A Letter from Victoria Mastrangelo

This letter is a part of The Catholic Woman’s letter collection For the New Feminism. Each piece featured in this series will explore the different ways in which Catholic women are making sense of what it means to be a woman in light of her lived experiences and in light of the Catholic Church. The intent of this series is to explore that “‘new feminism’” St. John Paul II called women to cultivate. To learn more about what such a feminism means and could look like, check out our free video program Cultivating Catholic Feminism.

M

y fellow workers in the vineyard,

I am a recovering perfectionist. I like rules, rituals, and traditions. I do well with clear expectations and strong boundaries. I like knowing what things are and what boxes they fit in. I expect strict and effective justice, as if that can be accomplished in our world. This is probably a big reason why I always felt at home in the Catholic Church. However, the more that I’ve learned about the Faith, the more I realize that what appears as rigidity is not so in reality. The more that I get to know Jesus— really get to know Him—the more I have to learn to accept the truth that we are taught from a young age: we are all uniquely and individually made in God’s image. To be truly unique means that there’s no one size fits all model of Christian living. So, sisters, let me share with you the journey of how this girl who loves order came to find out that she didn’t fit into the boxes that dictated her worldview and how she learned to love the messiness that is the human experience.

“Let me share with you the journey of how this girl who loves order came to find out that she didn’t fit into the boxes that dictated her worldview and how she learned to love the messiness that is the human experience.”

Photo by Nikko Tan

I’m a cradle Catholic. The cradle of my faith was mostly rocked by my abuela. It is her faith that nourished me with a sacramental worldview, although she wouldn’t know that’s what it’s called. She lives in a world that is immersed in the supernatural and saturated with the divine and invites us to see the world in that way. Growing up spending countless days and every summer with her, my faith grew with a daily 3 p.m. pause to pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet, with every weekly rosary that featured the rhythmic movement of hands-on beads and Ave Marias and Padre Nuestros. There were many reminders to check in with our guardian angels and every complaint or request was met with the directive to talk with Jesus about it. Digging into her purse for gum meant finding holy water, saints cards of her beloved St. Padre Pio and prayers to La Virgen. From her, I learned what it means to be a woman of deep faith and practice. The Catholic woman is one who knows that there are bigger forces at play in our lives, that recognizes that all things must be consistently brought to the Lord, and that trusts in God’s providence. My abuela wove a mantle of ritual and tradition that enveloped me through my childhood and still comforts me today.

I love to read and learn things. School was genuinely a fun place to be. In fact, my dream job is to be a perpetual student. As I entered high school, the spirituality that had been handed to me started to face my intellectual curiosity and questioning. I needed to know why we did the things we did and why they had to be done in certain ways. My love for rituals met my need for rules and boundaries. It was my sophomore year in high school when I was providentially placed into a theology class with the teacher that would become my mentor. He was the first person to challenge me to be able to defend my beliefs. My experiences with this teacher led me to a deeper faith in God, a deeper love for the Church, and a passion for theology. This class led me to my college, my major, and my eventual career.

While I’ve always considered myself a Catholic, I have not always considered myself a feminist. As I understood the term at the time, feminism was about hating men and advocating for abortion and sexual freedom. It generally felt angry or combative to me. My high school was an all-girls’ school and we were often confronted with the reality of our womanhood. It is an academically strong institution that sends multiple girls a year to Ivy League schools. There was a constant reminder that we need feminism to advance women in STEM, to bring more women into boardrooms, and to fight for all sorts of issues of inequality that women face. At the time, I felt like there was a choice to be made between my newly invigorated faith and the feminist and justice-oriented culture that seemed to clash in many ways with the Church that I had fallen in love with. In the end, I chose the Church, not realizing that in doing so I would get to have it all: ritual, intellectual reasoning, justice, and an authentic understanding of womanhood. Those things that I love now I had to learn could co-exist along the way.

Fitting Into Boxes

In college, I continued to dive deeper and deeper into the intellectual tradition of the Church. I solidified my understanding of Catholicism as the truth and became deeply rooted in what I thought it meant to follow that truth: the do’s and don’ts that draw the line between a practicing Catholic and a lapsed one.

Meanwhile, I got involved in campus ministry and began to be challenged in this worldview by the campus minister and others who were questioning the faith in ways that I believed at the time to be too secular. Rather than be open-minded, I became more rigid, believing that if people just studied what the Church said it would be clear that what she teaches is right and an easy path to follow. Being used to this more “traditional” culture at my university, my campus minister would challenge us to see things in nuanced ways and to approach individual cases as unique. I would often think and respond along the lines of “yeah, but, the teaching is clearly x” and shrug. I can now recognize the gift that she has been in my life as the first Catholic feminist that God put in my path. She was the first to plant a seed in me, which admittedly took a long time to grow—the Jesus of the gospels is the God of justice and the God of mercy and that both are love.

Photo by Dafydd Bates

At the time, I was not ready to admit that I was personally struggling with these boxes. From what I was learning and what most of the people around me were doing, I was struggling with my place as a Catholic woman. Friends from high school were going on to things like law or medical school, business and marketing jobs, and other forms of work out in the world. They seemed to me to be giving into the secular worldview of womanhood that I had rejected in high school. My college campus has a “ring by spring” culture that resulted in many of my peers getting married and beginning families immediately and then staying at home with their kids. I wanted that reality at the time but wasn’t finding it because deep within I knew it wasn’t who I am. I took this box with me, thinking that one day I would fit into it.

Over time, I went on to graduate school in theology and work in ministry, ending up as a high school theology teacher while also getting engaged, married, and having my first daughter. After the meager six weeks of “maternity leave” I had to face going back to work, pumping, and figuring out childcare all while being literally the only one of my friends who was not going to be a stay-at-home mom. It was devastating in so many ways. I was struggling with postpartum in general and then layered on top of that was all of the guilt of having to leave my six week old behind, of “choosing career” instead of figuring out how to live off a youth minister’s salary, and the shame of not fitting into the Catholic wife and mom box that I had mistakenly believed to be Church teaching.

My school was relatively new and I was the first to have a baby and come back to teaching. My colleagues were either single or had older kids and had been stay-at-home moms until their kids entered school. The women I followed on social media at the time were also all stay-at-home moms because that was the face of Catholic women on the internet at the time. It was an incredibly lonely time. There wasn’t really anyone in my immediate or digital circles that I could relate to or talk with about my situation. I would regularly come home and sob and frequently asked God to give us a circumstance in which I could be a good mom (i.e. a stay-at-home mom).

Solidarity with the Saints

God has a funny way of answering prayers. God didn’t answer my prayer in the way I wanted him to but instead helped me to slowly and painfully navigate the heart of my issue: my complete misunderstanding of what it means to be a faithful Catholic woman. He began by introducing me to (then) Blessed Zelie Martin, the small-business-owning mother of St. Therese.

“God didn’t answer my prayer in the way I wanted him to but instead helped me to slowly and painfully navigate the heart of my issue: my complete misunderstanding of what it means to be a faithful Catholic woman. He began by introducing me to (then) Blessed Zelie Martin, the small-business-owning mother of St. Therese.”

Photo by Nick Castelli

I was really struggling with breastfeeding, which only added to my belief that I was a failure as a mother and woman. I hated it and it did not feel like bonding. It seemed more like torture, but it felt almost heretical to say that out loud. I had so internalized a specific perspective on motherhood that everything that didn’t align with that perspective was another reason that I was failing. This was all compounded by the fact that our daughter was not in any way planned. So there I was, the theology teacher who failed at NFP, who worked and left daycare to raise her baby, and who couldn’t breastfeed. One night as I was nursing my baby and scrolling Instagram, I saw a post on saints for nursing mothers, which introduced me to Saint Zelie.

You see, St. Zelie also struggled with nursing and with mothering in general. She often wrote about her impatience, her struggle to balance her business and parenting, her issues with the hired help that cared for her children. In so many ways, I was living a similar life to this woman who raised a saint and who was a few months away from her own canonization. Here was a woman who didn’t fit into the mold I was, quite frankly, idolizing and yet God had rewarded her faithfulness with eternal life. Maybe, just maybe, this box was not one size fits all.

During this time, God also reintroduced me to a man that I already loved but didn’t completely know, along with his writings on women. St. John Paul II wrote a whole letter and apostolic exhortation on women and in two theology degree programs, I had never heard of or read them. These writings were a gift and opened up a door to a whole new way of thinking. St. John Paul II’s exploration of what it means to be a woman helped me begin to unpack what I had internalized and dismantle all the misconceptions wrapped in my vision of womanhood.

The mold I had internalized taught me that being a wife and mother was my only call. However, St. John Paul II helped me understand that the boundaries of what it means to be a woman are endless. He paints what it means to live out this feminine genius in broad strokes with certain qualities that we all share, but that are each lived out in as many ways as there are women in the world. Here was the pope helping me tear down all the self-created rules and false boundaries of womanhood created by the Catholic culture I had experienced.

“Here was the pope helping me tear down all the self-created rules and false boundaries of womanhood created by the Catholic culture I had experienced.”

Photo by Francesco Alberti

With this gift in hand, I dove into the world of the feminine in the Church and I met incredible figures such as St. Edith Stein and St. Hildegard of Bingen, who also didn’t fit the mold. The woman that would most change my life would be Servant of God Dorothy Day. I devoured her autobiography The Long Loneliness as my Lenten read two years ago and have been working my way through her copious amounts of writing only for her to challenge me and wreck me with every page. Dorothy could never be painted in the way that some saints are—as the portrait of earthly holiness and perfection. She’s too modern and way too honest about her messiness. Rather than strive for a specific type of holiness and piety, she chose to be herself, to embrace her imperfection and live a life that answered only to Christ. While the goals of holiness and piety are the definition of sainthood, I found the way that Dorothy struggled to achieve them to be more relatable than previous stories I had heard. In Dorothy, I found a woman who gets me, who helps me to wrestle with the lived reality of gospel living, who encourages me to be outside of the box. Dorothy is the one who is able to nurture and grow that seed my college campus minister had planted (see, I told you it would take a long time).

I was never going to fit into the boxes that were often presented to me by the world and by members of the Church. I’m a nerdy introvert who prefers jeans and t-shirts, who’s never going to be a girl boss or glass ceiling breaker. But, I’m also a woman who works outside the home, who follows intellectual curiosities, who questions and pushes the boundaries, and who doesn’t enjoy many of the tasks of domestic life. I’ve learned to accept that it’s okay to be any one of those things or even all of them. Being a woman is being all the things that God calls you to be, whether it’s the daughter, the sister, the wife, the mother, the friend, the social justice advocate, the CEO, the counselor, the lover of souls.

Discovering Catholic Social Teaching

During this same time, I was also beginning to wrestle with many of the questions and issues that had been raised in my high school days. I lived through the lack of support and resources for women during and after childbirth while teaching at a school that worked with an under-served population of students who faced a range of social justice issues from racism to income inequality to a lack of affordable healthcare and housing. Their experiences and mine brought up those old calls for reform and justice that I had viewed as secular and liberal in high school. I struggled to see how their experiences fit into the theology that I had learned and was now teaching them.

Looking back, I had not once taken a course on Catholic Social Teaching. Like the feminine genius writings of John Paul the II, the treasure trove that is Catholic Social Teaching was an undiscovered gift that helped me begin to see what the call to love your neighbor really means. I began to see how I could take the ideas that I had seen in conflict with my faith and rejected in high school and absorb them into my faith. A love for women and the marginalized is at the heart of our faith because it was at the heart of Jesus’ ministry and teachings. Living these teachings requires the balancing act of holding to the truths found in the Gospel and in the Tradition, while leaving space for the messiness and brokenness of humanity to come into contact with that truth.

Photo by Nikko Tan

Today, what it means to me to be a Catholic woman is simply to be a woman of the gospel. It’s to embrace and accept the messiness of the human experience while holding to the truth. At first, I needed the structure of the do’s and don’ts but now I see the rules more as guideposts that help us on the path from our brokenness to Christ’s healing. No perfectionist tendencies can actually make us perfect. Real people are unique and their experiences will be also. When I moved out of theology in an academic setting to the lived experience in ministry and teaching, I was faced with the hard reality that just boldly telling people what the Church teaches and why is often not enough. In reality, it wasn’t enough for me. I struggled when it was presented as a stencil or mold that I could only fit into in one particular way . My uniqueness wouldn’t allow me to just follow in line with certain interpretations of the Church teaching’s approved brand of Catholic womanhood. What I know now is that Catholic womanhood is not a brand but the living out of the femininity that God gave me and only me.

When I think about how to live out my faith, my femininity, and my feminism, I think about Dorothy Day and how she led with love and how Christ calls us all to do the same. Friends, I hope you join me in this mission in whatever form God calls you to!

AMDG (For the greater glory of God),

Victoria

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About the Writer: Victoria Mastrangelo is a wife, mother of three, and high school campus minister and theology teacher in Houston. She loves to read multiple books at once, research, write, drink coffee, and travel, as her dream job is to be a perpetual student. Her favorite saints are Edith Stein, Ignatius of Loyola, Dorothy Day and John Paul II which tells you a lot about her spirituality and love of the feminine genius and social justice.

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