How can a highly educated, successful woman feel comfortable in a patriarchal religion like Catholicism?
You can’t feel comfortable. You’d have to be, again, an idiot to feel comfortable in Catholicism. I’m not comfortable, and I’m angry all the time. So I guess what I feel — I have to take the long view and to say that the notion that women were equal to men is very new in the history of the species. I have to, you know, speak as loud as I can, not pretend it’s okay, but to say this church has a long history and it doesn’t move very quickly. But if all the women get out of it, then it’s only these creeps in the Vatican that own it. So the way that I stay is I’m a street fighter, that if I get out they win, and they’re not going to win. So it’s not comfortable. It’s an embattled position. But I think one has to be somewhat historically patient while screaming. I mean, that doesn’t sound like that makes sense, but patience and screaming, I think, is the way that I do it. Not to repress, not to say it’s okay — to keep witnessing but not to leave, because if you leave then they win, and they
