Interview with Prof. Natalia Lee

Prof. Natalia Lee interviewed by Prof. Philip Francis

Being a Hispanic Woman in the Academy

PF: What’s it like to be a Hispanic woman in the academy today?

NL: Did you see the Oscars last night?

PF: Some of it.

NL: Well, did you see John Travolta kiss Scarlet Johansson on the red carpet? It was an unwelcomed, inappropriate kiss and she contorted her face like this [contorts her highly expressive face]. That’s what its like to be a Hispanic woman in the academy today.

PF: Minus the red carpet and $10,000 dress, of course.

NL: Exactly, but you are constantly being made to squirm by people’s blatant and sometimes subtle forms of sexism and racism—sometimes its by people who don’t know better, but often by people who should know better.

PF: I imagine you also feel a double burden of responsibility for well-representing all women and all Hispanics.

NL: That feeling is with me all the time. It can lead to the “imposter syndrome” on steroids.

PF: Because people around you are constantly trying to make you feel illegitimate?

NL: Yes, often without knowing it. Sometimes knowing it all too well.

Becoming a Scholar of Religion

PF: You are a scholar of religion, and a theologian, with a specialization in Roman Catholic ecclesiology (the study of the various conceptions of the church itself). How did you become interested in the study of religion?

NL: I grew up in the Catholic Church, in a family of Cuban immigrants in Miami. My father was always skeptical of the institutional church, and my mother was devout. But in some ways I was more into it than my family. You could say I was really into Jesus for a time.

PF: But when did you become a student of religion?

NL: It began in High School. Even though I was attending a Catholic School I had one teacher—Elsie Miranda, a feminist who became the first person to come out to me—she encouraged me to think critically about religion. To see religion not just as something to be received and experienced, affectively, but as something to be approached with you brain turned on--intellectually. To see religion as something in need of critique, especially from the perspective of women.

PF: You did your undergrad at Fordham and masters degree at Chicago Divinity School. How did your scholarly identity take shape in those years?

NL: At Fordham, I studied with Beth Johnson (an influential Catholic feminist theologian), which solidified my feminist stance. At Chicago, I studied with David Tracy and Anne Carr, which hugely expanded my theoretical tool box.

PF: I’ve heard you talk more about your identity as a feminist scholar than about your identity as a Hispanic person.

NL: My critical thinking about myself as Hispanic and about race in general didn’t really set in until my time at Notre Dame.

PF: Which is where you completed your doctoral studies.

NL: Yes, it was at Notre Dame that I experienced acutely the ways that a kind of Irish-American Catholicism can be held up—falsely—as the only authentic form of Catholicism, as the “true” Catholicism against which all others are measured—and supposedly fall short.

PF: This narrow interpretation of Catholicism must have seemed so far from the Catholicism that you had known growing up in Miami.

NL: In my experience, Latino Catholicism is not as rule-bound. There is room for extra-parochial understanding of the church. The narrow version of American Catholicism that I encountered at Notre Dame was a willful refusal to recognize and engage the diverse ways in which Catholicism has been practiced and continues to be practiced around the world.

PF: I assume this is what led to your specialization in ecclesiology. What are the core ecclesiological questions that drive your work?

NL: The core questions are: why is there a church? In what ways does the church sin? The church likes to talk about individual, personal sins. I am interested in institutional sin. And on that score I am influenced by my teachers at Notre Dame—Gustavo Guitierrez, Virgilio Elizondo.

Current Writing Project, Pope Francis, and 20 Years into the Future

PF: You are working on a book.

NL: The book is an attempt to re-narrate the story of the American Catholic Church in such a way that legitimates the diversity of American Catholicism that lifts up the voices of women and minorities and the poor and oppressed. The “official narratives” of American Catholicism tend to leave these voices out.

PF: Do you think that having a Pope like Francis opens up space for these alternative narratives to emerge?

NL: Yes and no. Francis’ papacy represents a major re-direction for the Church—a change so significant that I feel like I can be a part of the church again—but his papacy is still not a cure all. Francis certainly emphasizes the importance of listening to the margins, in part because he comes from these margins, but he is still tone deaf when it comes to women’s issues in the church.

PF: Do you worry that Francis’ populism will sideline the democratizing impulse that you are defending in your ecclesiology?

NL: Yes—my fear is that many of us on the progressive/liberal side of Catholicism are so excited to have a more progressive pope that in celebrating Francis we will inadvertently be celebrating a centralized vision of the church, and will forget about the importance of fighting for a democratized version of the church.

PF: Take us 20 years into the future. How will the place of women in the church be different? Any chance for women’s ordination?

NL: Doubtful. I think its much more likely that we will have married priests, which I think in turn will have a positive effect on women in the church—because at least we would then have a priesthood that knows what it is like to have a substantial relationship with a woman, which is not something you can presuppose of the current clergy and hierarchy, including Pope Francis.

PF: What steps could Francis take, besides the ordination of women, that would help the strengthen the position of women in the church going forward?

NL: He could appoint more women to places of non-ordained authority, such as the Office of the Family, which is likely, and crucially though less likely to have more women in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has too often functioned a modern day Inquisition to silence the dissenting voices of women.

PF: Are you expecting a call from Francis with an invitation to the Congregation?

NL: Not any day soon.

PF: Maybe he’ll at least call to wish you happy birthday this year?

NL: I’d be less surprised by the birthday call.