 I'm Michelle Ross, Administrative Coordinator in the Center for Catholic Studies, and I have the honor of welcoming all of you to the 17th annual Ann Drummy O'Callaghan Lecture on Women in the Church. The lecture has been endowed by the O'Callaghan family in honor of Ann, who worked tirelessly in the diocese of Bridgeport as a religious educator and advocate for the mentally challenged. Ann had been a vocal spokesperson on behalf of women, growingly troubled by the role and treatment of women in the church, thus the theme of these lectures. One of its primary goals is to bring together religious educators, theologians, and students to discuss issues relevant to women in the church. With that, I am pleased to welcome Karen Pritchard to the podium to introduce Nancy Pineda Madrid. Karen is program coordinator in the Center for Faith and Public Life, and a graduate student in business analytics program. Karen? Hello, I'm pleased to welcome Nancy Pineda Madrid to the 17th annual Ann Drummy O'Callaghan Lecture on Women in the Church. Nancy Pineda Madrid is a associate professor of theology at Boston College. She is among the first US Latinas to hold a PhD in systematic theology and is the first theologian to publish a book on the evil of feminine aside. She has published numerous articles and co-edited two books, Hope, Promise, Possibility, and Fulfillment, and The Holy Spirit, Setting the World on Fire. Currently, she's working on a book on La Vierne de Guadalupe, which is very exciting. In February 2011, American magazine named Dr. Pineda Madrid as one of the seven most promising theologians of the next generation. In 2012, she received the Laredo Legacy Award for Religion and Theology. She's former president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States and former vice president of the International Network of Societies of Catholic Theology. Her book, Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juarez, argues that the tragedy of feminine aside demands a fresh consideration of what salvation means. As she says in the abstract to this talk, if we take seriously the extreme violence being suffered by women today, particularly along the US-Mexico border, then women must be recognized as a crucified people, a recognition that will encourage the coming reign of God and more accordingly, a more just world. Dr. Pineda Madrid's work, in particular, her analysis of this community of women driving towards salvation is a fitting legacy of Anne Romeo Callaghan's work for whom this lecture is an honor. It is my privilege to introduce Nancy Pineda Madrid and to welcome her to Fairfield University. Well, it is certainly my honor and delight to be here with you this evening. It's my first visit to Fairfield, so I'm really grateful to have the opportunity to be here among you. I wanna begin by thanking very much Dr. Paul Lakeland who invited me to be this year's the person presenting this year's lectures, so I'm really grateful. I've been a long admirer of his work and the work of many of the theologians in the department here, and so it's an honor to be here in your midst. I also wanna thank the Callaghan family. I had a wonderful dinner tonight with them and we had a great conversation and it was so fun and wonderful and I'm very, very grateful, so thank you for welcoming me in your midst. I also wanna thank Ms. Karen Pritchard for her introduction and also Ms. Michelle Ross who did a lot of the work to organize this in and to make this possible, so thank you as well. Let me make a comment as I begin here a bit about my own background. I was born and born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and raised in El Paso, Texas. And as a child, my family often went to dinner in Ciudad Juarez and I grew to love the city, love its people. And in many ways, as I got ready to write the first book of my theological career, this book was the book I had to write, the book on Ciudad Juarez and the violence against women there, largely because I knew a Juarez that was very different from the one that we have heard about most recently in the press. And so it comes out of that a sense of love for the people of Juarez and the region of the border. I'm certainly someone who has been very shaped by the US-Mexican border. Most of my formative years were all up and down the US-Mexican border on both sides of the border. And so my remarks and my interest in this topic come out of that. I also wanna say I'm so delighted to be giving this lecture in honor of Anne O'Callaghan. My mother was a DRE all her life. And so it's very fitting in many ways to be able to give a lecture in honor of a woman who also spent her life as a DRE committed to the church and to women's roles and it's certainly to working with those who suffer from intellectual disabilities. So I'm very honored to be part of this legacy of women who've given this lecture. So now to my remarks, violence against women, a crucified people. Along the US-Mexican border, violence against women has a long history. And in our own time, it has become endemic. It has taken many forms, including sex trafficking, feminicide and desapariciones, disappearances, among many others. And certainly we all know the problems of domestic violence and their long history. At the dawn of the 21st century, all of these crimes are metastasizing at an alarming rate. This evening, I wanna suggest to you that if we take seriously the extreme violence being suffered by women today, particularly along the US-Mexico border, then we must recognize women as a crucified people. A recognition that will encourage the coming reign of God and accordingly a more just world. I'm dividing my presentation today into three parts. First, taking violence against women seriously. What does it mean to take violence against women seriously? And second, recognizing women as a crucified people. What does it mean to make that kind of an identification? And where does that come from? And my remarks largely are very much informed by the work of John Sobrino from El Salvador, as well as Ignacio and Correa. And third, offering a credible account of our hope. When we face into this kind of violence, it's very hard to remain hopeful and it's a huge challenge to think about what does it mean to practice hope in the face of horrific evil? So we will look at that here as I conclude my remarks today. So first, taking the violence of women seriously. To take the violence against women seriously, most certainly necessitates being clear about the forms and effects of violence on women. I will describe two forms, sex trafficking and feminicide. And briefly comment on a third, desapareziones, disappearances. Paradoxically, at the same time that women have greater access to higher education and professional positions, poor women find themselves under an escalating and ever more severe violent assault and assault unto death. Human trafficking is a term for modern slavery. When trafficked, human beings become objects of commerce. Taken against their will, held in circumstances that exacerbate their vulnerability and sold for material profit. Sex trafficking in particular almost always targets poor women and poor women and children. They are kidnapped and forced into prostitution. The captors of these women sell their bodies repeatedly with utterly destructive consequences for their lives. It is a form of slavery unto death in many cases. And after the death of the trafficked person, the perpetrators seek out new bodies with the intention of their enslavement. And so the cycle continues. It frequently begins with a young woman of a very poor family. She finds herself being wooed by a man of some means. He convinces her that he is in love with her and entices her to travel with him to another location, often a foreign country, where they will marry and have a better life. He takes her to a location where she has no connections, a country where she does not speak the language. Instead of marrying her, he along with other men repeatedly rape her and then violently abuse her. And in other ways traumatize her until she feels completely demoralized and beaten down. Having placed her in a situation fully designed to exacerbate her vulnerabilities, her captors do all possible to deepen her sense of shame and to force her into prostitution. In short, her captors break her. This keeps her captors well healed. There's a lot of money to be made in this horrific evil practice. Notwithstanding that sex trafficking is horrific in every respect, the highly volatile context of the border region, the US-Mexico border region amplifies its horrors. In this region with its socio-political and economic vicitudes, the poor and especially women find their vulnerabilities exacerbated and exploited. The geographical proximity of border cities like El Paso Ciudad Juarez, Calexico, Mexicali, Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Hidalgo and Reynosa, Brownsville and Matamoros. The proximity of these cities, both on each on either side of the border, matters greatly since together they function as a single transnational space. In this context, sex traffickers operate with relative ease since movement across the border can be done inexpensively and quickly. In the largely Latino culture of this region with its honor-shame ethic, sex work for women is decidedly stigmatized. Female purity carries a high value. Moreover, the general climate of heightened violence mostly related to drug traffic has given rise to sex work with a high rate of linking sadistic practices and by that I mean biting, slapping, inflicting pain with the sex act. This is one example of the kind of violence that has suffered. Johns view this connection as enhancing their sexual gratification. Women caught in the web of sexual trafficking here and everywhere, because this is a growing problem around the world, frequently find themselves subject to such violent encounters. Moreover, victims are dealing with two different legal jurisdictions, putting victims at even greater risk. If after committing a crime, the perpetrators cross the border, he or she in fact almost always enjoys impunity. In fact, there are a number of people who will commit a crime on the US side and threaten the person that they are abusing with the fact that if they reported or if they're critical in any way, that they'll be killed and their body will be taken across the border and dumped. And so in that sense, and then there's impunity because there's no way, it's very, very difficult to trace and those situations are rarely traced. So that's the first example. The second example, feminicide. Feminicide identifies the most extreme form of gender-based violence against women, namely the assassination of women because they are women. Feminicide is one of two terms that scholars use. So you see these two terms up here. Femicide, the first term, is synonymous to homicide, except that it refers to the killing of women exclusively. Similar to homicide, it may be used to refer to a single murder. In contrast, feminicide, the second term up here, which is the term that I'm using, in Spanish known as feminicidio, is a kind of genocide against women. It not only refers to the killing of women by men, but also and more importantly, it specifies a large number of assassinations and these killings are distinguished by their particularly brutal nature and it refers to a system of impunity for the perpetrators. Feminicide presumes a system of gender inequalities and is the term increasingly preferred by scholars and activists when the character of society deteriorates resulting in the violation of women's health, well-being and freedom, then these violations contribute to the assumption that women are usable, abusable, dispensable and disposable. And over time contribute to a climate in which feminicide can erupt and develop. And while my focus has been looking at this on the south side of the border, the reality is it's a problem even here in the United States and around the world and we can speak to that during the questions if you would like. Historically discussions of feminicide have most often focused on Ciudad Juarez where systematic assassinations of women erupted in 1993 and remember that 1993 is the year in which NAFTA took effect and so the drug trade in Juarez really grew exponentially with the impact of NAFTA which made goods across the border much more possible in an easy kind of way much easier than it was prior to 1993 and as a result of that you have drug traffic that comes into the border region in a much more acute way than it was prior to 1993. So in 1993 journalists and others began to pick up on a growing pattern of gendered murders. The victims of these killings were poor brown women and girls typically between the ages of 10 and 29. So clearly the most childbearing years of a woman's life was when this was happening. They were raped, beaten and brutally murdered. Many were sexually mutilated. It is nearly impossible to obtain an accurate count of the number of victims of this feminicide. And one of the reasons that's true is because journalists, other investigators are often threatened if they wanna investigate and make these murders public. And many of them have lost their lives. There's many journalists and others lawyers, investigators who have been killed for making this kind of evil public. The growth of feminicide can no longer be seen as localized in Ciudad Juarez. Patterns similar to those seen here and so you see Juarez, I just wanted you to have a map of where it is. So obviously the western most point of Texas is where El Paso is and then Juarez immediately to the south of that. And if you travel to El Paso or Juarez, you know that at night you can't even tell that you're looking at two different cities. It's a singular metropolitan area. Patterns similar to those, well the growth of feminicide can no longer be localized in this region. Patterns similar to those seen there in the Paso Juarez area have emerged across the Paso del Norte region which is the region that encompasses Texas, New Mexico and the state of Chihuahua. And it even bleeds further to the east and to the west. So there's issues of feminicide all along the border. Sociologist Julia Monarez-Fregoso began naming this phenomenon as it's growing on both sides of the border as the cross border feminicides. In November of 2001, a young El Paso and five years old, her name was Alejandra Flores, was kidnapped, strangled, burned and killed. Her body was found naked suggesting that the act of killing her was eroticized by her murderer. Her murder took place just a couple of weeks after the now infamous 2001 cotton field murders in Ciudad Juarez. Roughly four years later, four young women's bodies were found dumped in the desert just beyond the city limits of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Located some 45 miles west of El Paso, Texas. These bodies also revealed that the murders had been eroticized and the bodies of these women had been eroticized in the act of killing them. Part of the border reality functions in a way that there's no safe harbor, there is a safe harbor, excuse me, there is a safe harbor for would be criminals, which I was explaining just a few moments ago. Again, a crime can be committed in one country, the perpetrator can escape to the other without fear of being apprehended for their crime. So that's a brief description of the first two forms of violence. I mentioned desapariciones. I'm often asked, what's happening today? A lot of the research that I did was related to the first decade of the 21st century. Today, a lot of the horror of this violence is continuing in the form of desapariciones, disappearances, where you don't find bodies. So it's very hard to mark the volume of killings. The bodies are disposed of in such a way that there's no trace left of those bodies either because they're put in acid or that they're cut up in various ways where you can't, that the research to find them is not as easily available, which creates, as you can imagine, a much deeper level of terror. So I wanna move a little bit of a summary from all of this. To take the violence against women seriously is to recognize that it is neither an illusion nor insignificant. For many today, these tragedies may seem unimaginable to the point of incredulity. Some would dismiss these horrors as the troubled invention of a warped mind, but certainly not real happenings in our time and place. So therefore, dismissing them as insignificant. Or these horrors may seem to so transfix us in a kind of voyeuristic gaze that we get fixated on all the details of the account. And it can seem nearly impossible to think through and move toward a just and merciful response to what is going on. While this kind of violence is quite real in multiple regions around the world, sex trafficking and feminicide, as I've already mentioned, take on a particular hue in the borderlands. These borderlands are increasingly a kind of denationalized place. A lot of scholars are getting into how the borders are becoming much more porous. And especially when it comes to the bodies of poor, particularly poor brown women. Forced and unforced migrations across this border and back heighten the horrors transpiring here. The impact is tragic. As Monares Fragoso, the sociologist I mentioned earlier, observes, even though the Paso del Norte region is celebrated as a tri-state region where social, cultural and economic borders evaporate, questions of sovereignty and political power are invariably used as an excuse to avoid creating binational and bilateral initiatives to investigate, identify and address violence against women. Nation states on both sides of the line are guilty of this. And we could get into that in much more detail. So the bodies of poor women victimized by sex trafficking, feminicide and desapariciones must command the attention of those who claim to follow Christ. If the Catholic faith and church is to be credible today. So I'm going to move now to my second point. Recognizing women as a crucified people. Violence against women is part of a centuries and millennia old pattern. Biblical stories cry out against this kind of evil. A notable example is the story of the unnamed woman of judges 19. She was repeatedly raped and tortured and then eventually murdered. Her body was dismembered. An account that echoes loudly in the experience of women today who know this experience of violence and who are killed or whose families find themselves trying to grapple with this kind of violence. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we need to know of this evil so that we confront and denounce misogyny in our societies and grievously in our religious traditions as well. To be sure we must attempt to understand violence against women and to consider what it means for us. Yet this violence asks more. How might we understand this violence so that we situate ourselves within its purview? This isn't something that's just happening somewhere else that we're outside of but we ourselves are inside the purview of what is going on. And that's important so that it impacts our way of talking about God. Ignacio Ea Curia, El Salvadorian philosopher once wrote and I quote, among so many signs always being given some identified and others hardly perceptible. There is in every age one that is primary in whose light we should discern and interpret all the rest. This perennial sign is the historically crucified people who link their permanence to the ever distinct form of their crucifixion. This crucified people represents the historical continuation of the servant Yahweh who is forever being stripped of his human features by the sin of the world. Who is forever being despoiled of everything by the powerful of this world. Who is forever being robbed of life, especially of life, close quote. So how do we see reality as it comes to us in our own time? What sign is the sign being given today? I argue that our generation lives in a time of extreme violence against women. This asks of us not only to look carefully and closely at the relationship between women and men between the poor and the wealthy but to consider a revision of how we talk about God. What does it mean to speak of the crucified people when the crucifixion is that of women? Two questions. First, what is intended by the phrase a crucified people? Second, what does it mean to identify women who have suffered extreme violence a crucified people? A great portion of humanity knows crucifixion as their historical reality, a reality that is the renewed crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The historical reality of ongoing crucifixions is the direct result of human decisions and structures. As Ignacio Eakuria explains, a crucified people is a collective body that owes its situation of crucifixion to the way society is organized and maintained by a minority. This minority exercises its dominion through a series of factors which taken together and given their concrete impact within history must be regarded as sin. Thus a crucified people is not simply people who know suffering but a particular group who suffer because of their shared historical reality, their collective vulnerability. The victims exemplify a group from whom the sin of the world continues to take away all human form and whom the powers of this world dispossess of everything, seizing even their lives above all their lives. To identify the victims of feminicide, sex trafficking and desapariciones as a crucified people carries several meanings. First, such an identification affirms that Jesus's crucifixion must not be viewed in isolation from the assassinations of innocent victims throughout history. It's a very, very important contribution of John Sabrina and others in Eakuria. If this connection between Jesus's crucifixion and the crucifixions going on today, if this connection is not made, then the suffering of the innocent is without a doubt trivialized, if not completely ignored. Ibon Gibara, who's a Brazilian theologian remarked as much. She wrote, and I quote, indeed Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed the Christ by the community of believers keeps his cross as a distinctive and unique sign. We are not denying this personal and historic aspect, but this cross is not greater or lesser than others, even though it is the cross of an innocent man. It surely represents a reference to a community of faith, but it must be set in dialogue with others if it is to avoid manipulation, close quote. When we leak the particularity of Jesus's crucifixion to that of today's victims of violence, we hold ourselves accountable for the abuse of power in our own time. We step closer to confronting our blindness, the ways in which our group interests function to limit our intelligence and circumscribe the range of our insight. My point is the meaning of a crucified people cannot be engaged exclusively or even primarily at a symbolic, figurative, or metaphorical level, but must be acutely focused on the material level, on the level of bodies. In this case, the bodies of women being crucified. Short of this, we participate in the abuse of power that leads to such evil. So that's the first point, the question of making this connection. Point number two, a crucified, this identification of a crucified people, women as a crucified people, those victimized by these forms of violence underscores the vulnerability quotient of women at a high risk for extreme violence. By their identity markers as women, as brown, and as poor, those victimized by feminicide sex trafficking disappearances and the like form a collective body who are vulnerable to the whims of dominant society acting on its own self-interest for economic, political, social, or even simply capricious reasons. A small sector of society, those in positions of power and dominance operate as a force to bend history in their own direction and this is sin. Frequently, the vulnerability of women is exacerbated and institutionalized through the perverted but prevalent use of religious symbols that provide justification for the subordination of women. In describing a common understanding of the cross, for example, among poor women in Latin America, Ibon Guevara observes, and again I quote, the cross is identified with their suffering and a kind of curse, being born female. This idea is deeply rooted in the popular culture of Latin America. The fate of being female is often considered a misfortune. For a group of women from poor neighborhoods in Recife, in Recife, Brazil, where she's done her work, the cross was not just the suffering of their daily lives of poverty but also their condition as women. Christianity taught them to bear and even welcome their cross rather than to look for ways to get rid of it. This sinful legacy has lent support to the assassinations of women that I'm naming today. So the third point, when we consider those victimized as a crucified people, we recognize that the tragedy of this crucifixion is brought about by the social sin of structural oppression in all of its forms. Fundamentally, social structures of domination within a context of extreme poverty and desperation have fostered conditions for the eruption of extreme violence against women. This particular crucifixion interrogates any acquiescence on our part to a benevolent patriarchy. A so-called benevolent patriarchy coupled with economic desperation far too easily moves toward evil like feminicide or sex trafficking or other forms of violence. However, when we hold our thinking about God accountable to the gospel message of liberation for the downtrodden, for the captive, for the oppressed, and for the forgotten as we hear about, for example, in Luke chapter four, we walk down the path of bringing the crucified victims of all such violence down from their crosses, identifying the victims of feminicide and violence, all forms of violence against women as a crucified people nudges us one step further along the path towards justice. So my fourth and final point. This identification urges a critique of the presumption that maleness is more essential to divinity than femaleness. Far too often, Jesus, the cross, and crucifixion have been grossly distorted with interpretations that serve to legitimate male dominance in the human community. Implicit in this kind of interpretation is the idea that the maleness of Jesus is utterly integral and essential to his Christic function and identity. Accordingly, this means that women, by virtue of their femaleness, cannot participate in the fullness of their Christian identity as images of Christ. So women may be identified as Imago Day as images of God, but not Imago Christi, images of Christ. This theological interpretation provides an ultimate justification for gendered gradations in humanity with disastrous consequences. Far too often, Christians have wrongly argued that because Jesus is a man, maleness and divinity are essentially interrelated in a manner, essentially and ontologically interrelated in a manner that cannot fundamentally exist between femaleness and divinity. Since Jesus was a man and God chose to be incarnate in a man, then men have a divinely ordained superiority over women. This line of thinking forecloses preemptively the possibility that God could have become incarnate in a female, in a female human being. What is at issue here is not whether we believe that Christ became a human being. For in fact, we proclaim that every Sunday as we recite the Nicene Creed or that Christ became a man. There's no question or debate about that. But what's at issue is whether we believe, if we affirm and believe that fundamentally what Christ became was a human being. The protests against feminicide confront and explode the ontological approach to the relationship between maleness and divinity. And I believe point us towards a very different interpretation, meaning underscoring human being and divinity rather than distinguishing gender in terms of men in particular or women in particular, but the identity as human beings. Catholic social teaching in its consistent affirmation of the dignity of all human persons would have us ask what understanding of the cross and crucifixion support misogyny and what understandings of the cross and crucifixion dismantle misogyny. Nothing is more important and urgent for Catholic believers than to figure out the answers to these questions. Nothing is more urgent for Catholic believers than to figure out not only who is killing the women, but what is killing them. By this I refer to any distorted theological thinking that undermines the explicit dignity of female humanity. And you see here, these images I'm sharing with you are images of protests in Juarez against the killing of women in Juarez. And so what you see in these popular practices is a connection between female humanity and crucifixion because on these crosses you'll see here the names of women Esmeralda, Lucita, and Barbara, and so forth. And even one up here, Desconocida, unknown. Some of the bodies have been impossible to identify and obviously a picture of a young woman on this pink cross that is protesting. So now I wanna turn to my third point. I realize this is extremely heavy and thank you for staying with this because it's not easy at all to sit with this kind of evil but I think it's important for us to do so. So I wanna turn to the question of offering a credible account of our hope. To claim that in the face of extreme evil against women, our faith can offer a credible account of hope is indeed a remarkable assertion. Yet we know that it is the victims of the world's injustices who are invariably the primary subjects of the hope that God is God's protest, that is God's protest against suffering. In John Sobrino's words, the hope that has to be rebuilt now is not just any hope but hope in the power of God over the injustice that produces victims. To name women who have suffered horrific violence as a crucified people is to recognize not only that they are victims of the sin of the world but they are also bearers of the world's salvation. This in no way idealizes suffering. Suffering in and of itself does not offer us salvation. Salvation emerges in what those who have suffered, past tense, do in response to their suffering. Hope may emerge in response to suffering. Hope is rebuilt through the action of those victimized by violence when they take action to blunt the effects of evil in the world. When those who have suffered violence and when others in solidarity with them work to bring the crucified down from the cross. It is when this kind of work happens that we have a credible account of hope. Resistance to evil can make clear the spiritual unity of all humanity, even in the midst of tragedy. Resistance to the evil of violence bears an eschatological orientation in the here and now. It is an action on behalf of the coming of God's reign in our midst today. An example of Christian hope in action can be taken from Ciudad Juarez. Within a few years after activists began identifying the pattern of these assassinations in Ciudad Juarez, mothers and other protesters started using the symbol of a pink cross in their public protests and marches and memorials. Over the years it has become so widely used that pink crosses have become an iconic symbol of resistance to the killings in Ciudad Juarez and beyond. And so you'll see, ni una muerte mas, not one killing more. And so this kind, and the color pink, a symbol often, a visual symbol of young women in their youth, this kind of a pink color. We're not, prior to this, I don't recall often seeing crosses being painted pink. In the late 1990s, the activist group, there have been many activist groups protesting this kind of violence over 300 in Juarez alone. In the late 1990s, the activist group was a seen echo, voices without echo, started painting electric poles and telephone poles. Pink, upon which they painted a black cross, which you see here. This practice helped to foreground the cross as a central symbol. One pole was painted for every woman and girl assassinated to honor her memory and to protest this abominable social violence. Many groups formed and ultimately, they numbered some 300. Their goals included bringing feminicide to greater public attention, demanding that it end immediately and ensuring that the perpetrators be called to account. Their protest took many forms, including long marches, the creation of public memorials, and at each you would see these large pink crosses appear. To bring the crucified down from the cross means working concretely in the world so that the justice be done to the victims of this world as justice was done to the crucified Christ. God did not permit the horrific assassination of the innocent Jesus to have the last word. In Jesus's resurrection, we find a limit to evil. Action taken on behalf of the victims of violence against women serves to bring them down from their crosses, to work so that evil does not have the last word. In Ciudad Juarez, where there is violence against women, to work on behalf of those who suffer this violence can mean and often does mean placing one's own life at risk. Indeed, in Ciudad Juarez, there are many accounts of activists and journalists who have been threatened or killed. Among the more notable examples is that of Norma Andrade, whose daughter, Alilia Alejandra Garcia Andrade, was a victim of feminicide in 2001. She was 17 years old at the time. After which Norma Andrade formed a group called Nuestras Ichas de Regreso a Casa that our daughters come home. In December of 2011, she was shot five times and survived. She moved to Mexico City from Juarez, where she was again attacked this time by a man who slashed her face. She has, and she's still living to this day. Activists believe she is being targeted for her work to document the hundreds of unsolved murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, including that of her daughter. No doubt those who have protested this horror have placed their own lives at risk. Norma Andrade's work along with that of many others is a course of action at the service of the resurrection of the dead. Andrade's work is so that others might live. The excruciating pain that she has suffered with the assassination of her daughter has enabled her to see that there are others out there who depend upon her efforts, almost all of whom she will never know personally. And so that's what you begin to see, people working and acting on behalf of others in the community who are not people that they know personally. And artists have also enabled us to confront this evil and invited us to consider conversion in some new ways. And I wanna share, I think their work, the work of artists as well, has been placed at the resurrection of the dead in the face of this tragedy. So this is one example. Laura Molina has created this poster which went up in Juarez and in the general area, cities along the border. The women of Juarez stopped the killing and you see again here a connection between women, female humanity and crucifixion, right? So the symbol of our Lady of Guadalupe, a very significant symbol to the Mexican people, the symbol of Mary. Obviously a reinterpretation of Michelangelo's pietà with the victim being a woman who's a victim of feminicide. Another painting, another artistic interpretation here by Ángel Valdés, here an image of Guadalupe, again an interpretation of Guadalupe yelling out, critiquing the violence. It's probably hard to see from where you are, but up here, well, let me start with this. This little, these words appear on a mountain side just outside of the borders, the city of Juarez, and it reads, la biblia es la verdad leala. The Bible is truth, read it. And then up here, a number of the, many of the slogans related to the protest. Una muerte, ni una muerte más, not one more murder. Cuántas muertes son muchas muertes, how many deaths there are many deaths. So all kinds of protests, ya basta, enough, enough of this. And you see all the guns, of course the guns for a lot of the violence happening in Mexico are manufactured in the United States. So you see the guns here, and if you can make this out, moving from across the border into Juarez, and then of course the cadavers symbolizing many, many of those who have been killed. And we could speak more of this. I think of Guadalupe in this image yelling out and crying out for an end to this. I also wanna point out on the far side what you see here too, a very beautiful floral scene here on the left-hand side. And so you see the violence, the tragedy, the evil on one side, and the beauty, and what God intends for us, the beauty of life, and a cry because you see such a radical disjuncture here between these two realities. The followers of Jesus Christ, we anticipate God's promise of resurrection. The cross demands that we risk our lives on behalf of life, knowing that our own fight of evil against evil, our own fight against evil will not defeat evil in a final way, which we realize now, after many millennia, we can subvert evil, but it isn't reduced in an absolute way in our lifetimes or in the period of human history. But our fight against this violence and the violence suffered by women allows the presence of God in history to become more transparent, and the graced nature of female humanity to be more wholly honored. Indeed, those willing to fight against violence offer us a credible account of hope. Thank you. Thank you, Nancy, and we have a little time, we have more than a little time for comments and questions. We have a couple of mics, so if you'd like to make a comment or ask a question, put your hand up, and either Michelle or I will give you a microphone in order to be heard. So who'd like to be first? What is the official church in Mexico and the US doing? Has the USCCB come out with policy statements? Have they, are there bishops and priests leading some of these protest groups? There are priests, there are a number of priests who have been very critical of the violence, so there are individuals we can cite on both sides of the border who are doing that, priests and bishops. The bishop of Saltillo, who's a man by the name of Raul Vera, has been very critical of the violence. So there are definitely individuals who have put their word out there criticizing it. The USCCB, the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, to my knowledge to date has not issued a statement about this. The Mexican bishops did issue a pastoral about 10 years ago, critiquing the violence in Mexico, it was about a 125 page document, pleading with the Catholics of Mexico to stop the violence, not only the violence that I've been talking about today, but all kinds of violence that has erupted in Mexico, especially as a result of a lot of the drug traffic and the drugs that you see in Mexico. But that statement sadly had very little attention to the experience of violence against women explicitly. Obviously a substantial document, 100 at about 125 pages, but it had about a couple of pages that was dealing with violence against women. And in that case, in that instance, that document was very critical of women talking about how women often bring violence upon themselves, which is a classic line that often is taken. And that's why you see in my statement, in my remarks, a sharp critique of patriarchy because part of what I see going on is that there's an example of a patriarchal mindset in a statement that is claiming that women should not be out late, out at night. A lot of these women are poor, they work in the Maquilas, many US corporations who brought in factories along the US Mexican border, on the south side of the border to take advantage of lower labor costs. And yet these factories are running 24-7. So obviously women are going into the factory, let's say at 10 o'clock at night and getting out at maybe five or six in the morning. And so a lot of the violence that's occurring is occurring at those hours, at the meeting at the front or the back end of this. And there's a critique of the women like, well, you shouldn't be out at night at this kind of an hour. And yet for the poor they need to work for their own livelihood. And in fact, scholars in Mexico have talked about the kinds of rhetoric that are occurring, the difference between the notion of a public man and the notion of a public woman, meaning a public man in the rhetoric, and this is largely in Mexico, we haven't had the same kind of analysis in the United States, but a public man is seen as somebody who acts on behalf of society, who's very concerned with the common good of their communities, and who will work and take leadership in that setting. Where the notion of a public woman is another euphemistic way of talking about women who are prostitutes. So obviously radically different readings of this term of a public man versus, because a woman, often, the perception still is and a lot of this is changing, but that a woman's place is largely in the home and not working or not in public. Thank you for your wonderful talk. I think you alluded to this, but I just wanted to bring it out again. So long as the church continues to refuse to allow women full participation in the church, they are really in fact colluding with this whole idea of women being not enough and women being lesser than. So it feeds into all of this abuse that we're talking about of women, and it's sinful. It is. I think there's a slippery slope, because while we may not see, well, there's, I mean, one would hate to say, I haven't looked at the analysis of trafficking, let's say here in Southern Connecticut. I don't know the history of that. I'm sure there are probably our scholars here at Fairfield who have that information, but I would be, I'm sure that there are elements of women being trafficked in this area, just when you study the phenomenon nationally, no question that that's happening, okay? But in many ways, because we may not necessarily see it in a very visible way, there can be a perception that patriarchy, because we're not seeing all kinds of women murdered in our streets, that somehow that's not, it's not such a, that we have kind of a benign form of it. And I like you, I wanna really challenge that, and say, you see a lot of rhetoric in the United States among feminist theologians around the whole discussion of women's ordination. And while I believe that's an important question, I think for me personally, this kind of a question of violence against women is raising, is coming to the surface for many of the same reasons that are, what am I trying to say? There's a connection between that discourse, which I didn't discuss here of course, but there's a connection between what one's doing symbolically around women, and women being in Mago Christi here, and this whole discussion of ordination. And I think this is, obviously this is an example where lives are really at stake. So I think it's just like we have to, anytime there's great horrific evil in the world, we have to rethink how we understand God and who God is. I think we're in a place where that need, that thinking needs to happen all over again, precisely on these points. Just curious, we're talking mostly Catholic circles. Are there differences between evangelical circles and Catholic circles about women in Mexico? I'm sure that there are. I think I'm sure like just in the Catholic church, you see a wide range of expressions. As I said, there are priests and bishops and leaders inside of the Catholic church who are protesting and critiquing this violence, but the great majority are not. And I imagine inside of the evangelical world, you'd see the same kind of thing where there's a range of responses. But I'm not up on where that conversation is in what is at this time in relationship to this. But I imagine you'd see both. You'd see elements where women are being blamed for their own victimization, as well as the fact that there's a critique of what's going on in society that gives rise to this kind of violence. Do you see any change or any betterment of language? I mean, I see that where patriarchy lives in our language in everything we do, especially in Catholics, and no openness, no open-mindedness towards a broader language before we even get to the truth of that language or something. I do, I mean, I think there are like everything. There's little pockets here and there where you start to see changes. A couple years ago, well, in March of 2016, that's not too long ago, about a year and a half ago, I was in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was giving a lecture there, and I was there over Tridwem, and I attended Easter Vigil Mass in Buenos Aires. And it was one of the most extraordinary experiences of the Easter Vigil I've ever had in my life. The priest there, this is a Dominican parish called Sacred Heart. And the priest balanced all the language throughout the whole liturgy. I was stunned, I had never seen it. So when we prayed to our father, he'd say, our father, mother, God, he led the whole congregation in doing that. And I was just in my hearing correctly. And he kept doing that throughout the liturgy, and he had a woman who he was, the liturgy of the word at the beginning of mass, he had a woman who obviously was a pastoral associate in this parish, and she had, he had her taking a leadership role in leading part of the liturgy during the liturgy of the word. And so here's the pocket of somebody who's trying to shift the ground underneath us in his particular word, world. And I think that's really, really unusual. Now this parish was a place where las madres, las madres de la playa de Mayo, you know, the women of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. They gathered here, and many of them, these were the mothers, the grandmothers who were protesting all these disappearances that occurred in Buenos Aires during the late 1970s, early 80s, when many tens of thousands, thousands and thousands of people who were picked up clandestinely and then their bodies were dumped out of airplanes in the Rio de Plata, just where, which is the river that Buenos Aires is on. And so you have the grandmothers that were protesting this who would gather in front of La Casa Rosada, which is their equivalent of the White House, the pink house in English, but in Buenos Aires, it's La Casa Rosada. And so they were protesting this in a very significant way and they found a home in this Catholic parish. So, and they all lost their children, many of them lost their, also their grandchildren because in some cases young women who were pregnant would be picked up, taken, tortured. They would wait until their children were born. After that child was born, then the young woman who had just given birth to the child was murdered, the baby was taken and given to a military family who wanted a new baby. And then the child had, there were no adoption papers or anything, I mean all of this was done illegally, of course, and so there were no paper trails of any of this. But the grandmothers were aware, of course, that their daughters, that this had happened to their daughters, so they were protesting and trying to figure out what happened to these grandchildren and where are these grandchildren. So that's what I mean by them losing both their daughters and then the next generation as well. And so this parish had been the local site where a lot of that had happened and in many ways I think that brought a certain consciousness there. And there's other examples, there's examples all over the place, I mean we can find examples here in the United States as well. I could mention some as well here locally, in the, I mean in the U.S. I was just thinking that I didn't want to lose sight of the fact that while you've been discussing what's been happening along the Mexican U.S. border that this issue doesn't also impact us here in lower Fairfield County. And in my work in education in the Stanford Public Schools we've got lots of kids who have been victimized over and over again on the border coming here who've attempted to get from somewhere in Mexico to the United States and ultimately ended up here in Connecticut and are now in our school systems and our communities who have been victims of exactly what you've been talking about. And so it's not so far removed from our own experience and our own community. And I think that that's just a really important part of this that we attend to that these folks, these women and their children are right here in our communities and in many instances being continued to be victimized here in lower Fairfield County, Connecticut as well. Wow, thank you. Thanks for that, Joe, because I know, yeah, that's very important to be, yeah. Do you know if there are any advocacy voices that are perhaps working with leadership in the Catholic Church to bring awareness of this type of horror and the whole concept of the language, of the patriarchal language? Are there advocacy groups that are doing that? Church leaders that maybe? Well, certainly you see all kinds of Catholic women activists that are organized around many different, there's Catholic groups that exist in cities across the country that are meeting and trying to think through what does this mean for us? And there are certainly all kinds of groups that are protesting this kind of violence. I passed out for you a handout that gives you websites and a number of books that record, well, the handout provides you with a number of different groups who are working to resist this. Some of them are working, most of them are not necessarily connected up with the church explicitly. And a lot of that is, you know, in fairness, maybe I'll take the other flip side of it, the really the stranglehold of a lot of the cartels, the drug cartels along the border is such that there's enormous fear, understandably, of even the church getting too far out there publicly and critiquing and protesting because lives are threatened. You look at the mayor, all the civic leaders and the church leaders and in many ways, all of these people are, many times they're caution, not all of them, but many of them are cautious because their lives are at stake. But there are other groups, as I mentioned on that paper. So I would just refer you there. So I think we'll take one more question. Thank you. So where do you see this movement heading? Is it a grassroots advocacy program that's just an awareness through lectures like yours, which is amazing, and others of their same ilk? Or is it something that's to be brought more forward on a more public, in more public ways? Or are we looking at just an awareness of what's happening abroad? Or is it really more close at home? Or are we looking at even finding ways that the type of violence or the type of experience these women are feeling and going through are things that might be in another way, sort of allegorically similar to lives, women experience our experiences here? I'm sure that they are. I'm sure that there are examples of women experiencing that here. I mean, it would be very interesting to look at the question of sex trafficking here in this part of Connecticut. And as I said, I don't know that information, but I'm sure that there are groups here that are involved with and trying to critique the trafficking that's going on and bringing that to light. And like what Joe was talking about, the students in schools, it's very important to be aware of that and certainly to have conversations, I think talks like this raise a consciousness for us to become more aware of what's going on here in our own area and region. And also to see connections between what's going on here and beyond our local region. I think that's very important because part of what we need is a change of consciousness that then creates in itself a critique of this and an outrage at it and is part of the process of dismantling it. So I think that the process of dismantling happens on many, many different levels. It was mentioned in my introduction that I'm doing a book on Guadalupe and part of what I wanna study with Guadalupe is looking at what the symbol of Guadalupe is as a religious symbol and how that symbol gets used for good, to really lift up women and to talk about the enormous dignity of women. But by the same token, it can be manipulated in ways that push women into a very subordinate position that actually is damaging to women. And both of those happen. And so how do we become much more aware of that because then I think out of that we get more critically minded. And there are a number of things that are going on. Like for example, in the arts, Mujeres de la Arena, which is a play that's been created regarding this tragedy of the women en Juarez. And I think that that raises a certain consciousness and also helps in a healing process. So when you say the movement, well, there are many, many different groups that are working on this and they're coming at it a lot of different ways. And so some of it is political, some of it is more through the arts. I mean, it's a variety of different ways that it can be addressed. Hi, I just wanted to thank you again, Nancy, for coming and for your lecture on this important topic. And thank you all for coming tonight. It is my duty tonight as we do every year to announce the speaker for next year. That will be Michelle Seracino from Manhattan College. And I'm not sure of the exact date for next year, but the first Wednesday in October. So thank you again. Thank you, Nancy. Have a good night.