SCHOLAR AT THE CROSSROADS
by Kristen West McGuire
Kristen: You are Cuban American, right? Tell me about your childhood.
Michelle: I had a very Catholic family. My father became a deacon when I was 19. I became a lector at the family Mass when I was only ten years old. My brother was an altar boy. It was very much a part of our cultural worldview. Being Catholic was not just going to Mass on Sunday. We had a home altar to Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre (Our Lady of Charity, the patroness of Cuba) and my grandmother had one too. It was just part of the Cuban culture.
Kristen: Did you find the cultural Catholicism attractive?
Michelle: As a child, it touched me both positively and negatively. Whenever anything was going bad, we would go to la Virgin del Cobre shrine in Miami, to our Lady. That was sort of interesting to me. The shrine was where you went when things went bad, not to see a priest. The women were petitioning her on behalf of the family. It gave me an understanding of Catholicism through the eyes of the women that was very different from what I was receiving in the institutional Church. I saw the sacred infusing the lives of women. For my father, it was more of a Sunday affair. The institutional church is more intellectually driven. And the Sunday Mass was sort of the zenith of one’s devotion.
Kristen: Did you rebel as a teen?
Michelle: When I was in high school, I remained in Mass. Sure, I was resistant, and I remember that my friends would not like to stay at my house because they had to go with us to church on Sunday. But I didn’t rebel, because respect for your parents was emphasized to me.
When I went to Georgetown for college, that became a time to intellectualize my faith. When I started to intellectualize it, I realized these ideas weren’t my own intellectual thoughts, they were imposed. I did so much work on feminism . It became problematic to claim a Catholic identity and be an active Catholic. I embraced the feminist ideologies. But finally I realized that I could have both in feminist theology.
Kristen: How old were you then?
Michelle: I had skipped a year of high school, so I was 20 years old. I went straight to Union Theological Seminary, for the liberation theology discourse, and also, to be in an ecumenical setting. I had no intention of leaving the Catholic Church, but I wanted to understand the fullness of Christ.
Kristen: Was it what you expected?
Michelle: Unfortunately, there are times when Catholic students have felt marginalized at Union. That was the case when I was there. It was an ok experience for me to have. We didn’t talk about or read many Catholic theologians. There was even a Catholic women’s caucus there, like all the other minority groups.
I took a year off and taught high school in Staten Island, because grad programs don’t teach you how to teach and I wanted some experience. I loved it. But I always wanted to be a professor.
I got my Ph.D. at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. There was great diversity there. While I’ve always been academic in my approach to religion, I realize that there is this whole other world in the faith that I need to be aware of—the experience of the faith.
I had planned to do my dissertation on Nuestra Señora del Cobre, when my advisor suggested that I read Sor Juana de la Cruz.
Many argue that she was the first feminist of the Americas. What was more significant to me that she was a Latina. There was no intellectual tradition in Latin America, or if there was, I was never taught it. So, to discover Sor Juana as a Latina intellectual was exciting alone. The fact that she was a woman was just icing on the cake.
Her writing is just beautiful and the aesthetic was extremely important to me – it’s not traditional theology. I have often said that what we call theology is the probably the worst and the least capable means of expressing the sacred.
Kristen: I was fascinated that you chose to write about Sor Juana’s theology using the insights of Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Michelle: Well, strategically I needed a European theologian. Most of the faculty needed an authentic male voice to legitimize her voice. His idea is that the aesthetic is fundamental for understanding the sacred in the world. Feminist colleagues were extremely critical of his work. After reading his work, he cannot be written off, critiqued and discarded. There was an impulse in him that I didn’t find in any other thinker.
Kristen: What has changed the most for you as an academic in the field over the past eight years?
Michelle: It becomes increasingly difficult to call myself a Catholic theologian. I’ve done a lot of research and teaching, but it’s not really about the Catholicism of the institutional church. For me, I still think of myself as a scholar of Catholicism. Calling myself a theologian is making a claim in terms of one’s institutional allegiance and I admit that I have distanced myself a bit.
It’s a struggle for me. Someone asked me, “Are you a Catholic?” Of course, I’m a Catholic, but I’ve distanced myself from the Church.
Kristen: Where’s the disconnect?
Michelle: When I lived in Guatemala for two years, that’s when my understanding started to change. I lived for two years, in a rural area, where I was doing research for a book. I met my husband there.
The mission does a lot of social justice work. You don’t have to be Catholic to receive that aid; you only have to be poor. For me, it was a very important experience in terms of understanding the role of the church. It was a weird combination. From the outside, you could look at the social projects of the Church, and it was very liberationist, or that was the impulse. But among the people, things are much more fluid. They are extremely theologically conservative.
It was important for me as someone who wants to dedicate myself to the Latin American poor to honor that and respect it and not to criticize it. It was not for me to say to them, “You need to be more progressive.”
The faith of Latin American Catholicism is much less liberationist than we have been led to believe. What does that mean for us as scholars of religion? How do we tell that story, knowing it doesn’t fit into our theological worldview?
Also, my husband dedicated several years of his life to the mission, and taught me a lot about how to be a Catholic in a different way. He lived it. So the question for me has become, “How do you live your life as a Catholic and let it infuse everything that you do?”
Kristen: That’s a tough question!
Michelle: Yes. Very few people really know the poor. Or understand what it’s like to be poor. When I was living there, I wasn’t poor, but there are certain things in that context that become great equalizers . When your child is sick and there is not medicine in the town, you have no medicine for your child. When Hurricane Stan caused mudslides, I was cut off from the outside world just like everyone else there. I think a lot of work done on the Latin American poor is not done in their own words…
Kristen: So, you’ve shifted more toward anthropology?
Michelle: Well, that and the history of religion. I’m working on a Caribbean religious history, delving deep into historical religion in Cuba and the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. I find that it has been very difficult – trained theologians don’t have a lot of historical accountability.
I have no interest in studying the institutional church or writing about it. The impulse there is to prove that I’ve learned all the important European thinkers. The people I am interested in have nothing to do with the faith experience of Karl Rahner. Theology is not very helpful in giving you the language and the anthropology and other ways of approaching the faith for myself.
