Creating Communities of Justice and Peace: Sacramentality and Public Catholicism in the United States

Abstract

This essay situates women’s religious leadership in the contested site of who and what counts as the authoritative face and practice of public Catholicism. It examines political praxis by U.S. Catholic women religious as a refreshing resource for a constructive feminist theology of the public church. Drawing on Vatican II theologies about the church’s social role, feminist and womanist theologies of sacramentality, and the Nuns on the Bus tours between 2012 and 2014, this essay argues that the U.S. public church bears sacramental significance when it re/creates the public, when it prophetically witnesses to an alternative political reality or creates (or births) a new world that better signifies a more interconnected, interdependent U.S. body politic rooted in solidarity. Examining concurrent activism by U.S. nuns and US Catholic bishops’ shows that what makes the public church public consists in the ability to imagine and create communities of justice and peace.