Erika Kidd remembers when, still Protestant, she and her husband were curious about the University of Notre Dame’s famous Grotto, a shrine to Mary modeled after the place she appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous in 1858 in Lourdes, France. Erika described watching a Catholic couple approach the shrine, kneel and pray, and she and her husband felt compelled to do the same. A wave of realization about the body’s role in worship washed over her.

“It was beautiful and earth shattering,” she said. “And it was the first time that I really realized I could worship God with my body. I began to think embodiment might have something to do with my salvation, that things like kneeling or candles or, of course, bread and wine could draw me to God and even be vehicles of grace,” said Kidd, who converted to Catholicism after finishing her undergraduate degree and is now an associate professor of Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas, where she also directs its master’s program.

Kidd was one of the speakers Feb. 4 in “The Church’s Understanding on the Dignity of Women,” the third in a four-part Faith and Culture Series organized as part of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’ Archdiocesan Synod preparation. The series was inspired by topics that arose during Prayer and Listening Events held throughout the archdiocese in fall 2019 and winter 2020.

The session’s primary presenter was Helen Alvare, who gave an overview of women in Scripture, Church history and teaching, and their contemporary roles in Church leadership and evangelization. A professor of Law at George Mason University in Virginia who holds a master’s degree in systematic theology from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., Alvare has served in Church leadership capacities on the diocesan, national and Vatican level, including as a member of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life.

She began in Genesis, where God created humans, male and female. It’s significant that he created two sexes — not one, and not many, she said. Crediting St. Paul Seminary professor Deborah Savage for her contributions to theological questions on the sexes, Alvare noted that while some interpretations of the creation story seem to subordinate Eve to Adam, that in the ascending order of creation — where God made lower creations before higher ones — Eve comes last, and is made not of earth, like Adam, but “of finer stuff” — from Adam’s rib, his own body.

Alvare notes that in the New Testament, Jesus takes a radical approach to his relationships with women, sharing their friendship, honoring their intelligence and speaking to them with dignity. The Gospel writers also recorded women’s acts of faith: Martha’s profession that Jesus is the Son of God, the women who discovered the empty tomb, Mary Magdalene as the first to identify Jesus after the resurrection. Most significant, Alvare said, is Jesus’ relationship to his mother Mary, whom the Church has always held as a model for men and women.

What’s notable about Scripture’s inclusion of women in the Gospels and in the epistles is how they deviate from the culture in which they were written, she said. In the Roman world, women had low status. Writings from the early Church — and secular writings about the first Christians — indicate that women were respected as daughters of God, and Christianity was attractive to women because of it, she said.

Over the centuries, Church representatives haven’t always lived up to the Church’s teaching or values, and have failed to treat women as equal in dignity to men, Alvare acknowledged. “The Church teaches that the challenge presented by the ethos of Jesus’ redemption is clear and definitive, but it takes historical time to realize — and we’re still on the way,” she said.

Recent popes have stressed the importance of women’s contributions to the Church in encyclicals and other teaching documents, and Pope St. John Paul II, in his 1995 “Letter to Women,” apologized for times the Church and its members have oppressed women throughout history.

Vatican documents have also spoken in support of women in the workplace, and they are increasingly represented in high-ranking roles in dioceses and the Vatican, Alvare said.

The Church views men and women as equal but complementary, with each bringing particular gifts to culture, society and the Church, she said. This “difference without ranking” is difficult for the broader culture to grasp, she said, but it’s important that Catholics do, so they better understand their relationship to the opposite sex and to the Church.

“Think of what our nation is undergoing right now and how we struggle with these concepts,” she said. “The Church’s wisdom on this is vast, beginning on the subject of women, and women and men, and it continues to bear fruit.”

In her testimony, Kidd, a parishioner of St. Mark in St. Paul, gave a short talk sharing how her relationship to Mary has evolved as she’s faced challenges and sorrows in her own life, including her husband’s major medical event, infertility and the death of her second son in utero, just two days before his due date.

“Mary helped draw me into the Church, and one of the very greatest gifts the Church has given me as I work out my vocation and pursue virtue and holiness is the person of Mary, mother of God,” she said.

Also sharing her testimony was Kelly Wahlquist, the founder of WINE: Women In the New Evangelization and the director of the Archbishop Flynn Catechetical Institute at the St. Paul Seminary. She described going from a “match, hatch and dispatch” Catholic — someone who only turned to the Church for weddings, baptisms and funerals — to leading Bible studies and Catholic speaking engagements after falling in love with God through Scripture.

“In four short years, my life radically changed because of this encounter with the Lord. And I have to tell you, at times I may have been out of my comfort zone, but there was a peace and there was a joy and I felt valued. All these gifts that had been cultivated in me were now being used to build up the body of Christ,” said Wahlquist, a parishioner of Holy Name of Jesus in Wayzata.

The event included a 20-minute live panel discussion with the speakers and Archbishop Bernard Hebda, where they addressed questions around women preaching, building a women-supporting culture, and women feeling heard in their parishes.

Previous sessions in the Faith and Culture Series were “Sources of Catholic Teaching (Scripture, Tradition and Magisterium)” presented by Bill Stevenson, a theology professor at the St. Paul Seminary; and “The Church’s Teaching on Sexual Morality and the Family,” presented by David and Catherine Deavel, who respectively teach in St. Thomas’ Catholic Studies and philosophy departments.

The final session is Feb. 9 on “The Priesthood (Both Baptized and Ordained),” presented by Sister Esther Mary Nickel, director of the Office of Christian Worship for the Archdiocese of Detroit. Registration for the live event is full, but all sessions are or will be available for viewing and as learning resources at archspm.org/synod.