Ministry Now and in the Future
“I want someplace safe. Some place to be a girl.” These could have been words spoken to Catherine McAuley by a young Dublin girl nearly two centuries ago – they are the sentiments that inspired Catherine to establish her House of Mercy on Baggot Street – but these are not the words of a poor Irish girl in nineteenth-century Dublin. They are the words of a sixteen-year-old South African girl in 2010 – an orphan who is HIV positive, homeless, and selling her body to passing truckers. This young girl’s request is a simple one, but it is not an isolated one, for it is the request uttered by dozens of women and girls in countries as different but as poor as Haiti and Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Kenya.
Too many women and girls in our world still live in precarious situations. Consider these statistics from the United Nations Department of Public Information (UNDPI): six out of ten of the world’s poorest people are women and girls; two-thirds of all children excluded from school are girls; women and girls routinely are subjected to sexual violence in times of conflict as well as in times of peace. Why is it that the situation of women and girls around the world has not changed for the better? Why do so many women and girls still live in fear and poverty? Why is it that in 2010, after so much work by women’s groups, including the Sisters of Mercy and other religious congregations, so many women around the world are still voiceless, subject to the authority of their fathers, brothers, and husbands? Why is it that only16 percent of the world’s parliamentarians are women? Why is it that after so many years of advocacy and work by so many people, after the hard work of the Beijing Women’s Conference, and after the efforts of governments to promote gender equality, the situation of so many women around the world has barely changed?
Recently, I heard a female parliamentarian in South Africa say, “We fought for gender equality and we fought to get into parliament, but I’m afraid that I have forgotten where I came from. I have slipped into thinking and acting like my male colleagues, because it is easier.” We Sisters of Mercy talk about gender equality, but what are we doing about it? Have we accepted and internalized a transformed value system that insists on gender equality?
We Sisters of Mercy are involved in many diverse ministries. We try to respond to many local needs and situations. We are very busy. In many cases, we are short-staffed and over-extended, and yet, my dream is for us Sisters of Mercy to continue the good work in which we are involved – education, health care, social services of all kinds – and also to make gender equality a priority in all our ministries, whether we are working exclusively with women and girls, or we are working with men and women, boys and girls. My dream is for Sisters of Mercy to make a serious, conscious effort in ministry to promote gender equality and to empower women and girls so that no woman or girl, in whatever country she lives, has to cry out for a safe place to live and be.
We have every opportunity to encourage women, for we work with them at grass-roots level, in schools and hospitals, in health clinics and social service agencies, in villages, towns, and cities around the world. We have opportunities to support their entrepreneurial initiatives, to inform them about their human rights, and to help them access those rights. In all our ministries, whatever they are, we Sisters of Mercy and our Mercy colleagues can assist women and girls to become agents of their own destiny, to become decision-makers in their own right, to be involved in peace processes, and to value their own knowledge and experience. We ourselves must internalize a value system in which women and girls are truly respected and truly equal to men and boys.
My dream is for all of us involved in Mercy ministry, not just those who work in women’s shelters or with trafficked women and girls, to embrace the values of the Christian scriptures in which St. Paul writes: “[T]here are no more distinctions between… male and female, but all are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). And my dream is that we Sisters of Mercy and our co-workers in Mercy ministry will affirm, in the words of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, “the dignity and worth of the human person and… the equal rights of men and women.” My dream is that in our Mercy ministries and with our Mercy co-workers, now and into the future, we can help to build a world that is safe for women and girls.
Colleen Wilkinson, RSM, a member of the South African Province of the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy (Ireland), lives and ministers in Pretoria, South Africa. She is Director of Mercy House, a transitional shelter for women in distress.