Those who participate in Women's Eucharist value the inclusiveness of each other--without regard to race, class, ethnicity, and religion--and especially as a counterweight to the gender inequities of the Church. Consequently, for some WE is a refuge, for others it is a Church substitute, and yet for others it is a religious add-on to their regular Church worship.
Dierks says that WE is a gathering among friends who operate well without a hierarchy or the specialization of roles. In fact, friendship was the most frequent response to Dierks' survey question about why people joined Women's Eucharist. Frankly, she points out, friendship is the very model of relationship that Jesus preached to his disciples.
Rosemary Radford Ruether, professor emerita of feminist theology at Pacific School of Religion and GTU, recognizes the implications for friendship motivations in WE by calling it a "reapportioned theology" or a "de-clericalizing" of the Church that "facilitates the taking back of ministry, word, and sacrament by the people"Eucharist is not an objectified piece of bread or cup of wine that is magically transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Rather, it is the people, the ecclesia, who are being transformed into the body of the new humanity, infused with the blood of new life."
And that brings up the issue of transubstantiation, the changing of the bread and wine into Jesus' body and blood. Of course, only an ordained priest can perform transubstantiation during the Mass, however, the WE women are unconcerned about this for their service. First of all, since non-Catholic women attend the service, they would have a difficult time identifying with transubstantiation. Secondly, as Sister Beth says, if transubstantiation really happens in a traditional liturgy, then it must happen in the Women's Eucharist as well, because "Jesus Christ is so inviting, I couldn't imagine him being exclusive." Thirdly, transubstantiation is not the reason the women gather for WE.
As radical as the WE group may seem in the eyes of some practicing Catholics, none of the WE women expresses an interest in breaking off from the Church to form a woman's church because the group is not interested in institutionalizing itself. The members prefer to keep the group small and home-bound because numbers don't matter to them. "The Cathedral" WE has anywhere from three to 19 women attend its services and it "holds a space" for those absent.
Women's Eucharist also defies definition or recognition by the official Church, but that, too, matters little to its participants because they are simply no longer waiting for institutional approval or sanction. They believe that inclusion for all the People of God should be the issue for Church, so they are simply giving up their attempts to work within the structure.
"If they [the Church hierarchy] can't hear us," says Sister Beth, "we've got to look out for ourselves."
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