Gender, Power, Privilege: Unavoidable Impolite Questions about the Catholic Conversation in the Public Square

In a posting I made earlier this morning about the compromise the Obama administration has offered the U.S. Catholic bishops re: contraceptive coverage, I ended by noting Joan Walsh’s outstanding analysis of what has taken place in the intra-Catholic debate lately. I noted that Joan Walsh sees a new maturity in what has been a tribalistic American Catholicism whose public voice has been almost exclusively dominated by men.  She notes that, in recent debates about the contraceptive guidelines, the voices of women–Catholic women included–are beginning to be heard with new force.