CPW Virtual Summer Week in Review | Day 4 - A Report on Dr Ally Kateusz’s Talk

WAKE NOW! FOR TIME IS RUNNING OUT.

By Mary Ring

            The theme of our Kintbury All Ages Week, which morphed so joyously into our Virtual Summer Week, was Prophecy - wake now! for time is running out! When I originally suggested to Helen that Dr Ally Kateusz might be able to speak to us with her astonishing discoveries, I was bearing in mind Richard Rohr’s definition of prophecy.

            Prophecy is not, he points out, a matter of foretelling the future. A prophet is someone from inside a culture, he says, who has the knowledge and understanding to see where their society is going off track.

            Consequently, these guardians of a society’s veracity and truth speak up when they see that wrong turnings and wrong teachings are prevalent. Wake up! they say - THAT is not the truth; THIS is the truth. Dr Ally Kateusz is one of these.

            Because Dr Ally is an art historian, specialising in the intersection of women and religion, she points out that documents are easily obliterated. They can be changed, altered, or re-written  to suit different mores over different centuries. They can be easily destroyed, or burned, or just disappear. Virtually no documents about the church’s liturgy, for example, from before the 8th century survive. Why not, when other documents did? Do we conclude that someone ordered them to be destroyed, because they showed women’s true roles?

            Art, however, is less malleable, especially pieces that are lost for centuries. It is from art that Dr Ally shows that women were leaders, teachers, evangelists, healers and preachers from the earliest days of the Jesus followers. Then, from about the time of Constantine, when the Roman patriarchal laws of male prerogative and male possession changed the early Christian Church for centuries, if not millennia, we begin to see the strong women leaders literally disappear.

            Take, for example, the 3 images above. In the portrayal of Mary from the catacombs, dated 300s, Mary has her arms raised in the traditional pose of a prayer leader. Either side of her, and smaller, are Sts Peter and Paul. Mary is clearly the leader; she has by far the biggest image, and she, not the men, is leading the prayers. Her gaze is direct, meeting our eyes as an equal.

            Now look the image from Pallara in the 900s. Mary’s hands still represent prayer, but they have come down to her chest. Is she still allowed to pray publicly? Then look at what has happened by the time of the last image from the 1500s. This is the Mary who has been deliberately used to subjugate women, by the Church, for the last millennium and more.

            This meek, mild, obedient, virginal and maternal Mary has her eyes downcast. She cannot meet our gaze. Where her arms were strong and leaderlike, they are now the opposite. Her hands are submissively folded, her whole pose speaks of abnegation and self-suppression. In almost every picture of her now, we see her with her child Jesus, all her focus upon him, her own role obliterated. “Be it done unto me according to Thy word.”

             So what has been modelled to women for 1500 years? What have we been taught? I urge you to visit Ally’s website, https://allykateusz.org for a number of fascinating slideshows showing, through art, what has really happened to the message that Jesus gave us.

            There is more which could be added concerning examples of manuscripts altered, women written out, women vanished. And of the oldest artefacts depicting altars surviving from the three oldest Churches in Christendom, which depict the only gender-parallel liturgy - a woman and a man at the altar in two cases, and only women in the third. Or the artefactual evidence suggesting that Jesus had a strongly feminine, or even intersex nature. Visit Dr Ally Kateusz’s website to follow her research further.

Or finally, visit the Wijngaards Institute, or Amazon, or this link to download her book for free: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-11111-3 on Hidden Leadership, Mary and Early Christian Women.

Dr Ally shows that Jesus left women followers as equals: powerful leaders who preached, prayed publicly, healed, evangelized and baptised. Where have those women gone? What has the Church done to them? 

Is it not time for us to wake, for time is truly running out?