Namaste Insights, Fall 2012

Matthew: Conservative in what exactly? Is it conservative to tell the pope that he’s surrounded by evil men—men who cackle at night like hens? And what’s conservative about refusing to move a grave when instructed to do so by the archbishop, for which she was interdicted?

Certainly Hildegard abode by some of the restrictions of her time and of the institution of that day. She didn’t march to be ordained a priest. But in a subtle way, she brought the feminine strongly into ecclesiology and her understanding of the church. She most deCinitely didn’t buy into the notion they are trying to sell us today that the magisterium and entire teaching arm of the church is located in Rome.

As you pointed out earlier, she was teaching as a woman, and she was preaching, which of course has been forbidden by the last two popes. She was preaching in the presence of bishops and archbishops throughout Germany and Switzerland. So I don’t see much that’s conservative about her!

Mary: Some claim that she was an elitist because in Rupertsberg abbey all the choir nuns were of noble birth. That she didn’t have people of lower birth serving as choir nuns was one of the criticisms directed at her during her own lifetime by Mistress Tengswich, the superior of Andemach Abbey, who wrote a letter to her complaining that her nuns wore fancy hairdos and tiaras. In other words, that she was a social elitist.

Matthew: I don’t give her high grades on what I would call class consciousness. All saints have clay feet, and it’s important to know their limitations as well as their genius. She made mistakes, as we all do. One of these was that she stuck by the class structure of her day.

Matthew Fox nails 95 theses at Wittenberg, Germany, where Martin Mary: It was a deeply Luther nailed his 95 theses hierarchical society with deep class lines.

Matthew: At the same time, she was explicit on the rights of the poor and taking care of their needs.

She talks about the compassion she felt whenever she encountered the poor. She also talks a lot about greed, criticizing it not only in the church hierarchy but also in the social structures of her time. And her favorite virtue was justice, for she was always calling people back to justice. “Daughter Justice,” she called it. But she didn’t apply her justice consciousness to the class issues of her time, and today we would see this as