting entitled “Feminist Spirituality and Activism in Challenging Times,” in which five inspiring women of faith shared their perspectives on intersectional activism since the election. Speakers on the panel included Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D., a feminist theologian who is co-founder and co-director of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER), Sonja Spoo, Domestic Program Associate at Catholics for Choice (CFC), Laura Singer, an activist for reform in the Catholic church working with the Women's Ordination Conference and Call To Action, and Lauren Robinson and Violet Ricker, both current students at McCormick Theological Seminary.

Throughout their annual meeting, W-CC members shared their distress regarding current U.S. policies including those related to environmental degradation, limiting access to women's health and reproductive justice, the undermining of public education, xenophobia, rollback of protections for transgender students, support for militarization at the expense of critical human services, and regressive tax policies which enrich a few and impoverish millions of others. W-CC shared deep concern of the administration's wholesale denial of facts and truth, which demonstrate a profound disrespect for human intelligence and lack of integrity.

W-CC also criticized the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) for abandoning the social justice commitments of our faith, and for failing to advocate for the overall common good. It decried the USCCB's focus on abortion and perceived threats to "religious liberty" at the expense of other pressing issues.

Further, W-CC pointed with alarm to the concentration of self-described Catholics around the present leadership, people with a limited grasp of essential Gospel values.

Women-Church Convergence envisions a society of justice, equality and the inclusion of all; honest, ethical, environmentally sensitive and democratic.

It pledges anew to work for such a society with all people of goodwill.