The trouble with women: The Catholic Church, gender politics, and the West German public, 1959--1989

"The Trouble with Women: The Catholic Church, Gender Politics, and the West German Public, 1959-1989" analyzes the West German Catholic Church's confrontation with secular and religious social movements on sexual morality and gender equality beginning in the 1960s. The dissertation challenges the application of the secularization thesis for West Germany and posits a new chronology for Catholicism – one with significant implications for the history of Catholicism and of gender politics in late twentieth-century Europe.;In 1945, the German Catholic Church emerged triumphant from the ruins of war. With secular institutions destroyed and the strongholds of Protestantism under Soviet occupation, the Catholic Church exercised considerable influence over the initial make-up of the administrative superstructure at all levels in the Western zones. Through its close collaboration with the new Christian Democratic Party, the Catholic Church also succeeded in having most of its demands incorporated into the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany, including an invocation of God in the preamble, an affirmation of a right to life; religious instruction in the schools; the protection of marriage and family; and acknowledgement of the validity of past concordats signed between the Catholic Church and the German State. In doing so, the ghettoized Catholic Church of Bismarck's Kulturkampf established itself as a parastatal organization with significant influence over state policy and society. Yet, within two decades, Catholic hierarchs had lost much of their moral and political authority and the insulated German Catholic milieu lay in ruins.;In eradicating the boundary between the political and the moral, Catholic hierarchs unwittingly drew the Church into the vortex of a crisis of authority, as a wave of secular and religious social movements emerged that challenged institutional authority and made the politicization of sexual relations, albeit in very different ways, the focal point of their campaigns.;Accustomed to dictating the moral and political behavior of its congregants, the institutional Church at first refused to change, counting on the loyalty of its core constituency – women. But Catholic women like their secular counterparts had new ideas. Catholic women in postwar West Germany sought to renegotiate their relationship with the Church. They demanded a more active role in Church ministries, called for the democratization of the Church, and challenged the Church's hierarchical and gendered conception of marriage. In particular, they resented the condemnation of artificial contraception by a male, celibate priesthood. When the Church refused to compromise, they left the Church en masse. Those who stayed – liberal and conservative – often followed the Church's teachings selectively, creating spaces within the West German Catholic Church that respectively eschewed patriarchal authority or placed a hyper-valuation on papal loyalty and woman's emulation of the Virgin Mary.;The stakes of this debate could not have been higher. In rejecting the Church's gendered and hierarchical concept of marriage, protesters challenged the structure and authority of the church. Moreover, the interpenetration of theological arguments employed by Church hierarchs to justify celibacy and to condemn birth control resulted in a cascading series of crises that eventually encompassed abortion, women's ordination, and new reproductive technologies.;But out of this crisis of authority, a much more activist, albeit smaller, Catholic community emerged. For the majority of these ardent believers, activism meant promoting the moral values championed by the Vatican in the secular and religious sphere. For a minority, it meant a profound commitment to loyal dissent. For these Catholics, disillusionment with the hierarchy did not translate into a loss of piety; instead it entailed redefining what it meant to be Catholic. Groups such as Kirche von unten (Church from Below) and Wir Sind Kirche (We Are Church) underscored the centrality of the laity in Catholicism, rather than the traditional focus on hierarchy. In turn, the protests of the "loyal opposition" served as a call to action for the conservative core.;This conservative core proved both resilient and flexible, slowly developing new strategies within the religious and secular sphere to promote its agenda. This learning process had not proceeded in a linear fashion nor to date has it extended to all political and religious issues in which German Catholic Church is embroiled. Moreover, it has not meant abandoning Catholic doctrine on sexual morality championed by the Vatican. Rather for Catholic leaders, it has entailed a subtle shift.;Neither German historians nor historians of gender can afford to ignore this subtle shift. With its actively engaged minority, significant financial resources, and international connections, the German Catholic community has proved politically adroit, succeeding in introducing revisions to abortion law (2009) and limiting research on embryonic stem cells and access to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (2011). (Abstract shortened by UMI.).