… I will pour out my spirit on every man and your sons and your daughters will become prophets … also on the slaves and on the female slaves in those days I will pour out my spirit.
The oracle of Joel in announcing the fulfillment of the universal outpouring of the Spirit emphatically brings out an inclusive fact: sons and daughters, slaves and slaves will be filled with it. In other words, the prophetic charism is not subject to gender discrimination. Loquela, dreams, visions, wise discernment also belong to women.
We meet them prophesying throughout the entire span of Scripture and then in the history of the Church. But they are equally present in every religious experience – think of the Sibyls or the Pythia, sacred to Apollo. Think again of those women – shamans, fortune tellers, healers, however “wise” – who accompany the paths of peoples and cultures.
Although excluded from sacrificial practice – and this too would seem to be an interreligious constant – they too participate in the gift of the Spirit. The social and cultural dispositions that discriminate against them, denying them subjectity and speech, fall before its force. It does not hinder himimbecillitas sexus. If anything, her exuberance dissolves it.
Of course – and it has been done – one could also grasp in the prophetic gift of women a sort of contiguity to that unpredictability, to that loquela alogica, to those phenomena not attributable to the rational that discriminate them. Against this reading, clearly misogynist (and hostile to the same Spirit), lies the wise, wise, lucid, effective trait of the prophecy of women.
This appears already in the Old Testament. First of all, the “naturalness” of women’s prophecy emerges. For example, a prophetess is Isaiah’s wife and the statement does not need explanatory glosses. Then the “authority”, their authoritative discernment. Such is the case with Hulda (see Alessandra Buzzetti on page. 25), the prophetess who is left to judge the authenticity of the rediscovered book of the Law. At that time there are not a few prophets in Israel and it is truly shocking that we entrust ourselves to a woman, who should, by reason of her sex, be uneducated and totally inadequate to what she is asked of her. And discernment, through a sort of oracular representation, can also be spoken about the woman of Tekoa called, in fact, to induce David not to take revenge on his son Absalom who killed his brother Amnon. Different, but still close, in the ability to read the history of salvation and sing the merciful action of God, the prophetic phrase of Anna, mother of Samuel. Her song is echoed in Magnificat of Mary of Nazareth.
And how can we forget, after the prodigious passage of the Red Sea, the sister of Moses: «Then Mary, the prophetess, sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand: behind her the women went out with tambourines and dancing. Maria sang the refrain for them… ». The role of her in the exodial story of her is remarked, after the episode of her that she together with Aaron sees her speaking against Moses, from stopping in her camp until she is cleansed of the leprosy that affects her for seven days. [vedi Ami-Jill Levine a pag. 16]
In the New Testament, alongside Mary of Nazareth – Jerome identifies her as a prophetess right from Magnificat – are the old Anna who lives her widowhood not moving away from the temple and the four daughters of Philip. We have nothing to tell us about, except to point them out as she prophesied. But the whole range of the prophetic charism can be identified in Magnificatsong of praise, recognition of the fidelity of the God of the covenant, utopian gaze on a future to come in which the rules of human living so extraneous to God’s plan will be overturned.
Regardless of the complex exegetical questions, in placing it on the lips of the Mother of the Lord, the author of the Lucanian Gospel of childhood wanted to give her a theological and theological portrait of her. And, I believe, that more than anything else stands out, alongside the spirituality of the “poor of the Lord”, the lucid judgment on history, the indomitable certainty of making himself definitively the neighbor of the God of the covenant. These testimonies, certainly small, in the obviousness with which they are transmitted to us reaffirm the constant of female prophecy. On the other hand, the Pauline correspondence confirms.
Unfortunately, a certain mistrust – think of the Montanist prophetesses – will produce that exile of the Spirit which, at times and repeatedly, seems to mark the history of the Church. But, despite this, the prophecy of women does not die out. Think of Hildegard of Bingen, and others.
It must also be said that at a certain turn in history, prophetic talk is the only possibility of speech offered to women. A dangerous possibility that can even lead to their death (Margherita Porete is a striking example). And, however, when it is recognized, it becomes prophecy, science, mysticism, theology, knowledge, speaking in the broadest sense of the term. In most cases it is a question of a talkative attentive to the present that shows its errors, its uncertainties, spurring the community to a renewed evangelical feeling, to a renewed purity. Exemplary in this key is St. Mary Magdalene de ‘Pazzi in hers Letters of the renovation, probably never reached the recipients, but how lucid in a time of crucial transformations. With more explicit instruments, exposing themselves in the first person, this was done even before by Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. In them prophetic and mystical locution are intertwined together with the judgment on the present, not without an open gaze to the future. The prophecy of women is imbued with the present, with a critical look at the present and precisely therefore opens to the future. It finds multiple forms, not a few in solidarity with women themselves in times that remain against them. Not surprisingly, he is the epigone of medieval mysticism, of prophetic figures before the modern age – how can we forget Juliana of Norwich and her theological stature? – it is the “prophecy of needs”, that is, taking on social plagues such as abandoned childhood, malpractice women, orphans, the sick, the humanly and religiously uncultivated … A huge founding effort sees the rise of the century xviii and the xx religious institutes and congregations with the aim of putting an end to intolerable situations of moral and social disease, often acquiring the education of women as a lever, as a strong point. To give them life are singular figures who struggle to be listened to and who, tenacious and stubborn, resist pressure of all kinds in order to correspond to the breath of the Spirit. We could also say that, at a certain point, the prophetic talk is replaced by factual prophecy and in ever new forms. Unfortunately, over time it loses its original mystical and theological depth. It would be necessary to retrace the history of spirituality in order to show drops in tone attributable not so much to women as to the idea of the Church elaborated from time to time. And it should also be understood – and this is true for today – that needs change and to be stubborn to keep alive what is dead, not to reconvert the charism, not only is the denial of prophecy, but it is a sin against the Spirit …
Beyond the inevitable shadows, in the complexity of stories and people, the prophecy of women remains. And not only in the red thread of the Enlightenment, often persecuted, however successful in making room for a less plastered, less self-centered, less triumphalistic experience of the Church …
From the Montanist prophetesses, passing through the heresy of Guglielma and Maifreda, we arrive at the radical Reformation, the Huguenot prophetesses, the Methodist prophetesses, the renewal of the Spirit as an interconfessional and trans-religious phenomenon.
The prophecy of women is present in the Church today through the request for reform, in the search for new authority, in theological and cultural commitment. Whether the prophetesses of the past, visionaries or not, have revealed themselves to be theologians, the prophetic talk of women now runs in their passionate interrogation of the Scriptures, in revisiting and reorienting theology across the board, in the careful reading of history, in the utopia of a humanity that is finally sisterly and fraternal, open to the sweet and vigorous, joyful and pacifying, never, never homologating, breath of the Spirit of God.
by Cettina Militello
Director of the Chair for Women and Christianity, Pontifical Theological Faculty Marianum