Too many women

Publish date 22-08-2020

by Flaminia Morandi

11th and 12th centuries: wars and crusades without return cut men and the number of single women, widows and girls who cannot find a husband grows. 13th and 14th centuries: the poor nobles are added, ruined by the failure of the feudal economy based on land and the emergence of the commercial economy of the cities. 16th century: in Europe, women living alone are 20% of the population, widows for marriages with too old men, for wars, for recurrent epidemics that kill more men than women. For centuries a woman has had only two alternatives: marriage or the cloister, as long as it was well closed and women could no longer leave it, as the Council of Trent reiterated, and perhaps claim the part of the inheritance they had renounced by becoming nuns. .

Then the women invented a third way, alone, without any certified founder: to be "beguines", a term with an unclear etymology, perhaps derived from the "beige" of the cloth of their clothes. Living in common, in small houses around a courtyard and a church, as laywomen without vows, without giving up their possessions, supporting themselves with work, serving the sick and the poor in chastity and prayer, the only guarantee of the community.

Not an Order, nor a Third Order. Dolcelina di Digne, abbess of one of these women's associations, said to her companions: "Daughters, you are gathered here in the love of Christ. All the other holy orders have a very close bond in their rule. But you, you are linked only by love ". The love of Christ which frees from paralysis, makes one get up, walk, see and hear, love. Their "charisma" was precisely this inner journey of freedom, without mediation, in search of the Beloved, in love with the Eucharist.
It was the beguines of Liège who inaugurated the cult of the SS. Sacramento, frequent, daily communion, inspiring St. Francis, who had heard of it.

What fear, women like this, in a time when even medicine saw a danger in female physiology itself: cold and damp moods that predisposed to imagination, passions, infidelity, falsehood.
Yet King St. Louis IX of France himself loved beguinages and had founded them, there were close relations between the beguines and the mendicant orders, especially Franciscans, who often accompanied them spiritually. Pope John XXII had protected them.

But in the end fear prevailed: in the great cauldron of the fight against heresies, in the attempt to Christianize society, the beguines also ended up.
Which today can again be a source of inspiration and a response to the great, ambiguous talk of women in the Church. Women, not women like men.

Flaminia Morandi
NP April 2020

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