Summary Of Sister Trouble

In Marian Ronan’s work, “Sister Trouble,” she discusses the vatican investigations of American Catholic sisters, and argues that the constant tension and conflict between catholic sisters and bishops and popes stems from the issue of gender. Ronan quotes Kathleen Sprows, who argues that throughout church history the issues between celibate women and men in the church have come about when these women step out of their traditional gender roles, as traditionalists believe strictly in the essentialist nature of gender. This means that men and women inherently have separate characteristics and capabilities. This is often paired with the idea of gender compatibility, in which men and women compliment each others capabilities, and thus, naturally go well together. Sprows writes that as opportunities for women to increase their education and power in society/the public sphere, they also come to challenge the traditional female gender role which places women mainly in the private sphere and as subordinate to men (pg.80). Ronan writes, “The current investigations, and many of the efforts to control, confine, or abolish groups of women religious through history, have to do with those women not merely daily to act
81). She then presents the argument of feminist theologian Karen Trimble Alliaume, who believes that the reason women aren’t allowed to be priests is because, “the institutional catholic economy of salvation is one of imitation,” (pg. 81) and women cannot properly fulfill that requirement because they aren’t men and jesus was a man. Women cannot exist as an imitation of jesus, but rather as a separate and complimentary being (bride of christ) (pg.