Spiritual Quote of the Day (Margery Kempe, Speaking Truth to Clerical and Temporal Power)

“Sir, I also hear it said that you are a wicked man. And if you are as wicked as people say, you will never get to heaven, unless you amend while you are here.”—English medieval housewife, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary Margery Kempe (c. 1373 – after 1438), answering the Archbishop of York (who had just told her “I hear it said that you are a very wicked woman”), in The Book of Margery Kempe (ca. 1436), translated by B. A. Windeatt (1985)

The climax of the Oscar-nominated movie Conclave occurs when Sister Agnes (played by Isabella Rossellini) makes a crucial revelation before the College of Cardinals. “Although we sisters are supposed to be invisible, God has nevertheless given us eyes and ears,” she says.

The scene, like the larger movie, is a challenge to the patriarchy that has dominated the Roman Catholic Church for centuries—and, in its way, an echo of the above earlier pointed rebuke by Margery Kempe, who wrote (in the third person) what is believed to be the earliest surviving autobiography in English.

The current century has found the Church in a rolling crisis, its most tumultuous since the Reformation—its religious orders depopulating, its churches emptying, its coffers drained by clerical abuse settlements, and its counsels often unheeded. 

Even aside from a failure to take women into its hierarchy, the Church is finally paying the price for the alternating carping and obliviousness that its worst male leaders have displayed toward the females in their pews, even as they covered up the worst offenses of each other.

At the next papal conclave, however soon that occurs, the assembled cardinals will do far more than pick their next leader. They will also choose the fundamental direction of the Church, which, for its own survival, must be a belated attempt to do what Margery Kempe urged centuries ago: “amend while you are here.”

More widely, Kempe's rejoinder applies to the patriarchy that exists in governments around the world. Substitute "nasty woman" for "wicked woman" and the archbishop's fit of pique will sound all too familiar to citizens of the United States these last eight years.