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Child Brides to the Patriarchy: Unveiling the Appropriation of the Missing Girl Child
Author(s): Jennifer Stith
Source: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion , Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 83-102
Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of FSR, Inc
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.31.1.83

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 JFSR 31.1 (2015) 83–102

CHILD BRIDES TO THE PATRIARCHY

Unveiling the Appropriation of the Missing Girl Child

Jennifer Stith

Feminist religious scholars have offered important insight about

the ways that patriarchal religious systems often negatively im-
pact the lives of women. However, few consider the ways these
same structures affect the lives of girls. This essay uses the back-
drop of actual child marriage, a practice widely recognized as
a violation of girls’ human rights, to formulate questions about
the ways the Roman Catholic ritual of first communion may also
initiate girls into patriarchal disempowerment under the veil of
a celebration. The author postulates that appropriation of girls’
selfhood into the roles of “child bride” and “mother” is a critical
component of the patriarchal religious construct, leading to blind
subjugation. A broad revisioning of Catholic ritual and doctrine
is suggested as necessary to improving the health, well-being,
and empowerment of girls, their families, and communities.

“The jars of ointment of the church, the sacraments, need to be

broken open, by all people, but especially by women. . . . Be-
neath this refusal [to allow women to participate fully in Cath-
olic rites] is a complex set of reasons and traditions, [that]
serve to contain and protect what lies within these jars of oint-
ment: God’s own extravagant affections for humankind.”1

Tremendous gratitude to Suzanne E. Joseph, Denise Gifford, Mary Ann Stenger, Robert Cunning-
ham, Twila Hartmans, Carrie Meyer McGrath, Michael McGrath, Barbara Thompson, Stephen A.
Fermelia, and especially Olga-Maria Cruz-Smock, for her guidance and editorial support, from start
to finish of this project. The views expressed in this piece are the author’s alone and do not necessar-
ily reflect those of any other organization or entity.
1 Susan Ross, Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology (New York: Contin-
uum, 2001), 9.

-83-

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84 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 31.1

In Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology, Susan Ross

outlines a critical need to examine the texts, symbols, and rituals of sacrament
from a feminist viewpoint, paying particular attention to issues of gender and
embodiment. Ross makes clear: “An account of sacramental theology that fails
to deal critically with body and gender, especially as they are inherited [through]
tradition, will unwittingly perpetuate androcentric accounts of experience and
fail to attend to the particularities of women’s lives.”2
Ross’s call to action lies at the heart of this paper’s investigation: examining
the traditional ritual of Roman Catholic first communion with a feminist herme-
neutics of experience and feminist sacramental theology and applying Ross’s
theories to girlhood. In order to make visible that which the kyriarchal system
of Catholicism and its corresponding patriarchal culture have kept hidden, I
compare the obfuscating ritual of first communion to a more visibly oppressive
rite, child marriage. First communion’s “jar of ointment” must be broken open,
to reclaim and protect what lies within it: the bodily integrity, self-identity, and
sacred divinity of girls and the women they become.3

The Visible Child Bride

Married at age seven, the fate of Mamta of Rajasthan, India, as portrayed
in the 2007 PBS documentary “Child Brides: Stolen Lives,” portended that of
more than 100 million girls who, within a decade of the film’s release, would
be married to men much older than themselves.4 Widely considered a human
rights violation, child marriage continues as a practice in many patriarchal cul-
tures. Child brides are often forced into sex before they are ready, become
pregnant too young, and face life-threatening hardships.5 When one man in a
village similar to Mamta’s was asked why young girls, including his own daugh-
ter, are married to men often decades older, he replied, “It’s a lot easier to
control a young girl.”6

2 Ibid., 124.
3 Equally important issues to contain and protect include the bodily integrity, self-identity,
and sacred divinity of boys and men, which are affected by initiation into this kyriarchal system. That
is a study for another time.
4 “Child Brides: Stolen Lives,” PBS, October 12, 2007, http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/341/
index.html.
5 “Pregnant Child in Afghanistan: Miriam’s Story,” ABC News, December 6, 2011, http://
abcnews.go.com/Health/pregnant-children-face-risk-death-labor-developing-world/story?id=
15163624.
6 “Child Brides: Stolen Lives.”

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 Stith: Child Brides to the Patriarchy 85

Figure 1. Tahani and Ghada, child brides in Hajjah, pose with

their husbands. ©2011 by Stephanie Sinclair / VII Photo.7

Figure 2. Girls pose with Catholic priest, holding documents

commemorating their first communion. @2014 Photograph from
DesignPicsInc, www.depositphotos.com.

7 Cynthia Gorney, “Too Young to Wed: The Secret Lives of Child Brides,” National Geo-
graphic, June 2011, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/child-brides/gorney-text.

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86 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 31.1

Against the backdrop of child marriage (fig. 1), this essay will explore the
symbolic marriage of seven-year-old Roman Catholic girls in the first commu-
nion ritual (fig. 2). The “groom” in this instance is another form of a much older
man—patriarchy itself. To accomplish this task, I review and apply essential
elements of a feminist hermeneutics of experience and a feminist sacramental
theology, which will help reveal critical perspectives as they apply to Catholic
girlhood.8 I offer a brief definition of the missing girl child in the patriarchal
religious construct of Catholicism.9 I then note feminist religious scholarship
that has identified Marian devotion as potentially problematic in the lives of
Catholic women, alongside an overview of key ways that patriarchal religious
systems negatively affect women. I also explore the nature of the ritual and de-
tails of the first communion ceremony that are dangerous for a developing girl’s
sense of self-identity. In what follows, I discuss possible long-term implications
of this ritual on girls’ lives and postulate a reason scholars have not yet plumbed
the depths of the ways these issues first affect girls’ lives. The problem of the
“missing girl child” is one of not only patriarchal religious doctrine but also
feminist religious scholarship, and my ultimate goal is to prompt further work
in this area.

Applying a Feminist Hermeneutic of Experience to Catholic Girlhood

“We need . . . what we might call a “hermeneutic of experience,” a set

of principles, insights, and critical judgments that equips us to inter-
pret our experience in a more accurate and more profound way.”10

Theologian Bernard Cooke calls Christians to greater attention and deeper

critical thinking with the words, “We Christians must wake up; we must find out
what is really going on.”11 “Waking up” the collective Catholic consciousness, in
my view, involves a feminist hermeneutic of experience in studying sacramental
theology, as well as the overarching kyriarchal system into which it initiates,
through key sacraments like first communion, its child followers, specifically for
this investigation, girls. Taking a cue from mujerista theology, this paper inten-
tionally points out a similar need for all Catholic girls and women to develop

8 By using the term feminist, I do not mean to exclude womanist or mujerista perspectives. I
merely wish to acknowledge the embedded sexism within Roman Catholic traditional sacramental
theology as a baseline.
9 Certainly, a study of rituals affecting girlhood could include other religious traditions, in-
cluding Judaism, Buddhism, or Hinduism; this essay specifically aims to examine the Catholic ritual
of first communion, in comparison with the ritual of child marriage within the Islamic faith.
10 Bernard Cooke, Sacraments and Sacramentality, rev. ed. (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publi-
cations, 1994), 33.
11 Ibid.

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 Stith: Child Brides to the Patriarchy 87

a critical viewpoint—one that positions their lived experience as sacred space

from which to view the systems that shape their lives.12

Sacramental Theology and Honoring Eucharist as Lived Experience

Ross explains that sacraments are “ways in which the community recog-
nizes and celebrates together how God is present in their midst, in and through
the very realities with which we exist, and in and through human relationships.”
According to Ross, “sacramentality is an inherently ambiguous reality,” in that
the reality sacraments create “both reveals and conceals the presence of God.”
This “fluid” quality of sacraments, Ross contends, demands a historical analysis
of their relation to “a people and their traditions.” Without an understanding
of context, “sacraments can become detached from their times, and therefore,
their root meanings.” Ross argues this type of analysis is largely missing from
contemporary Catholic Christianity, “to its detriment,” so that sacramentality
becomes “fixed” in certain forms, “most particularly in the seven ‘official’ sacra-
ments.” As a result, she maintains, “the sacramental takes on a life of its own”;
the sacred becomes “routinized.”13 In what follows, I examine this point exactly:
how the sacrament of first communion has come to routinize and ritualize patri-
archy, specifically in girls’ lives.
Ross proposes four criteria for a feminist sacramental theology adequate to
the lives of women (and, by extension, girls):
1. redefining a context for sacraments that is tolerant, if not
appreciative, of ambiguity;
2. including a critical consideration of body and gender;
3. being explicit about its understanding of symbolic represen-
tation and how symbols are related to the community; and
4. acknowledging that a sacramental theology is meaningless
unless it is tied to a concern for justice in the communities
in which sacraments are celebrated, and in the wider world.
Emphasizing the last item, Ross cites religious scholar David Power’s crit-
icism that the Eucharist is tied to the sacrament’s isolation from the concrete
concerns of suffering human life.14 Similarly, Ana María Isasi-Díaz centers mu-
jerista theology as a liberative praxis that struggles for justice in the lives of
Latina women.15 My concern is to maximize justice for Catholic girls, examining

12 For more, see Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First
Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 62.
13 Ross, Extravagant Affections, 37–40, emphases added.
14 Ibid., 53.
15 Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology, 115.

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88 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 31.1

the ritual’s effects on girls’ minds, bodies, and hearts, in their lived experience.
This means, to use Cooke’s words, attempting to see “what is really going on.”16
To illuminate these arguments, I turn to one of the most clearly visible rituals of
female subjugation, child marriage.

Child Marriage: Who and Where Is the Missing Girl Child?

Chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Elders is a group of global lead-
ers that addresses issues presenting the greatest challenges to global health and
development and thus possessing the greatest potential for positive change.17
The Elders’ commitment to ending child marriage is a strong one; yet so is the
commitment of those wishing to maintain this religious and cultural tradition in
their communities. Among the reasons some Muslims give for maintaining this
practice is the example of the Prophet Mohammed, whose “beloved” marriage
to Ayesha, his youngest wife, took place when she was reportedly nine years
old.18 If we apply Ross’s criteria for a feminist sacramental theology to child
marriage, while noting its historical context, we can see the ways in which gen-
der-based violence has come to be perpetuated for centuries.19
Ayesha has become a religious symbol shaping a significant interpretation
of religious myth and tradition that conceals the damage being done to girls by
those enacting the ritual. Instead of being supported in her girlhood, growing
through an adolescence that empowers her sense of self, Ayesha is celebrated
in memoriam—by her religion and within communities that practice child mar-
riage—as an adult-like bride and mother (at age nine)—without consideration
of what this appropriation does to a girl’s sense of self-identity. This scenario, in
part, describes what I call the problem of “the missing girl child.” Patriarchal
religious traditions celebrate girls as young wives and mothers, not as the girls
they are. This appropriation is a key component of patriarchal power and girls’
disempowerment. Ayesha is not the only religious girl figure to be made prema-
turely into a child bride and mother, however. Catholicism has its own icon of
idealized and appropriated girlhood: the Virgin Mother Mary.

16 Cooke, Sacraments and Sacramentality, 11.

17 Barbara Crossette, “The Elders’ against Child Marriage,” Nation 294, no. 7 (Feburary 13,
2012): 20–23.
18 Gorney quotes Yemeni Member of Parliament, Mohammed Al-Hamzi: “If there were any
danger in early marriage, Allah would have forbidden it.” He cites Ayesha as proof that the Prophet
approved this practice (“Too Young to Wed”).
19 Certainly, there are many factors perpetuating the practice of child marriage we cannot
here analyze fully, but recognize is needed.

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 Stith: Child Brides to the Patriarchy 89

The Missing Girl Child Becomes Child Bride and Mother

The power of story to shape reality cannot be overemphasized. Thus, we
must examine the symbols that make up those stories within an “embodied con-
text” that considers how understandings of body and gender have become rit-
ualized and routinized through sacramental worship long after their historical
moment has passed.20 The Catholic Church has failed to acknowledge the ways
in which its core narrative has limited Catholic girls’ lives. Roman Catholicism
offers girls and the communities they are initiated into just one symbol for girls
to emulate: Mary.
The Bible does not discuss Mary’s girlhood; for that matter, the Bible pro-
vides no stories about girl children whatsoever.21 While there are stories about
Jesus preaching in the temple as a young boy, the earliest age that young women
are represented symbolically, most significantly through Mary’s character, is be-
fore she becomes pregnant with Jesus. Whether viewed literally or symbolically,
girls aged twelve or younger apparently have no place within Catholic religious
doctrine. The girl child is missing.22
Indeed, the most powerful image in the Catholic symbology of children
is the Madonna and (male) child. This picture, and the relationships it rep-
resents, mother and son, female as mother, and son as favored child, have been
normalized to the point of being overlooked as oppressive. Such iconography
positions motherhood as the sole female role. Certainly, while it is important, as
scholars like Elizabeth Johnson point out, to consider a female God/dess image
in which women can see themselves,23 it is equally important to consider what
girls, and the rest of society, miss out on by having no girl images associated with
the divine, or even humanity.24 To approach divinity, indeed to become valued
as a person, a Catholic girl must emulate the symbol idealized by the religious
community, the Holy Mother. And she must do so early, at the age of seven.25

20 Ross, Extravagant Affections, 12.

21 The immaculate conception could be cited here, but others have explored how it sets Mary
apart from all other women as an “impossible model,” born without original sin, while ordinary girls
and women are descendants of (the sinning) Eve. See Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1973), 82.
22 A noncanonical text, the Protoevangelion of James, offers an account of Mary’s girlhood that
draws an even closer parallel to child marriage: it says she was given to Joseph, “an old man,” when
she was twelve. “The Book of James—Protevangelium,” n.d., Gnostic Society Library, accessed
March 9, 2014, http://www.gnosis.org/library/gosjames.htm.
23 Elizabeth Johnson, SHE WHO IS: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse
(New York: Crossroad, 1992), 212.
24 Tricia Sheffield notes that women are “bearers of the divine, but not . . . embodiments of the
divine” (“Cover Girls: Toward a Theory of Divine Female Embodiment,” Journal of Religion and
Society 4 [2002]: 1–16, quotation on 1).
25 Susan Abraham and Elena Procario-Foley, ed., Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 182.

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90 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 31.1

Many traditional Catholics look to Mary as a sacred figure. Defending

charges that Catholicism is patriarchal and misogynistic, Catholics often point
to Marian devotion as proof that women are highly valued. Feminist critique
proves a bit more nuanced, however, and much scholarship focuses on the issue
of “Mariology.”26 As Johnson writes, “the Marian tradition has consistently been
integrated into the patriarchal framework of Christianity, and has served to le-
gitimate it.”27 Indeed, some feminist scholars refer to Mary as the “patriarchal
feminine,” reducing women’s value to their maternal bodies, and negating any
diversity of their experiences of being.28 In short, as symbolized by the Virgin
Mary, who obeyed God’s will by birthing the divine male child, women are po-
sitioned as subordinate to family and church demands and taught to treasure
their “holy” subordination.
Perhaps even more alarming is what scholar Frances Kissling points out
about the idealized servant-mother model for Catholic womanhood. She writes,
“[The little girl in grammar school] . . . learns she will never reach a state of
being in which the Church respects her, because the model . . . [of] the Virgin
Mother . . . is a model no woman can meet. Women cannot be both virgins and
mothers.”29 As Kissling alludes, this impossible and paradoxical conditioning of
the Catholic female “self,” like that within Islam, starts early; indeed, it begins
on a Catholic girl’s symbolic “wedding day”—her First Holy Communion.

Ritual and Sacrament:

The Effect of First Communion on Catholic Girls
In view of the dramatic ways child marriage affects the lives of girls put
through that practice, one might ask how it could possibly be compared to such
an ostensibly harmless practice as first communion. Some might say the two
rituals are not at all alike. I suggest they are. Those engaged in orchestrating
these rituals may fail to see the damage done to girls because they themselves
have been ritualized not to see it. Patriarchal religious violence is structural
violence—embedded within the interlocking systems of family, religion, and
culture and routinized confusingly through celebratory events.
Catherine Bell explains the dual nature of ritual to both construct and de-
construct particular realities, without the awareness of the consequences of
doing so. She claims that ritual “tends to see itself as the natural or appropriate

26 Elizabeth Johnson, “The Marian Tradition and the Reality of Women,” in New Catholic
Women, ed. Mary Jo Weaver (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 85, 103.
27 Ibid.
28 See Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist
Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 333.
29 Frances Kissling, “Roman Catholic Fundamentalism: What’s Sex (and Power) Got to Do
with It?” in Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women, ed. Courtney W. How-
land (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 200.

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 Stith: Child Brides to the Patriarchy 91

thing to do in the circumstances,” while it “does not see how its own actions re-
order and reinterpret . . . [those] circumstances” in ways that may not be intend-
ed.”30 Similarly, Joseph Martos investigates the purpose and power of Catholic
rituals, highlighting their transitional nature—how they “change the way people
perceive themselves in relation to God, themselves, and others.” He describes:
Typically, symbolic gestures signal what is happening during each phase
of the ritual: first, individuals are physically removed from their previous
social environment, “and/or signs of their status within it are removed
or covered over; second, the candidates are taken to a place apart . . . or
are given special instructions that prepare them for their new role, and/
or they are ritually processed into persons with a new status; and third,
they are received into their new social environment . . . given signs of
their new status, and/or their new role is recognized and approved by
the larger group.”31

Commonly, baptism (at infancy) and confirmation (in adolescence) are

considered sacraments of initiation, while Eucharist, or first communion, in
childhood, is the sacrament that welcomes participants into full Church par-
ticipation.32 If we view these foundational rites from a traditional Catholic per-
spective, then we will see little wrong with this sacramental process. If we view
the sacraments as points of indoctrination into a system that many scholars and
laypeople alike have deemed harmful to women, then we begin to understand
the need for a feminist sacramental theology to review especially these early
rites that children undergo.
Feminist religious scholars like Mary Daly have rejected patriarchal cre-
ation myths for the ways they blame Eve, and thus all womankind, for the Fall
of humanity from heavenly grace, resulting in the stain of original sin.33 The
Catholic Church, by contrast, celebrates these myths. Catholicism both es-
tablishes the sin narrative as foundational doctrine and presents itself as the
solution to this dilemma. For centuries, the Church has claimed the sole right
to “give grace” to the fallen through the sacraments of the Church—and only
those ordained, men, are able to interpret and bestow these “mysteries” of
grace.34 While this idea has evolved somewhat in recent decades, it seems fair
to say that the concept of “original sin” and the imputation of blame on all
women comprises a significant portion of the misogynistic philosophy of most

30 Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),
quoted in David Power, Sacrament: The Language of God’s Giving (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 24,
emphasis added.
31 Joseph Martos, The Sacraments: An Interdisciplinary and Interactive Study (Wilmington,
DE: Michael Glazier, Inc., 2009), 45–46.
32 Cooke, Sacraments and Sacramentality, 158.
33 Daly, Beyond God the Father, 48.
34 Cooke, Sacraments and Sacramentality, 7–8.

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92 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 31.1

traditional Catholic families and parishes, even if covertly. The implications of

this hidden sexism for women have been widely noted and are worth review.
Indeed, feminist religious scholars point to religious patriarchy as “one of
the strongest forms of [sexism], for it understands itself to be divinely estab-
lished.”35 Johnson claims that androcentric philosophy, specifically doctrine that
images God as male, affects women both socially and psychologically: “Male
images allow men to participate fully in [the divine], while women can do so
only by abstracting themselves from their concrete, bodily identity as women.
Thus is set up a largely unconscious dynamic that alienates women from their
own goodness and power at the same time that it reinforces dependency upon
men and male authority.” Johnson calls this patriarchal imagery for the divine
“a tool of symbolic violence against the full self-identity of female persons.”36
Similarly, Grace Jantzen argues that for women to participate fully in their
divinity, they must have a god according to their gender.37 Jantzen, Johnson,
and Daly highlight the silences imposed upon women under patriarchal reli-
gious symbolics and the ways dominant religious narratives have limited the
templates for women’s lives. Yet none of these scholars has thus far thoroughly
examined the early junctures along a woman’s developmental journey at which
this patriarchal conditioning occurs. Applying their feminist scholarship to pa-
triarchal rites like Catholic Communion, which solidify patriarchal conditioning
in a woman’s girlhood, should certainly be in order.

All Dressed Up and Only One Place to Go

Ross reminds us of the formative power of liturgy and ritual. She proposes
that these may have profound effects, of which we may not always be conscious,
and that in worship, as Martos outlined, the participant is actually changed and
formed in relation to others, God, and the world. “Worship is not simply the
result of one’s belief or actions; rather it also shapes them,” she explains. This is
what Ross means by attending to the “embodied character of all of sacramental
and liturgical life.”38 In a sense, we become what we celebrate. To illuminate the
formative power of ritual and the ways it shapes its young participants, we turn
again to child marriage and listen to the perspectives of girls whose worshipping
communities put them through that rite.

35 Johnson, SHE WHO IS, 23.

36 Ibid., 38.
37 Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999).
38 Ross, Extravagant Affections, 177, 31.

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 Stith: Child Brides to the Patriarchy 93

Figure 3. Following a wedding party in Yemen, child brides Si-

daba and Galiyaah are escorted to their new lives with their much
older husbands. ©2011 by Stephanie Sinclair / VII Photo.39

Recall the photos of child marriage offered in figure 1, and see here (fig. 3)
additional elements illustrating the confusion on girls’ part. In “Too Young to
Wed: The Secret Life of Child Brides,” National Geographic reporter Cynthia
Gorney tells the story of Shoba, a seventeen-year-old Yemeni girl who was mar-
ried at age eight. “Picture the occasion,” Gorney describes, “a group ceremony,
a dozen village girls, great excitement in a place of great poverty.” “Beautiful
new clothes,” Shoba recalled, smiling bitterly. “I didn’t know the meaning of
marriage. I was very happy.”40 Shoba’s happiness did not last, yet the illusion of
child marriage as a blessed event endures. While the illusion may be even more
difficult to recognize, the same is true of first communion.
The ceremony to initiate children in First Holy Communion is often ap-
proached with great joy by Catholic families, who carefully select suits and ties
for boys and white dresses and veils for girls. Usually the event is marked by
family celebrations, commemorating this day when children become able to
receive the body of Christ as the Eucharist.41 Professional photographers take
pictures of the group, often a second-grade class, as well as each child with the
presiding priest.
Contemporary understandings of “Eucharist” contain multiple meanings,

39 Gorney, “Too Young to Wed.”

40 Ibid.
41 Colman O’Neill, Sacramental Realism: A General Theory of the Sacraments (Wilmington,
DE: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1983), 94.

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94 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 31.1

including not just “receiving communion” (the host that is Christ) but also “cel-
ebrating communion” with other Church members, viewed as “members of the
body of Christ.” A modern understanding that the “presence of God” is more
of a living presence in the lives of the individuals comprising the community of
celebration still warrants critical review.42 For when we look at the “presence of
God” that is being communally celebrated with a feminist sacramental theology
and feminist hermeneutics of experience,43 we can learn quite a lot about the
formative power and embodied character of the relationships to self, other, the
world, and God ritualized into girls’ lives through first communion. Their “child
marriage to patriarchy” becomes unmistakably clear.
Many Catholic parents view first communion as a sweet occasion, lovingly
dressing their seven-year-old daughter in her dress and veil.44 Likely, they envi-
sion the day she will pick out another white dress, for the sacrament of marriage.
The garments that symbolize purity, chastity, and obedience to God, however,
also serve to cloak complex realities. Teresa Delgado examines Catholic expe-
riences within Latin American and US Latino culture, in which Catholicism is
deeply embedded. Her insights can be extended to the majority of traditional
Catholic structures consisting of church and often school, families, and commu-
nities—parish life that is pervaded with Catholic doctrine.45
In “This is My Body . . . Given for You: Theological Anthropology Latina/
mente,” Delgado examines the Catholic meaning traditionally ascribed to
“woman” and how it can both distort identities and serve as a “source of re-
newal.”46 In this construct of Catholic female identity, into which girls are sac-
ramentally and socially initiated, Delgado points to two key problems within
the classical understanding of theological anthropology as being responsible for
serious distortions of the identities of girls and women. First is the hierarchical
ordering of male/female relationships, resulting in the idealization of the male
hero, which she calls machismo. The second, which she calls marianismo, is the
idealization of the obedient woman reflected in the Virgin Mary, as the ideal
form of God’s grace in women. The idea is that women’s humanity is actualized
by submitting to male authority—in Mary’s words at the Annunciation, “Let it
be done to me according to thy will.”47

42 Cooke, Sacraments and Sacramentality, 9.

43 Ibid., 107.
44 Some Catholic parishes have variations of dress, including dressing all children in the same
types of albs. However, the dynamic of dress described here, with white dresses for girls and suits for
boys is predominant in most parishes.
45 Within American Catholic churches, there is some range of conservative and liberal praxis,
while adherence to doctrine is still mandated by the Vatican.
46 Delgado’s review does include girls in her examination.
47 Teresa Delgado, “This is My Body . . . Given for You: Theological Anthropology Latina/
mente,” in Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology, ed. Susan Abraham and Elena Procario-Foley
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 26–35.

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 Stith: Child Brides to the Patriarchy 95

Delgado insists this dual emphasis of machismo and marianismo is central

to the domination and commodification of women’s physical bodies, “in spite of
the best attempts to interpret that culture and theological tradition in ways that
affirm women’s full humanity.”48 This paradox between intent and actuality is
crucial to the thesis of this essay, and Bell’s cautions must be recalled, regarding
what rituals and those enacting them both do and do not see. When it comes to
those involved in the indoctrination of girls into a patriarchal religious symbolic
(here Catholicism), is it quite possible that many, if not most, simply “know not
what they do?” But what does the ritual of first communion actually accom-
plish? And more important, how might it affect the lives of young girls—with
and without their awareness?
Catholic Church leaders contend that first communion brings girls to “the
Lord’s Supper,” into full participation in the church.49 They come “to the table”
to participate in the “body of Christ,” by both consuming the host and becoming
members of the community.50 This “seat at the table,” however, presents both
a double blind and double bind. In “welcoming” girls to the table of first com-
munion, the Catholic Church defines and forms a specific type of self-under-
standing for Catholic girls—the same one that feminist religious scholars have
criticized for its harm to women.
For girls, to enter into “the body of Christ” means celebrating a “presence
of God” in which they will be subjugated. They must worship and obey a male
God; they need a male savior in order to connect with that male God; they must
emulate the Virgin Mother in order to be accepted by their religious commu-
nities. Logically, then, girls themselves are not divine; they are distanced from
the divine God by their very gender; they must accept a restricted position of
power; and to be valuable in this community, they must aspire to be Mary. Girls’
options are either to become a good Catholic wife and mother or to become lit-
erally “a bride of Christ,” a woman religious, or nun. These roles are not without
tremendous value, of course, except when girls feel marriage or the convent are
their only options—that their core value comes from the role they serve not the
full person they are.
If, instead, girls were born into the world innocent, the divine already within
them, then they could be valued for themselves, equal to boys, and open to full
flourishing. Motherhood could be valued as a possible choice, but not the sole
measure of their worth. In fact, fatherhood could be valued equally, and society
arranged in a way that supports parenting as a choice, with the development
of dynamic autonomy and creative potentiality in all people. In this feminist
construct, girls can choose for themselves their lives’ direction, supported by

48 Ibid.
49 The ritual also impacts boys, though not investigated here.
50 Cooke, Sacraments and Sacramentality, 158.

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96 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 31.1

adults who have done the same.51 In terms of spiritual authority, all people can
attain equal status, the interdependence of one with the whole held in delicate
balance, as opposed to an infallible kyriarchy. A “presence of God” that would
call for a “new way of life”52 would be one that insisted on all God’s people being
equally positioned “at the table.”
By contrast, according to Martos’s framework, in first communion, girls
are “removed” from their status as whole human beings and “covered over”
with the stain of original sin (begun in baptism and reinforced covertly through
first communion apparel of white veils and dresses).53 As Johnson and Jantzen
would contend, girls then accept and internalize their distance from divinity in
being made to worship a male God image.54 The Church gives them “special
instruction” in the tenets of Catholic patriarchy and their subordinate female
status to prepare for their new role, and they are then “received into their new
environment . . . approved by the larger group.”55 To make the approval even
more confusing and convincing, loving family members and godparents joy-
ously celebrate this event with cake, punch, and presents. The question re-
mains: What roles are we celebrating for Catholic girls through the ritual of
first communion? And in so doing, what are we seeing and, perhaps even more
important, not seeing?

Long-Term Implications of Catholic Girls’ Marriage to Patriarchy

Delgado cites an important truism affecting girls that is essential to the
perpetuation of the structure of Catholicism. She writes that Latin American
women and Latinas “learn at a very early age to put the community before in-
dividual, the family before the self,” a model that clearly extends beyond Latino
culture to much of traditional Catholic life. While Delgado notes this can be
a positive attribute in building community, she is also clear that this mind-set
makes it very difficult for girls and young women to satisfy their own needs—
or, in some cases, to even know what those needs are.56 Under Catholicism,
women’s “selfhood” is idealized as “selflessness.” A good woman is one who is
self-sacrificing to all.
Women must remain “docile and accommodating,” Delgado explains,
“in order to sustain calm familial relationships” because power is skewed “di-
vinely” in favor of fathers, brothers, husbands, boyfriends, and other men in

51 Grace Jantzen’s scholarship on traditional patriarchal religion as “necrophilic” versus a fem-

inist revisioning that would be one of “natality” and flourishing is worth highlighting here (Becoming
Divine, 57).
52 Cooke, Sacraments and Sacramentality, 11.
53 Martos, Sacraments, 45–46.
54 Johnson, SHE WHO IS, 25; and Jantzen, Becoming Divine, 74.
55 Martos, Sacraments, 44–45.
56 Abraham, Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology, 34–36.

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 Stith: Child Brides to the Patriarchy 97

the community, “who maintain final authority for women.” Disturbingly, the
young women caught in this familial-religious matrix largely don’t recognize
this subordination. Delgado references religious scholar Eleazar Fernandez’s
concept of “disembodied knowing” to describe this phenomenon, in which one
does not or is not able to take into account certain principles and norms that
affect one’s mind and body.57 The cause of disembodied knowing in the lives of
these girls is simple: their selves and bodies are not valued as their own. They
are valued as virgins, brides, and mothers—roles that serve the needs of the
Church.
Precisely because Catholic girls are shaped almost exclusively for the ser-
vice of others, there may be little time in which they are not thinking of their
self-worth as externally defined. Such thinking sets them up to be targets of
victimization of all sorts. As Delgado argues, the reason it is so vital to recog-
nize the ways that ideologies like machismo and marianismo affect the lives of
girls and women and their communities is the difficult and dangerous outcomes
these ideologies perpetuate: namely, violence to girls and women.58 Review the
photo of a young girl’s first communion (figs. 2 and 4), revealing the virginal
child bride, emulating Mary. Delgado outlines explicitly the dangers of this nar-
row model. Teaching girls that submissiveness to male authority is “holy” makes
them prime targets for male domination and abuse, which they are ill prepared
to identify, understand, or rebuke.
Patriarchal culture is encoded with violence. Celebrating selfless ideals
for girls, rather than autonomy and agency, can have lifelong consequences
to themselves and their future families. When these girls become mothers, it
may be much more difficult for them to instill a sense of self-identity within
their children, because they have never been encouraged to develop their own.
While this dynamic may vary, the metaphor of child marriage being harmful
to girls by making them mothers too early and affecting the health of their
children must be considered in relation to Catholicism here.59 Interpersonal
violence becomes embodied trauma, with enduring consequences to wellness
and relationships. One way Catholicism, via first communion, may participate
in this process is by co-opting girls’ personhood and power through celebratory
ritual.
Examining a photo of a first communion ceremony (fig.  2), from the
view of feminist sacramental theology prioritizing issues of gender, body,
symbology, and justice, we can see the enactment of our concerns. Delgado
explains, “The priest takes on the symbolic manifestation of Jesus as priest,

57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Ruth Gaffney-Rhys, “International Law to Combat Child Marriage,” International Journal
of Human Rights 15, no. 3 (March 2011): 359–73, 362.

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98 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 31.1

prophet, and king”60—obviously, girls do not. Young girls receiving the sac-
rament engage in a ritual in which their salvation is offered by a divine inter-
mediary, and both positions, priest and divine being, they can never experi-
ence on their own. The symbols of male priest/Christ figure and child bride
likely do much to create and reinforce the internalized associations attached
to these roles and the dynamics of patriarchal power at play—both seen and
unseen.61

Figure 4. Boys and girls engaged in the ritual of first communion.

©2014 by Sebastian Czapnik, Dreamstime.com

The patriarchal construct for girls is also observable (fig. 4) when viewed
with boys. Wearing suits and ties, boys at first communion are dressed as in-
dependent adult men, who could clearly become husbands, fathers, priests, or
professionals.62 In contrast, dressing girls as brides reinforces their value within
the private sphere only, internalizing their dependency on marriage and moth-
erhood, while they, themselves are still children. The ritual of first communion
thus offers boys a step forward in the hierarchy of the Church, while girls step
to the side and backward.63 First communion is, ultimately, ritualized patriarchy
and patriarchy ritualized—early and effectively—in the lives of children and the
adults they eventually become.
As Archbishop Tutu said about child marriage, Catholicism promotes the
male control of female selfhood “because . . . men allow it.” He notes: “Fathers,
village chiefs, religious leaders, decision-makers—most are male . . . we need to

60 Abraham, Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology, 37.

61 We recall, also, Elizabeth Johnson’s theory about patriarchal religious symbolics creating
female dependence on male authority and distance from their own (SHE WHO IS, 38).
62 A comprehensive investigation of the ways that boys’ self-identity is impacted by Catholi-
cism and first communion is needed, though outside the scope of this essay.
63 Olga-Maria Cruz-Smock, conversation with author, August 13, 2012.

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 Stith: Child Brides to the Patriarchy 99

enlist the support of all the men who know this is wrong, and work together to
persuade all those who don’t.”64 Certainly, as long as no one challenges Catholic
patriarchy, the narrow realities it produces through ritual will remain unseen,
thus continuing to be unchangeable. The call for justice outlined in this paper is
to all Catholic people—to reevaluate what is celebrated as “sacred.”

Finding the Missing Girl Child: Why Did She Go Missing?

The patriarchal devaluing of girl children that led to their omission from
biblical texts is the same type of social contract that leads religious and family
systems in many parts of the globe to devalue girl children through the practice
of child marriage. The latter contract is overtly disastrous to the seven-year-
old girls being married to men three and four times their age. The former is
covertly destructive to the seven-year-old girls being slowly indoctrinated into
a psychological ideology that simultaneously “idealizes and humiliates” them.65
One issue overlooked by religious leaders and feminist scholars alike is the
lack of representation of the girl female body and the impact of this troubling
omission.
Ellen Driscoll discusses the work of theorists including Susan Bordo, San-
dra Bartky, and Michel Foucault, all of whom have suggested that the body is
an inscriptive surface upon which the politics of gender are written. “As well as
a text of culture, the body is a site of practical social control,” Driscoll writes.66
It is not only women whose bodies are thusly co-opted by patriarchy, as these
scholars stress—first, it is the bodies of girls. Driscoll examines why this is so
harmful to both girls and women who internalize,
ideals of femininity, based on the “masculine appropriation of desire,”
that are reproduced by the image-makers of our culture. . . . Internal-
izing the all-knowing and all-seeing gaze, girls and women oblige the
male spectator—human or divine—in their attempts to embody perfec-
tion, while memorizing “the feel and conviction of lack, insufficiency,
or never being good enough.” If shame is linked to the acquisition of
self-object awareness, then can it not be argued that the female body as
“other,” as “object of vision: a sight,” is the site of shame, a site of scru-
tiny upon which male desire for power and control is inscribed? Per-
petually engaged in a self-surveillance that is soul-destroying, women
[and girls] not only experience themselves as shamed, they also shame
themselves and their spectators.67

64 Crossette, “The Elders’ against Child Marriage,” 21–22.

65 Daly, Beyond God the Father, 112.
66 Ellen Driscoll, “Hunger, Representation, and the Female Body,” Journal of Feminist Stud-
ies in Religion 13, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 91–104, quotation on 94, emphases added.
67 Ibid., 101.

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100 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 31.1

Undoubtedly, social activists like the Elders, working to stop child marriage
globally, see the “soul-destroying” and life-altering aspects of child marriage.
Driscoll’s theory suggests such activists are shamed into seeing it by the very
shamed-filled gaze of the child brides themselves. It is this “seeing” of the child
bride’s return gaze, and the empathy that recognizes the embodied gendered
inscriptions of power beneath it, that I suggest is also needed in examining girls’
experiences of first communion. What does the girl child demurely dressed in
white see, and what does that tell her about her place in the world? Unfortu-
nately, religious structural violence is embedded into all the systems surround-
ing her, so adult hindsight often presents the only clear view. Feminist scholar-
ship, therefore, seems to warrant such retrospective analysis.68
While feminist theologians and scholars of religion have explored the ways
patriarchal religious symbolics affect the lives of women, few have examined
the impact these religious structures make upon girls. Driscoll’s theory may
indicate why. To what extent are we feminist scholars, if we were raised in the
Catholic or other patriarchal tradition, sites of this patriarchal shame, as well as
spectators?69 Could one possible component of the “missing girl child” problem
be that harm to women is easier to look at than the ways religious symbolics first
affect girls?70 Recalling Cooke’s words, for women, “waking up” in patriarchal
religious systems often involves acknowledging, in order to heal, deep wounds
acquired within the very institution we are taught not to question. The silences
around Catholic women’s experiences, particularly their experiences as girls,
are significant. We must “unveil” the Catholic girl’s position of overlooked dis-
empowerment and attempt to pave the way for new understanding and fuller
flourishing.

Breaking the Child Marriage Contract—Setting the Girl Child Free

How might first communion be modified to empower girls? A critical first
step is to examine honestly the texts, narratives, and symbols that subjugate girls
and fragment their senses of self-identity. As explored here, the Catholic sacra-
ment of Holy Communion is a key ritual that disempowers girls, sending them
down a road of blind subjugation. The question becomes, should this ritual
continue, and if so, how might it be changed to be more empowering to girls?
Applying existing feminist religious scholarship, including a feminist herme-
neutics of experience and feminist sacramental theology that honors girls, may
begin to address these questions. Reimagining the valuation of girls for girls’

68 See Sheffield, “Cover Girls.”

69 Carter Heyward, Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989).
70 There is no blame here for feminist scholars. I wish merely to highlight a concern, to raise
awareness, and to encourage full healing.

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 Stith: Child Brides to the Patriarchy 101

sake prompts the reimagining of rituals to offer them and, in corresponding

ways, boys. Rather than fitting girls into rituals that idealize virginity, marriage,
and motherhood, a more child-honoring method may be to create rituals that
meet the needs of children—in this instance, girls. For example, girls undergo
several important stages around which meaningful and significant rituals may
be constructed, including menarche, celebrations of creative expression, an-
alytical achievement, compassionate consciousness, friendship or relationship
milestones, or losses of various kinds.
We can also take lessons from feminist religious scholars’ suggestions on
meaningful rituals for women, including many ways of honoring the lived and
embodied experiences of women in the Church. Contrary to current rites, this
type of celebration of “sacred” is “not . . . the symbol of the (absent) pres-
ence of God, [or] . . . ‘otherness’ of God, but rather the intentional assertion of
God’s presence here, in the bodies of women [and girls].”71 Designing rituals
that guide girls into more embodied, self-aware, and empowered self-identi-
ties helps ensure they will be capable of designing for themselves the types of
lives, relationships, and concerned worldviews that have the best chance for
egalitarian flourishing. Translating this embodied “presence of God” concept as
“Eucharist” into sacramental worship, including first communion, where girls
could play an active and empowered role, is an important challenge to consider.
But it will not solve the patriarchal problem for girls.
Even if the ceremony of first communion were to be changed significantly,
including attire, girls would still be entering a system that subjugates them in
terms of their position within the Catholic kyriarchy. A fuller transformation of
Church doctrine and structure is necessary, including, but not limited to: inclu-
sive images of God that include female and all genders; a revisioning of the cre-
ation story that does not blame women for all human suffering and instead high-
lights the reality that patriarchal structures bring harm to girls and women—and
boys and men;72 the empowerment of all persons to become priest/esses, should
they wish; and a revolution of appreciation for and empowerment of women
religious. If Catholic leaders, wishing to truly honor Mary, could release her
creative power from its rigidly literalized and routinized maternal symbolism,
the Catholic Church might “birth” such a new divine consciousness, capable of
celebrating a “presence of God” that values girls and women as sacred in their
own right and in Church rites as well. The invitation is omnipresent.

This paper has highlighted overlooked issues affecting Catholic girlhood, but
is in no way comprehensive. More interdisciplinary scholarship is needed to
explore the full impacts of patriarchal religious systems on girls’ lives, in order

71 Ross, Extravagant Affections, 167.

72 Jimmy Carter, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2014).

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102 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 31.1

to envision ways to transform harmful rituals, texts, symbols, and systems for
the flourishing of girls, their families, and communities. Catholicism, through
rituals like first communion, has kept the girl child hidden, subjugated, and
silenced for far too long. It is time that those within patriarchal religious tra-
ditions like the Catholic Church, as well as feminist religious scholars studying
these structures, identify this appropriation of girls’ self-identity, bodily integ-
rity, and sacred divinity—and work to set the girl child free.

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