Here Is Your Provocative Idea For The Day - Maybe I should Make This A Regular Feature

"Modernity began with the exclusion of women," Forcades said.

In "modernity" — the phrase she used to describe the post-Renaissance period of history that continues to this day — human reason was made out to be the highest "ideal of human life." From modernity's outset, Forcades said, women were excluded from pursuing this ideal because they were barred from receiving an education and attending university.

While reason is the ultimate ideal for secular society, Forcades made clear that the church has never said that the ideal of human life is the priesthood, which only men are allowed to attain.

"The ideal of human life is sanctity, and that has always been open to women," Forcades said, though she also mentioned she supports the Women's Ordination Conference and will continue to advocate for women's ordination to the priesthood.

Before turning it back over to Chittister, Forcades questioned if the best way to address the Catholic Church's sexism is by casting stones at the institutional church from a perspective that the society outside it is more welcoming to women.

"I don't know about that," she said.

Note:   Memory was at the core of an Oct. 11 exchange between two prominent Benedictine sisters both known as radical thinkers in their circles — Sr. Joan Chittister, 83, and Sr. Teresa Forcades, 53 — at All Souls Church Unitarian in Washington, D.C., for a fundraising event hosted by the Women's Ordination Conference titled "Radicals and the Rule."

I was familiar with Sr. Joan Chittister, a (in all the best ways) controversial theologian and writer, I'm not familiar with Sr. Teresa Forcades, but I'm hoping to become more familiar, now. 

This is from Bridget Mary Meehan's blog, a priest from The Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests

I share Sr. Forcades skepticism about the beneficial effects of modernism, especially in the era of Darwinism and neo-Darwinism, which matches notions of natural selection (which led Darwin and most of his followers to consider even women of their proposed superior groups, naturally inferior to men) and the early, entirely naive and crude conception of genetics which the neo-Darwinists glued to natural selection, complete with all of the worst features of both in regard to subjugated people, Women and Others.  Her point that women were excluded by modernism, if you measure it from the broadest meaning of the word, in that women were regularly deprived entrance to universities, is a good one to consider.  I would also note that the academic culture built up in that period, contains a good part of what women must adopt to be taken seriously by it - and so granted credentials, the real goal of academia - and which will continue to be a largely unexamined aspect of the culture of those who enjoy such credentials.  I think a good part of the damage done to feminism in the post-second wave retreat was directly due to such accommodation with the relics of that embedded, unexamined sexism.   The pro-porn pseudo-feminists are certainly able to be understood in those terms.