Catholic Women, and War and Peace

 Over the past six months, during what I am fondly remembering as my hermitage half year, though admittedly I travelled and met friends during two of those six months, such is the nature of my partial hermitic-monastic experiment, I began reading a few Substacks. They are sort of the new blogger with an upgrade. The gateway drug to this new particular source of online reading was Dominican Dispatches a bilingual Substack run by two Dominican friars, one Dutch one Italian, that I fondly remember from a few days in Vienna last summer. Some weeks ago I discovered To the Ends of the Earth, which is a thoroughly enjoyable read every time and today I discovered we have a shared love of Tolstoy, in this case of War and Peace and that we both read it around the same time, back when I was 18 and he was 19. It has made me want to re-read this Russian Classic again after all this time, though some weeks ago while at a lunch - dinner an unforgiveable hot summers day in Regensburg- I spoke about how the war sections of this larger than life novel had been a bit boring for 18 year old me. They are a lovely Russian couple who usually live in Rome drawn like me to things Dominican, and they too had struggled through the war bites. I wonder if my now older self would take more time with the war bites, I may be less obsessed with finding out what happens between Natasha and Prince Bolkonsky, and may be able to take in the slow pace of the novel with more equanimity. 

In a totally different vein I also discovered this morning that a friend of mine has also started a Substack and has contributed to series of the Journal of Moral Theology about Synod Group 5, the one on women in church (though not necessarily the official name as I am just calling it what I currently remember). Bronwen McShea's piece highlights how the report from this group misunderstands the de jure nature of women's authority in church matters up until the 18th century and paints it as something de facto and how this contributes negatively to how we understand the reality of women in the church based on their long and rich history rather than contemporary ideological trends. I am very broadly paraphrasing so please do read what she wrote, not just because I thoroughly agree with her but because based on my own research of Trent, the second reformations, and the 18th century her analysis is very accurate and very grounded in the reality of women of the church throughout its long history and not just that which happened in the last 200 years. The 19th century was a very negative century for women of all religious groups and none. This was largely thanks to the French Revolution, it's exclusion of women, and how everyone was either enthralled or panicked by it, too much of either to truly come to understand it. I am oversimplifying here, it would become a very long post if not. If you want to know more wait a few months and read it in my upcoming book. Still thinking about how to modify the title so will write again when I do.