Published March 13, 2025
As a teenager and women’s-studies student in college, I assumed the Catholic Church had retrograde views about women. Providential encounters with Catholics drew me back to church, and before my senior year, I was reading the Catechism with the local priest. I returned to the faith, got married and now have seven beloved children. I have long been happy to defend the church’s teachings on women from critics.
When many young Catholics today have questions about the faith, they turn to religious podcasts, or what a friend calls the Alternative Magisterium. Rather than the church’s reflection on the sexes’ equal dignity, they’ll often find something more akin to the far right’s misogynistic views, which have emerged from dark corners of the web. Popular Catholic influencers increasingly risk bringing them into the mainstream.
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Fellow Erika Bachiochi is a legal scholar who works at the intersection of constitutional law, political theory, women’s history, and Catholic social teaching. She is a Professor of Practice at the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, where she teaches courses in the history of political thought, directs the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought, and serves as founding editor-in-chief of its online journal, Fairer Disputations.
