“Add Teresa of Avila and Stir”—Why Adding Women Does Not End Exclusion Mechanisms in (Theological) Science

Abstract

Knowledge production is by no means neutral; it perpetuates existing presuppositions and exclusions. Within Catholic theology, this is accentuated by particular structures and institutions. In this article, I will show that exclusions are not changed by simply ‘adding women’. I will proceed in four steps: First, I will examine the epistemic preconditions of knowledge production. Second, I will highlight concrete examples that show how several factors can change our reconstruction of theological history. This section will be organized around gender understandings in the premodern/Reformation era. Third, I argue for a specific understanding of theology which can be understood as a commentary on the respective context. Finally, I will summarize the conclusions with a concrete example. This article is situated in the context of the theological debates in the German-speaking world, which has a particular set of conditions for academic theology, such as the inclusion of theological faculties at state universities. However, it can certainly offer epistemic insights into postcolonial and gender-critical debates on theological contexts that are relevant beyond this specific context. Moreover, the article makes the current debate accessible to non-German-speaking audiences and in this way seeks to close ‘data gaps’ in international scholarship.

1. Introduction

The historian Susan E. Dinan (Dinan 2001) situates her ecclesiastical-historical reflection on the genesis of her own religious congregation, the Daughters of Charity, within the changes in early modern Catholic studies in recent decades. A major reason for the broadening of discourse, she says, is the increase in studies and findings from women’s history, which have challenged the discipline of historical scholarship. It is not, however, a matter of a mere addition of women and women’s histories into ‘general’ historiography: “The study of women has not been a case of ‘add Teresa of Avila and stir’, with women simply blended into the larger pot of Reformation studies, but rather a reconceptualizing of history in its entirety. Historians quickly learned that to talk about women alone, to place them in a ghetto, or to tack them on to the end of the ‘real’ history was not (and is not) examining gender. Rather, historians interested in women have asked very different kinds of questions of their sources and actors and have used a different perspective from which to examine the early modern world” (Dinan 2001, p. 98). Thus, it is a matter of examining the social construction of gender in its historical contexts and effects and of understanding these as genuine components of one’s own scholarship. Above all, only then is it possible to understand the form of power relationships and gender constructions: “Indeed, by studying gender, historians often learn a great deal about society at large” (Dinan 2001, p. 99).

Knowledge production is by no means neutral. It perpetuates existing presuppositions and exclusions. Within Catholic theology, these presuppositions and exclusions are particularly compounded by specific structures and institutions. In the following, I will argue that exclusions are not simply changed by ‘addition’. I will proceed in four steps: First, I will examine this thesis in terms of the philosophy of science by illuminating the epistemic presuppositions of knowledge production. Second, I will highlight concrete examples that show how several factors can change our reconstruction of theological history. This section will be focused on understandings of gender. Third, I will argue for a specific conception of theology that can be understood as a commentary on each particular time and context. Finally, I will conclude with a concrete example that summarizes and consolidates the article’s findings.

This article is situated in the context of theological debates in the German-speaking world. German theology has its own particular context and conditions for studying and teaching theology, including the existence of theological faculties at state universities. This article, however, aims to offer an epistemic insight into postcolonial and gender-critical debates on theological contexts that is relevant beyond the German-speaking world. Moreover, the article makes the current debate accessible to non-German-speaking audiences and helps to close ‘data gaps’ in academic scholarship.

2. (Hidden) Patterns and Colonial Systems of Domination in Academic Knowledge Production

2.1. Hidden Patterns in Academia

Feminist and postcolonial studies have helped to uncover hidden patterns in knowledge production. Judith Gruber argues that, in Western Europe, an awareness is currently emerging “of the crucial role that the university still plays in the reproduction of cultural imperialism and race, gender, and class injustice” (Gruber 2023, p. 15). In this way, Gruber continues, the persistence of a specific culture of science is reinforced, which appears concretely in everyday university life. However, the university is not an island in the midst of society, but, as a function of its mission, it interacts with political-social and, thus, public discourses, in which norms and values are reflected. Here, two thematic strands are intertwined, but they have a common goal: on the one hand, there is the demand for a reappraisal of one’s own colonial history of knowledge and its persistence in the present day (cf. Ahmad et al. 2018; Pang 2008; Bhambra et al. 2018); on the other hand, there is the reappraisal of the persistent and continued exclusion history of women (and thus of non-cis men) (cf. Leimgruber 2023; Criado-Perez 2020; Brunner 2020). Both debates have the goal of naming exclusions and their mechanisms in history and in the contemporary world, of enabling other narratives, and of opening up and demanding other action in the present.

Research has made it clear that racism, classism, and gender hostility are intertwined and mutually dependent. In legal and sociological terms, this is named and examined in the theory of intersectionality (cf. Crenshaw 1991; Chebout 2012; Cooper 2005, p. 9; Walgenbach 2017; Leiprecht and Lutz 2005; Werner 2023).1 The interrelated nature of mechanisms of exclusion and hidden patterns of action and thought have important consequences for this analysis: the argument presented here cannot show two clearly separable types of exclusion. They are not simply ‘additive’ but are interwoven into one another. From a postcolonial perspective, academic scholarly production, as it occurs particularly in Western contexts, is “inextricably entangled in the establishment and maintenance of colonial systems of domination” (Gruber 2023, p. 16).

2.2. Case Study: Catholic Theology in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland

Profound patterns of discrimination have been revealed in the conditions for women scholars in the academic landscape. Caroline Criado-Perez has summarized this under the keyword ‘data gap’ (cf. Criado-Perez 2020). Although the gender gap in the sciences has been the subject of intense scrutiny in recent years, as in postcolonial discourse,2 the ‘closing’ of the gap has been slow to come. The pastoral theologian Ute Leimgruber points out that the regulations implemented by the European Commission in 2015 to change the gender gap would be implemented very slowly (cf. Leimgruber 2023, pp. 1–3).3 This slow implementation is confirmed by further studies, which also apply specifically to Catholic theology in German-speaking countries. In general, it is repeatedly pointed out that “a total of 30% of academically publishing authors [are female], however, female researchers have fewer chances than men to gain a foothold and advance in their respective fields” (Leimgruber 2023, p. 4).4 A look at Catholic theology reveals similarly sober results and a mixed outlook in terms of change. The number of people working in Catholic academia in Germany, Austria and Switzerland has been surveyed regularly since 2006. The current 2022 study (known among theologians as the Emunds Study, named after one of the two authors: Bernhard Emunds) (cf. Gabriel and Schönhöffer 2007; Emunds and Hagedorn 2017; Emunds and Lechtennöhmer 2012; Emunds and Retka 2022)5 surveys the proportion of women among professors at 19%, which is below the average level of 38% in the humanities at large. Even if in the so-called academic ‘Mittelbau’, which includes younger scholars writing dissertations and habilitations on fixed-term contracts, women make up 46% of those employed, and gender identity other than ‘man’ and ‘woman’ is not queried. In this group, the numbers of completed degrees are alarming: in 2016–2021, women accounted for 26% of completed doctorates and only 13% of postdoctoral degrees.6 In addition, women disproportionately do not complete their doctorates or do so after an inordinately long time.7 In figures, the completion rate is 31%, while it is 52% for men (cf. Emunds and Retka 2022, p. 363).

These figures could be interwoven with other perspectives of analysis. One important factor for active academics is the number who are first-generation university graduates and how this correlates to ethnic origin and gender identity. A consistent intersectional analysis for theology is still needed. And yet, these numbers already tell us a great deal about the underlying mechanisms and structures, which are further reinforced through specific readings of anthropology. Most importantly, these findings interweave with the issue of women’s visibility in academia. In two studies, the group AGENDA—Forum of Catholic Women Theologians has investigated how many women appear as authors in relevant German-language theological journals.8 Women are underrepresented as scholars and as authors, with just 19% being female. This underrepresentation has concrete consequences because those “who publish less, seem less efficient. Or in other words, it’s who can be counted that counts” (Leimgruber 2023, p. 8). Criado-Perez draws attention to the fact that “articles by female authors are more likely to be accepted or better rated if the selection process is based on double-blind reviews—that is, if neither author nor reviewer can be identified” (Criado-Perez 2020, p. 138). In addition, there is the so-called gender citation gap, which demonstrates that women are systematically cited less than men. Again, Criado-Perez points out that in “the past 20 years […] men cited their own gender 70 percent more often than women” (Criado-Perez 2020, p. 138). This citation gap combined with the publication gap is not only a self-perpetuating problem, but it cements outdated assumptions regarding ‘self-evident’ truisms, and these are what is ultimately at stake here. The male researcher is set as the norm to the point that men are ten times more likely to assume authorship is male when using abbreviated initials for first names, revealing “symptoms of an epistemologically hegemonic practice that is, after all, only the visible tip of a far larger iceberg” (Leimgruber 2023, p. 9).9 Other patterns inscribe themselves in this vicious circle, which in turn are closely linked to the question of coloniality (cf. Quijano 1992).10

2.3. Gender Gap and Catholic Anthropology

Statistical data can be helpful because the results can be portrayed in quantitative terms that are more difficult to ignore, and data can reveal the need to analyze the underlying processes. This leads to uncovering so-called biases, i.e., distortions of perception as well as of judgment. The perceptual biases that are at work here are primarily gender bias, “which influences both perceptions and decisions” (Leimgruber 2023, p. 10). The gendered stereotype of the ‘male scientists’ combined with the notions of both a universal, neutral perspective and universal knowledge, are among the most powerful biases in science: “Women may be at a disadvantage in science because people hold different stereotypes about women than they do about men and successful scientists” (Carli et al. 2016, p. 255) cited in Leimgruber (2023, p. 10). Scientists have repeatedly criticized the myth of meritocracy and performance-based success, particularly in universities (cf. Criado-Perez 2020, pp. 133–34, 147–48). Moreover, the performance of women is judged differently, whether in academia or teaching. In academia, this has become known as the ‘Matilda effect’ (cf. Steinbrink et al. 2023).11

Ironically, the findings of gender studies are often rejected as ‘not scientific’, revealing the interconnection of different forms of bias. Gender studies are accused of not producing “any ‘findings’ in the sense of objectively given facts” (Villa and Hark 2015, p. 21). If gender studies are not scientific, they are not to be taken seriously and therefore do not have to have any consequences, allowing gender biases to continue to be reproduced unabated. This lead to two consequences: First, it further entrenches the assumption that “the underrepresentation of women in science has nothing to do with unconscious presuppositions, nothing to do with the construction of gender, nothing to do with ‘glass ceilings’ and hierarchizing, patriarchal patterns of preventing women or others who do not fit the stereotypical figure of the white, male, middle-aged scientist” (Leimgruber 2023, p. 12). Second, the underrepresentation is blamed on women who are simply not brilliant enough because if they were, they would be appointed to professorships (cf. Werner 2021a, pp. 49–51). This kind of argumentation prevents any systemic discussion. On the contrary, however, the gender gap as well as the gender citation gap, with all of their misogynistic and gender-critical ingredients, should be paid attention to precisely because they are not purely university-related problems: “University research has significant influence on, among other things, policy, medicine, and occupational health laws. […] It is important that this research does not forget women” (Criado-Perez 2020, p. 147).12

Among the systemic causes of these problems are essentialist views of gender, for which Catholic anthropology in particular has many well-known and egregious examples. (Werner 2019b, 2020, 2022a, 2022b) The Catholic doctrinal position is that there are two binary created sexes with a heterosexual orientation, which have specific gender-related essential characteristics expressed in different actions and value concepts: “In the doctrinal letters of the last popes in particular, women are given attributes of service (which are essential to them) and are presented as especially suited for social, reproductive, and emotional activities” (Leimgruber 2023, p. 13). Here, the genealogy of various dichotomies could be invoked—I will go into this more intensively later—which include, for example, the dichotomy of inside–outside and also certain counter-gendered emotionalities as well as professional attributes. Women are then understood as less rational and, thus, seemingly less suitable for a university career—or if they are, then in ‘women’s subjects’. This reflects the devaluation of women’s activities of social practice (and remuneration).13

Although this binary gender structure is critically examined in other academic disciplines, such as historical studies, such examination is missing from mainstream Catholic theology. This is due to the embeddedness of Catholic theology in the power space of the Catholic Church and its magisterial rejection of gender studies, but it is also due to the danger of the double reproduction of a gender bias within Catholic theology. In addition to the biases described above, which are perceptible in statistics, Catholic anthropology has a major impact on the Catholic scientific context, and this can delay or even prevent moments of self-enlightenment. In this case, theology is part of the problem. I will examine this below in Part 3.

2.4. Theological Production of Knowledge and Colonial System of Domination: A First Conclusion

Judith Gruber has examined the mechanisms of exclusion described above in various fields and made clear how much “theological knowledge production […] is inextricably entangled in the establishment and maintenance of colonial systems of domination” (Gruber 2023, p. 16). She describes these mechanisms through the image of the center and the periphery (cf. Gruber 2023, pp. 14–15). As the established ‘center’, non-European theologians ‘must’ engage with European theology to be recognized but not vice versa. The center does not need to engage with the periphery. Feminist theology, gender theory, and postcolonial theories are also described as marginal topics and actual theology gets along without these theories. For this reason, it is still possible to write successful theological theses without any reference to these theories or to the discourses of power behind them. Here, a double negation of power occurs. For power is first excluded as an object from the assumed center by devaluing the theological approaches that address it, which “are considered marginal subjects in the established theological discourse” (Gruber 2018, p. 24). Second, power is excluded as a formal object of reflection by not analyzing knowledge production from the perspective of power. The theology located in the ‘center’ is ‘pure’ because it is universal and not contextual. At the very least, it is neutral, pure scientific theology springing from the thinking and reflection of apparently gender-neutral brains. Thus, according to Gruber, if, for example, political theologies are relegated to the periphery, understood as marginal, then “the central ‘core issues’ of theology can be understood as apolitical” (Gruber 2018, p. 24). Here, processes of othering take place (cf. Silber 2021, p. 248)14, in that the theology so clearly distinguishable from the center is described as ‘the other’ and thus excluded from the larger canon.

These processes are ongoing and continue to be reproduced, but they also have a long history: “We have so many female geniuses literally written out of history that they don’t come easily to mind” (Criado-Perez 2020, pp. 143–44). The situations that arise here are described by Kate Mannie as “a property of social conditions” (Mannie 2019, p. 57). These are both subtle and openly aggressive towards women, which is why we can also speak of an epistemic violence (cf. Brunner 2020, p. 145), which is caused by and in bodies of knowledge and practices of knowledge (cf. Leimgruber 2023, p. 18).15 Theologians are, therefore, called upon to take these hidden patterns seriously, to uncover them, and to change them. Therefore, I postulate that theology is to be understood as a commentary on the respective time and context.16 Theology always addresses existing concepts and their (un)known presuppositions in order not only to get away from a “one-line master narrative of an unambiguous Christian tradition” (Gruber 2023, p. 16) (most historians and systematic theologians would immediately agree with this) but also to reveal one’s own location. This location might be in the ‘center’ or in the ‘periphery’ to reflect the underlying power dynamics, i.e., to approach a voluntary decentering of one’s theological commentary.

3. When Theological Investigations Are More Adding of Women and ‘Stirring’—Concretizations

3.1. How Does ‘Woman’ Enter Church History? A Rereading of Historical Gender Constructions through the Lenses of Gender Studies—Two Examples

Livia Neureiter deconstructs and decenters the English term ‘history’ by using the pairing of “her-story—his-story” (Neureiter 2009, p. 29), which is supposed to make clear that history is usually just ‘his’ history (cf. Tutiwai Smith 1999). Neureiter traces the phases of the transformation of historiography by women’s movements and applies her findings to the history of dogma. Through the influence of men in shaping the history of dogma, the ecclesiastical-historical representation concretizes itself precisely as ‘his-story’. Neureiter refers to Pierre Bourdieu, who describes the effectiveness of symbolic orders. Dominant symbolic orders are perceived as self-evident and do not need any justification. The concrete change, which Susan Dinan has already pointed out, has occurred in several phases. The first phase can be described by her image of addition: ‘Add Teresa of Avila’. Here, the double absence of women appears where women, as underrepresented subjects of scholarship, inscribed women as forgotten subjects of history (cf. van Osselaer 2019): “’Woman’ was therefore in search of ‘women’” (Neureiter 2009, p. 32). However, reflection on systemic issues quickly made it clear that this was not enough. The second phase, driven by gender studies with the separation of sex and gender and through the resulting models of analysis of gender, discourse analyses, and intersectional analyses created the tools to expose purely additive changes in historiography in their profound ineffectiveness for real change (cf. Werner 2023) and have also made clear that any historical reconstruction starts from the present (cf. Neureiter 2009, p. 33).17

Above all, however, the separation of sex and gender made it possible to reveal power mechanisms inscribed in bodies and genders (cf. Dinan 2001, p. 100). If the gender order is understood as an underlying hierarchical symbolic order (cf. van Osselaer 2019, p. 579), then theological drafts and magisterial statements can be reinterpreted in their historical context as well as in how they are read today (cf. Neureiter 2009, p. 35). For example, the U.S. historian Joan Wallach Scott defines the meaning of gender for historical work as follows: “Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (Wallach Scott 1988, p. 42).

More recent studies of the age of confessionalization in particular show the efforts of all denominations to use gender ascriptions to determine bodies. This can be read, for example, as church historian Ute Gause makes clear in the Lutheran church’s domestic fathers’ literature (Hausväterliteratur) (cf. Gause 2006; Bauer and Gause 2020) as well as in efforts to cloister women’s communities after the Reformation and the Council of Trent. “One particularly powerful way reformers attempted to regulate society was by regulating individual behavior. Gender was central to attempts at social control because expectations for male and female (religious and lay) behavior changed and often became more distinct from one another over time” (Dinan 2001, p. 100). Another example can be seen in the so-called ‘mixed life’, that is, a mixture of the contemplative and active life of religious sisters. The historian Carmen M. Mangion shows that these sisters had to struggle with several difficulties (Mangion 2011, p. 170). They had to go against the regulations of the Council of Trent, which said women had to live in a cloister (Dinan 2001, p. 109). They wanted to live the expected religious life with the Liturgy of the Hours and to pursue their diaconal and educational activities. Through their professions, they were in a public sphere increasingly denied to women and practicing what today would be understood as “undoing gender”—under constant suspicion of doing something that was not their due (cf. Mangion 2011, pp. 165–70). However, Dinan notes in her reflection, the respective sisters were engaged in work that, if in the public eye, at least conformed to gender notions (cf. Dinan 2001, p. 109). Dinan also points out that the meaning of ‘public’ for each gender was interpreted completely differently. If a ‘public man’ was a respectable term, a ‘public woman’ was a euphemism for a prostitute (cf. Dinan 2001, p. 109). It can be said that women “faced stiff barriers to gender deviance, and even stiffer penalties for violating gender norms” (Dinan 2001, p. 100). To better understand how gender roles and religiosity change, it is worthwhile to analyze the interrelation of religion, gender, and colonial conditions in several steps. The 19th century is especially important, because it is possible to look with a magnifying glass at what gender roles shape until today. I will do this by providing four analyses of religious performance in the 19th century, with every step concentrating on a different set of dynamics.

3.2. Feminization or Existentialism of Religion in the 19th Century? A Gender Analysis of Role Models, Performances, and Differences between Catholic and Protestant Female Gender Roles: First Analysis

Catholic anthropology in particular saw women as the greatest spiritual danger, and even married women still had to be controlled. Dinan refers to the great efforts made in Spain to confine both nuns and married women to interior spaces of control. The sources examined “testify to the enormous energies expended by the Spanish Church and state in confining women, whether by enclosure into convents for nuns, marriages for wives, or penitential houses for reformed prostitutes” (Dinan 2001, p. 101). These examples make it clear how reservoirs of traditional theological knowledge merged with contemporary developments, mutually conditioning one another to establish and/or preserve a targeted order. The historian Keith P. Luria, therefore, sees historical theology as facing the following challenge: “We are still in need of convincing explanations for the gender differences in religious practice, but we should at least keep in mind that they were likely the result of age-old misogynist attitudes combined with the new concern of the Catholic Reformation Church to segregate the sexes in religious activities” (Luria 2001, p. 126). However, at least since the French Revolution and the Catholic Enlightenment, these efforts encounter a paradoxical situation (cf. Holzem 2013, p. 18; 2015). It is well known that secularization and enlightenment, the spread of the bourgeoisie and its cultures of knowledge, had a much stronger influence on men than on women (cf. Mergel 1995, pp. 24–25; Borutta 2010, 2014). As a result, women were allowed to operate in the space of personal religiosity, but precisely their own female public sphere at the interface of church and society (cf. van Osselaer 2019, p. 583). Unlike men, women had a vital interest in remaining religious18 because the church opened up a kind of freedom of movement and freedom of thought (cf. van Osselaer 2019, p. 584) that had been denied to them in the social public sphere (Mergel 1995, p. 27). This phenomenon is usually described as the ‘feminization’ of the religious in the 19th century (cf. van Osselaer 2019, pp. 579–80). However, according to historian Christine Gudorf, the struggle against liberalism increasingly shifted the place of the church into the private sphere, which was now once again reserved for women, which “reinforced religion’s feminine image by suggesting that there was indeed a special connection between religion and the feminine domestic sphere” (Gudorf 1983, p. 234).

Ute Gause critically examines the ‘feminization of the religious’ by explicitly pointing to developments in the churches of the Reformation, which underwent an ‘existentialization’ of the religious (cf. Gause 2006, p. 157). The difference between the two processes can be seen primarily in the possibilities that were open to women and for which new theological models had to be found. In the face of centuries of “Augustinian sexual pessimism” that could hardly paint a different picture of women than “a creature particularly susceptible to sin and the devil’s seductiveness” (Schlögl 1995, p. 17), Catholic women were in need of an upgrade. Until then, the life of a woman was conceivable as a sinner and penitent or as a pious virgin in asceticism and prayer. Models of holy women as nuns were especially suitable for these ideals, but a role model for women in bourgeois existence was missing. Bourgeois life was a source of incalculable dangers, even for husbands, because of the sensuality and physicality that went with it (for references, see Schlögl 1995, pp. 28–29). Caution was, therefore, required even for the most pious women, and their religiosity had to be closely controlled to preserve their purity from the presumed sensual spirituality (cf. Schlögl 1995, p.17) for it was precisely piety that was interpreted negatively: “In the eyes of contemporaries this numerical imbalance [in mystical experience of women religious] confirmed the prejudices that circulated concerning women and deemed them more susceptible to emotionally loaded devotions and more prone to believe in miracles and superstition” (van Osselaer 2019, p. 583). For women from the churches of the Reformation, on the other hand, it took an expansion of life models beyond marriage and the pastor’s wife because women in the 19th century wanted to pursue their ‘evangelical’ mission of helping the poor. The Catholic alternative to marriage—the convent—was unavailable to Protestant women, meaning that “only one model prevailed: womanhood was defined by marriage and motherhood” (Gause 2006, p. 160). The deaconesses were to be a consequence of this development (for this, see especially Ute Gause (2006)).

3.3. Colonial Influence and Male Gender Trouble—The Impact of Colonialism and Gender Performance on Christian Gender Roles: Second Analysis

This process of the differentiation of gender relations with the attempt to further fix them in a dichotomy of inside–outside, etc., is perceptible and effective far beyond the Catholic and German area. It is, therefore, something that is intrinsically necessary for an understanding of the 19th century (cf. Mangion 2011, p. 170). In the 19th and 20th centuries, something occurred that that initially fixed gender roles: “When the stereotypical gender role became systematically connected to sexual differences and the distinction between the ‘rational man’ and the ‘emotional woman’ was seen as a scientific fact” (van Osselaer 2019, p. 579). According to theologian Carol Engelhardt Herringer, the understanding of man and woman changed from “different in degree” to “different in kind” (Herringer and Herringer 2019, p. 504). For example, Peter van der Veer (cf. van der Veer 2001) can illustrate these shifts in his sociological-historical study of the importance of religion in Britain and India by describing the interdependence between the colony and the colonizers. In doing so, he marks the significance of gender in the relations of power. In the Victorian period, women are characterized as the “angel in the house” (Herringer and Herringer 2019, p. 504). The world is described as corrupt over against the perfect world of the family, which would henceforth be the firm foundation and under the protection of men, who must go out into the hostile world (Herringer and Herringer 2019, pp. 83–84). This imagery and rhetoric were also inscribed into the Catholic Church. For example, Pope Benedict XV describes women as the “‘soul of society’, the superior spiritual and moral force, and the social force of religion” (Gudorf 1983, p. 237) (quoting from Benedict XV 1918).

Van der Veer reconstructs one of the possibilities for the emergence of ‘muscular Christianity’, which emphasizes the masculinity of Christians in public. Two ideas provide the foil to this specific understanding of Christian masculinity and of religiosity. The ‘Orient’ is understood as feminine, and contact with the ‘Orient’ could result in men being seen as feminized. Interestingly, this motif will reappear in the anti-Catholicism of the late 19th century. Van der Veer (cf. van der Veer 2001) gives a nuanced account of how the patterns of Christian masculinity formed in opposition to Hindu masculinity. He describes this distinct masculinity as stemming from the need to arrive at a clearly circumscribed religious as well as national identity that included moral integrity. Nationalism is a recurring theme that is framed in categories of gender and racism. Certain sports were popularized in order to escape the accusation of being feminine and at the same time to be clearly British; thus, cricket or rugby were seen as a “place of real Christian Salvation” (van der Veer 2001, p. 92), and this also includes religious exercise, such as that of the Boy Scouts. The reconstruction of the Indian Uprising of 1857–1859 against the British should make us sit up and take notice of a turning point in this rhetoric. According to van der Veer, it is here that the circumscription of the endangered white woman by uncivilized non-white men was born: “It was their sexual violation of the ‘purity’ of the Victorian ‘angel in the house’ that unleashed a hysterical, sexualized, and racialized hatred against the Indian native” (van der Veer 2001, p. 86). In colonial discourse, this was based on the need to assert one’s own moral strength and masculine power in the face of an untamable masculinity on the one hand and an Orient understood as feminine (and, therefore, subaltern) on the other.

The Catholic theologian Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza (cf. Schüssler-Fiorenza 2001, p. 35f.) has put forward the thesis that the privatization of religion caused the clergy to lose their privileged social position and they were increasingly put on a par with the ladies of society. The consequence was a need for an increased emphasis on masculinity, which Schüssler-Fiorenza argues is still one of the reasons behind the discussions about the admission of women to clerical office today. The emerging discourses of masculinity in the various cultural contexts, thus, certainly also reacted to a certain feminization of the religious as well as, above all, to a defamation of the feminine as a threat to the masculine (cf. van Osselaer 2019, p. 580).

For the Catholic Church, this tension would become even more acute as a result of the growing ultramontane movement and the Kulturkampf in Germany. From a Catholic point of view, the thesis of the feminization of the religious and thus of the counter-gendered spheres and areas of society, in all its ambivalences, appears accurate on several levels. On the factual level, this is borne out through the presence of women in the public sphere as well as through the symbolic and theological interpretation of Mary as the comprehensive image of femininity (cf. Herringer and Herringer 2019, p. 504) and Catholicism, as it would then be reflected in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception promulgated in 1854.19 “Mary was the perfect vehicle for the forms of spirituality encouraged by the Catholic Reform, but she was also the most capable of divine intercessors, one to whom people could turn for help with all sorts of problems” (Luria 2001, p. 119). The other side of this development is the far-reaching, permanent suppression of women as well as the feminization of the private sphere, the devaluation of the feminine while at the same time emphasizing the purity of female spirituality (cf. Luria 2001, p. 124): “The Roman Catholic Mary was an extension of the feminine ideal in that she was not just morally superior but free of original and actual sin” (Herringer and Herringer 2019, p. 504). In any case, the Catholic Church never lost the ambivalent image of women, which is further fueled by the exemplary character of Mary, but it also continues to be emphasized in contemporary magisterial documents, namely, whenever the special dignity of women is accentuated.

3.4. Mary and Marian Spirituality during the ‘Kulturkampf’—How Catholics Became Oriental and Feminine: Third Analysis

The feminization of religion was, however, ambivalent, as exemplified in the fact that the cult of Mary was also quite attractive to men. Popular devotion to Mary provided men with a medium of (non-violent) resistance against state and police despotism (cf. Herringer and Herringer 2019, p. 506; van Osselaer 2019, p. 587). Such devotion served as the foil to the idea that the ideal type of man was the white, male, liberal-enlightened, science-believing citizen. This reinforced two-class society at the confessional dividing line and contained cultural-colonial ingredients. Therefore, it was possible for non-Catholics to deride the Mariological, clerical, feminized Catholic Church and its men (cf. Herringer and Herringer 2019, p. 508), and Mary paradoxically became their shield (cf. Holzem 2015, p. 998). From the mid-19th century onward, this is exactly how Mary was interpreted, and as a result Mary became the patron saint of the Catholic against the world, a development that was later to be formulated magisterially by the Marian dogma of 1854. Moreover, these developments can be embedded in the intensifying ‘Orientalization’ of Catholicism in the long 19th century (cf. Werner 2020, 2021a, 2022b). This occurred in different intensities and iterations, but all of them emphasized the basic tendency that Catholics needed to be civilized in order to complete the process of nation-building (cf. Borutta 2010, p. 151). Catholics were placed on a lower cultural level (cf. van Osselaer 2019, p. 583). For the progressive, liberal, and enlightened forces, Catholic expressions of popular piety, in particular the Holy Rock pilgrimage to Trier in 1844 and the increase in Marian spirituality, became the focus of harsh criticism (cf. van Osselaer 2019, p. 585). However, this form of religiosity was also criticized within the church because it did conform to the ideal image of a Catholic reform due to the danger of it becoming a subjective religiosity that was difficult to control (cf. Luria 2001, p. 116). At the same time, Catholic religious women continued to be attractive to Protestant as well as to secular men because they were explicitly and largely exclusively perceived as sensual, exotic, and erotic at the same time. However, they were also possible sources of religious madness that could be contagious, which is why they continued to be demonized: “Exceptional religious phenomena such as miraculous cures, stigmata, and ecstasy were pathologized and gendered. The high number of female miraculées was regarded with suspicion and seemed to support the idea that these miraculous events were nothing more than the product of women’s imagination and feeble nature” (van Osselaer 2019, p. 585). Here we find again a gendering of the religious in the devaluation of female religiosity.

3.5. Colonial Thoughts, Structures, and Catholic Piety—An Ambivalent Relationship Far beyond Europe: Fourth Analysis

Manuel Borutta emphasizes above all that logics can be found here that were developed and applied in colonization. The modern concept of culture is—according to Borutta—in itself already a concept that distinguishes between the home and the colony, which is described as ‘other’ and ‘foreign’. This concept was also applied to Catholicism (cf. van Osselaer 2019, p. 50). Here we find mechanisms that today would be called postcolonial ‘othering’. Borutta refers here to the travel descriptions of Fridrich Nicolai. They are written in the style of non-European voyages of discovery, although he simply traveled through southern Germany and Austria. These descriptions can certainly be understood as “inner-German colonial fantasy” and are marked by the essential signatures of the European Enlightenment (van Osselaer 2019, p. 51). What is particularly exciting, however, is that the descriptions, and the judgments they imply, include other characteristics that are mutually dependent, namely, race, class, and gender. The ‘Nicolaean’ Catholics do not appear purely as a confessional group but as people of the lower classes and lewd women (cf. van Osselaer 2019, p. 53). The logic of these travel stories is extended to structural features of colonial ethnography, first, through dehistoricization, in which the culture in question is described as static; second, through the exoticization of the culture and thus the interpretation it as the Other of the enlightened Occident; and third, the foreign/Other is essentialized by being equated with nature (cf. van Osselaer 2019, pp. 57–58). These characteristics are now all applied to Catholicism so that it could be understood as an inner colony of Enlightenment Europe. Thinking further, we can say that women within Catholicism itself are again constructed as a separate ‘colony’, not only because of the need to enlighten them but also because of the need to tame them and classify them as subordinate within the framework of the dominant discourse.

Furthermore, Luria’s research on popular religion shows that segregation also happen within groups: if at first the social classes and the sexes were mixed, it quickly became differentiated according to ‘class’ and ‘sex’ (cf. Luria 2001, p. 124). The realization that this is not an exclusively European phenomenon—as Elizabeth Johnson points out (Johnson 2007)—enormously enriches the reconstruction of the history of religiosity from an ecumenical perspective because only then do the consequences of the conditioning categories beyond confessional differences become clear. In addressing contemporary theological challenges regarding language about God, Johnson draws attention to the particular situation of Latina/o theology in the United States. Of interest here is the historical context of the so-called ‘second conquest’ with its colonial implications that illustrate parallel structures to the inner-European assessment of Catholicism for the ‘second’ conquest of North America in the 19th century, when the United States expanded its borders through annexation, purchases, and military action, possessed an implicit theological significance (see, for example, Elizando 2000; Luna 2002; Gonzalez 1999, p. 223; Diaz-Stevens and Stevens-Awoyo 1998; Hernandez 2006, p. 187). Thus, in 1848, Mexico lost half of its territory to the United States, which now makes up present-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, and large parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also legalized the annexation of Texas. The fact that many Latino/as live in the Southwestern United States has less to do with migration is often claimed—they have simply always lived there. Florida had already been ceded to the U.S. by Spain in 1819. Later, the Spanish–American War in 1898 extended American hegemony to Cuba and Puerto Rico (as well as the Philippines) but without their full inclusion in the States. This second conquest led to the reinforcement of the political, economic, and social systems that marginalized Hispanics (cf. Luna 2002, p. 106). These existing religious cultures, which had developed their own form of Catholicity, were brought into direct confrontation with European Protestant Christian culture, whose vanguard emphasized a persistent aversion to what they perceived as a papist, degenerate, and mixed-blood population (cf. Johnson 2007, p. 200ff.). Here, too, popular Catholic piety becomes important. Precisely in the situation of discrimination and oppression, the practiced popular piety acquires an importance for survival. Expressions of popular piety assure the practitioners of the abiding divine presence through symbolic expression in the form of shrines, crosses, Madonnas, and great processions (cf. Gonzalez 1999, p. 222): “One obtains knowledge by participating in an affective way in the symbols and rituals. From this comes not primarily a head knowledge of beliefs—although its doctrinal repertoire is broad and deep—but a sense of personal trust and love for God, who is the source of the community’s existence” (Johnson 2007, p. 205).

3.6. Summarizing: Gender Roles, Marian Piety, and Colonial Thinking as a Religious-Cultural Reservoir for Catholicism—Until Today

From the mid-19th century onward, the Catholic milieu closed in on itself, and in doing this, it performatively realized the complex of confessionalizations, political disputes, ultramontanism, and intra-Catholic disputes. Regarding the thesis of the feminization of the religious, the question remains as to whether or not this only occurred during a short window in the sense of the active participation of women. Further, what lasting impact did this 19th-century phenomenon have on the structures of the Catholic church and its culture beyond the ‘long 19th century’, in particular, on the understanding of women as a separate group in (Catholic) humanity, with their own attributes and characteristics that permanently make them second-class people? This development reached its climax in the so-called ‘Marian Age’ (cf. van Osselaer 2019, p. 580), which began with the Marian dogma of 1854 and served as a catalyst for ultramontane piety for almost 100 years (cf. Herringer and Herringer 2019, p. 509). This process was accelerated and intensified in particular by Marian apparitions (cf. Herringer and Herringer 2019, pp. 509–10; van Osselaer 2019, pp. 580–81), which are spoken of as a ‘Marian miracle’ (cf. Holzem 2015, p. 997; Schneider 2013, pp. 91–102). Tina van Osselaer points out that the Marian apparitions can be examined intersectionally because they provide information about the understanding of gender and class in the respective times. The majority of the recipients are female or children and from mostly uneducated or poor areas and social classes. This informs us about existing stereotypes: “In studying these cases we therefore have to take care not to reproduce the gender stereotypes of the nineteenth century and explain the higher number of female visionaries by referring to their ‘natural’ religiosity or receptivity towards the emotional and the transcendent. […] As for the positive ones: in this period pious ‘femininity’ was lauded via ideal types as the angelic mother and the innocent, pure, and humble virgin” (van Osselaer 2019, p. 581).

There is certainly more behind the 19th-century upsurge in Marian devotion than the usual interpretation of a new emergence of popular piety (cf. Luria 2001, p. 116).20 Therefore, it is important to understand the magisterial and theological developments in the late 19th century as a theological commentary on their own time. In this way, the inner logic behind the interrelation of Marian spirituality and magisterial decisions can be clarified.

4. Theology and Magisterial Statements as Theological Commentary on (Contemporary) History? Proposal for a Hermeneutics of Theological Statements

4.1. The Encyclical “Ineffabilis Deus”—A Symbol for a New Maigstral Way of Teaching

The Marian dogma of 1854 became a test case for the changes in Catholic religious mentality. The dogmatization of the Immaculate Conception of Mary falls into this debate about religiosity and its legitimate sources; it can be read as a doctrinal commentary on contemporary history. The Marian devotion “was useful to the Church hierarchy when it could be channeled in support of orthodoxy, but it would not have been so popular if it had not met the devotional, emotional, and strategic needs of ordinary Roman Catholics” (Herringer and Herringer 2019, p. 513).

With the encyclical Ineffabilis Deus, Pope Pius IX not only proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary on 8 December 1854, but he also created a new type of dogma. Due to insufficient biblical references, a new type of argumentation was needed, namely, to establish the active tradition of the Church and the factum ecclesiae as the hermeneutical norm for the interpretation of Scripture (Gen 3:15; Lk 1:28). The encyclical itself sets the tone for the interpretation of the feast. As an “exaltation of the Catholic faith” and to “promote the Christian tradition”, the cult of the Immaculata, now authorized and highly popularized, rapidly developed as a religion-style movement. It became a targeted counter-movement that could unify all the specific critiques of the ultramontane pastoral approach as being critical of the Enlightenment, focused on feeling and the senses, moral indoctrination, especially in the area of sexuality, and the propagation of a resolute ecclesiasticism: “In an age of the increasing power of the state and a preference for rational solutions to economic problems, Mary offered traditional solutions to crisis, telling people to pray, trust in God, and go to church” (Gudorf 1983, p. 510). At the same time, however, dogmatization revealed a split in German Catholicism between the advocates in the pastoral clergy and the laity, who were especially represented in the magazine “Der Katholik” on the one hand, and critical theologians and the higher clergy on the other (cf. Schmiedl 2002, p. 113).

4.2. The Encyclical as a Sign of ‘Papolatry’ and ‘Mariolatry’

With the dogma, the new synthesis of Marian piety, papal devotion, and denunciation of the spirit of the age acquired a symbolic expression. Its significance should, therefore, be understood far beyond merely being a ‘role model’ for women.21 Marian piety functions as a discourse of demarcation against a world perceived as hostile, against Protestantism and other beliefs, and against the concepts of freedom and the science of modernity, which the church fundamentally rejected (cf. Pope Gregory XVI 1832; Pope Pius IX 1864a, 1864b). Mary was the “suitable patroness for a struggle against an enemy who wanted to attack the Christian Occident out of anti-Christian motives” (Scheer 2006, p. 340). Moreover, as a hyper-visible woman and mother, Mary merged with the church’s combative stance and acquired an ecclesiological significance (cf. Scheer 2006), which Gisbert Greshake calls “Papolatry” and “Mariolatry” (Greshake 2014, p. 18). The hyper-subjectivization of Mary goes hand in hand with a hyper-institutionalization of the church as an institution of salvation, whose objective piety in infallibility was ensured by the pope (cf. Greshake 2014, p. 18ff.).

From this example, it is clear that magisterial statements are in a close interplay with social, political, and contingent social events, reacting to them and helping to shape them. In the context of the interpretation of the so-called ‘Tübingen School’, Andreas Holzem has proposed that theology is always a commentary on contemporary history (cf. Holzem 2013, p. 15). By framing theology in this way, doctrinal decisions can be understood as “a specific processing of theological and philosophical inquiries and [would] have to be consistently historicized” (Werner 2019a, p. 53). This can certainly be seen in the shift of emphasis that Greshake identifies in 19th-century ecclesiology, and it provides another reason for the exuberant Mariology. Here, two centers of action are identified: first, the pope and his “unifying plena potestas over the church” were emphasized, and second, “the soteriological significance of Mary” (Greshake 2014, p. 18ff.). This development was essentially a decision of the magisterium. By seeing it this way, it is possible to consider and evaluate the two dogmas, the one of the Immaculata and the one of the infallibility of the pope, separately. It can also be understood as a theological achievement of its own, which provides a theological commentary on contemporary developments, namely, the modern turn to the subject. The forms of “Papolatry and Mariolatry just described are the specifically Catholic forms of the ‘turn to the subject’ typical of the modern era. Two magnificent subjects come together closely, namely the Pope and Mary, and by this everything which is sacred to the modern age is emphasized: freedom and autonomy, greatness, dignity and perfection of the humanum” (Greshake 2014, p. 18ff.). But it is precisely the interpretation of the hyper-subjectivization of Mary and the hyper-institutionalization of the Church, culminating in a hyper-subjectivation of the pope, that corresponds to the modern shifts in mentality toward the subject that were triggered by the Enlightenment.

4.3. Theology and Exclusion—How to Manage a Change

Here, we return to the epistemological statements which were made at the outset: the question of theology and its history is the question of whose history is written down by whom and through which sources and forms of knowledge. The addition and expansion of the subjects of history are accompanied by a necessity to expand scholarly practices. Postcolonial history, which I argue is always grounded in feminist and gender theory, is critical of racism and also should include the possibility that “indigenous practices of memory and narrative, especially narrativity, plurality, and alternative rationalities are allowed and valued” (Silber 2021, p. 76). Otherwise, the history of theology runs the risk of again reproducing exclusions: the exclusions that occurred historically are doubled by reconstructing them under the scholarly mechanisms of exclusion. Above all, it is necessary to apply existing power-critical analyses to magisterial decisions and theological statements alike to bring about effective change. Such a theological reconstruction can pursue several goals. First, small-scale intersectional and postcolonial analysis can reveal the logic of exclusion and, thus, exclusion itself. In this way, it becomes clear how many factors of theological knowledge formation are interwoven. This is only beginning to be done in reflection on the history of theology. Second, it is possible to point to other histories alongside existing theological histories and to name exclusions that have arisen. This makes it possible to add other perspectives to existing historiography. Third, such a theological approach can reveal historically variable forms of exclusionary logic. Such analyses are helpful for the present because they can deconstruct contemporary theology as well as magisterial decisions more precisely in order to reveal the underlying logic and its complexity. I will conclude with such an example which illustrates what is at stake here: on the one hand, hermeneutical pre-judgments that obscure other pre-judgments and on the other hand, teaching decisions oriented towards modern concepts of knowledge and science, which do not make their implicit exclusions clear. These only become clear through a multi-layered analysis.

5. The Processes of Exclusion and Hermeneutical Presuppositions: The Calendar of Saints as a Concluding Case Study

5.1. Liturgical Reforms and Historical Science—Exclusions Due to Hermeneutical Decisions

The concrete relevance of these insights cannot be adequately shown only by the interwoven reconstructions of the 19th century, but rather it becomes clear through other examples, one of which is highly illustrative of the ‘data gaps’ related to female presence and knowledge about women (cf. Criado-Perez 2020). One very striking example is the reform of the veneration of saints. The Catholic ‘pantheon of saints’ is known to undergo regular changes in liturgical practice. Not only are some added, but some disappear from the liturgical books, or the emphasis in vernation is changed. Thus, for the ultramontane pantheon of saints, it was important to emphasize a few central saints and above all to push aside hitherto traditional ‘cattle and plague’ saints from folklore. The focus was on saints who had an answer to the questions of the day in terms of ultramontane piety. In addition to the focus on Mary as the Immaculata, the cult of the Sacred Heart, Joseph and the Holy Family all belonged entirely to the ‘center’ of ultramontane spirituality (cf. Luria 2001, p. 119). After Vatican II, the liturgical devotion to the saints changed once again. Although all saints remained in the martyrology of the universal Church, the standard for liturgical veneration was modified. Only ‘secured’ saints with a general relevance should be venerated in order to emphasize the importance of Sunday masses and feast days of the Lord (cf. Berger 2005). The historical-critical examination of the vita or legend of each saint resulted in more female saints being removed from the liturgy of the Eucharist or the Liturgy of the Hours than male ones: “Women’s histories, after all, are generally less well documented than those of men. Second, the demise of popular devotions after Vatican II further reduced the presence and power of women saints in the lived lives of the faithful, and revised hymnals and prayer books eliminated songs and devotions to women saints in significant numbers” (Berger 2005, p. 64). Liturgy and dogmatics, from their basic meanings, already stand in the tension between the lex credenda–lex orandi. If critical examinations of life testimonies now become liturgically relevant, what occurs is more than a cosmetic streamlining of the liturgy. For example, according to Teresa Berger, virginity is given center stage in the case of female saints but not in the case of male saints: “The liturgical calendar, to put it sharply, regularly seems to tie female sanctity to gynecology or, more precisely, to an “intact” virginal female body. Moreover, women saints, in both the short biographies and the prayers connected with their liturgical memorials, are often heralded for stereotypically feminine virtues of humility, service, self-denial, compassion, interiority, bodily suffering, and obedience” (Berger 2005, p. 65). Legends or descriptions of a saint’s life include at least one testimony about the time, the person, the interpretation, and the interpretation of what is sacred or who may be sacred. However, these legends and the knowledge they communicate about the person are again disproportionately often written by men: “Women usually are not the authors of authenticating narratives of holiness, such as the vitae of the saints. Almost exclusively, these vitae are male-authored texts, even when they concern women saints. The ‘male gaze’, in other words, controls the textualization of women’s lives of holiness. Rare is the life of holiness in which a female ‘voice’ can actually be heard, at least until modern times” (Berger 2005).22

5.2. Unveiling Hidden Patterns—Or Why Faustinus and Jovita Count. A Conclusion

The feast day of Saints Faustinus and Jovita, although attested since the 5th century and recorded in the 13th century, was removed because Faustinus was described as a deacon. The logic was that this cannot be historically and critically genuine, because it was not possible that a woman was a deacon. If this is the methodology for selection and inclusion, then it becomes clear that such a decision is more than just one fewer saint’s day (cf. Muschiol 2000, p. 54). It is a compelling example of how presuppositions structure knowledge and how this is influenced by many other factors. Institutional presuppositions are very much part of this process, and this is generally well-known. The less obvious, hidden patterns of influence are not less relevant but are very much part of the production of knowledge and data gaps. However, as the above example makes clear, teaching practices are based on scientific standards, but, at the same time, there are presupposed standards that have an implicit effect. What is striking, however, is the extent to which women’s bodies have been subject to doctrinal and theological regulation. In addition, I have tried to make it clear that theological content is manifested in emotions, liturgies, spiritualities, and in the limitation of the possibilities for free movement in public. The example of gender conceptions of the 19th century are especially revealing of the complex conditions that arise from the interweaving of different categories of knowledge production and their structure. The 19th century is important because its impact continues to be felt today, especially in Catholic anthropology and church teaching as well as in existing colonial structures within the theological production of knowledge. This calls for a different theology, which should be both intersectional and postcolonial. Just adding Teresa von Avila and stirring will not change hidden patterns or illuminate long shadows of theological and doctrinal history.