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Kristi- This is very well done so far. We assume that this will go within the larger EUCHARIST article, and maybe under the HISTORY section (2.3). You have some strong sources but could benefit from a few more academic books and or articles. Look mat religious studies databases. You can also look at bibliographies in the Bynum book for example.

Women and the Eucharist

Women, though traditionally excluded from the administration of the Eucharist, own an intricate history in relation to the religious practice, in spirituality and physicality. Theologian historians suggest women take greater stake in the practice of communion than men, and beyond the symbols of religiosity, the eucharist represents the woman’s gender role moreso than the men who commandeer—and have commandeered—the Church. 

In an article, published by Boston College’s school of Theology and Ministry, author Megan Loumagne attests “taking the Eucharist is an experience of Christian hope.” The most common ritual of the Catholic Church, the Eucharist “contains references to many of the key theological tenets of the institution:” belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; the forgiveness of sins; resurrection and Holy Easter; life ever-lasting. However, due to its controversial and precarious exclusion of women from the administering practice, for women’s religious communities, it has also come to represent the symbolic and literal expression of “church philosophies and practices to which they object—most notably exclusion, hierarchy, and disempowerment”. 

Among these women’s communities, the Benedictine women, for generations, have cultivated self-sufficiency in religious life, leading their own services and adapting the liturgy to reject the patriarchal traditions of the Catholic Church. Though permitted to carry out all regular Mass requirements, they must still invite in an outsider to perform the ceremonial practice of the Eucharist, as male priests, to this day, must preside in order for the consecration of the bread and wine as Christ’s body and blood to be legitimized and recognized by the Church. This exclusionary act has perpetuated frustration and tension within the Benedictine women’s communities and other religious women’s communities in regard to the Church as they affirm, within their own communities, there are women who are more than capable and prepared to preside over the entirety of the worship. 

The Benedictine women of today are not alone. Piety and holiness in Christian spheres, especially in relation to food, the Eucharist, and Eucharistic miracles, have been attributed to mainly women for centuries. Of the saints canonized between 1000 and 1700, 18 percent were women—30 percent of said women demonstrated their holiness through extreme austerity and self-rejection, and more than 50 percent of those women were afflicted by life-long illness, often brought on by fasting and other religious activities, and were therefore sanctified for their unwavering devotion. Though the minority dignified in sainthood, women saints, canonized during the middle ages or earlier regardless, almost entirely own the Holy Starvation market, encompassing the Eucharist as sole sustenance, food multiplication miracles, feeding and healing miracles, and the from-Christ Eucharistic miracle (in that Jesus Christ handed the Eucharist directly to the receiver, most usually a woman, in a vision). Because women, in antiquity and through the modern-era, are so closely associated with  and represented by feeding work, the defining quality of a woman saint, especially during the middle ages—a time in which food insecurity, food scarcity, and illness were paramount issues—was, unsurprisingly, miraculous feeding work. 

Of such canonized women, Saint Lidwina, in her lifetime, performed innumerable food miracles in her pathetic state. Characterized as a silly, young girl who would often shirk her responsibilities in lieu of her dedication to God and prayer, Lidwina fell ill as a teenager, and as the years passed, her limited palette eventually shrunk to include only consecrated bread and wine fed to her no more than twice a day. As her health deteriorated, Schiedam town officials testified that Lidwina’s “body shed skin, bones, and even portions of intestines, which her parents kept in a vase.” Emitting a sweet odor, her effluence cured others—a man’s leg was healed by her bath water; though she had never been pregnant, she was able to nurse others “in an act that she herself explicitly saw as a parallel to the Virgin’s nursing of Christ.” 

Her fasting and abstinence from food, according to her, was natural—called for, even, by God in order to atone for the sins of her community. Her story is well-marked by suffering substitution, in which she grew sicker and more pathetic in exchange for the salvation of those who came to confess to her or receive some kind of healing from her body. In consuming only Christ, Lidwina’s body became the food and sustenance for her followers. 

In similar stride, Marthe Robin, later deemed “Marthe the Venerable” by the Catholic Church, consumed nothing but the Holy Eucharist for more than 50 years. Marthe, born in 1902, was a very sickly child from the age of two; by the time she had reached adulthood, she was paralyzed, bedridden, and unable to keep down even sips of water. However, quite like Lidwina, Marthe was able to consume the Eucharist, and in using her body as the host for her followers, performed echoes of what hagiographers, earlier, called Eucharistic miracles.

Though she had never attended school, Marthe “was able to counsel many who visited her with great words of wisdom;” it’s estimated that she was the confidant and religious counsellor for more than 100,000 visitors in her lifetime. She honored thousands of prayer request per year, her devotional influence reportedly reaching individuals far beyond her bedroom walls. Though she passed in 1981 at the age of 79, an average of 40,000 people still visit her home to pray and many claim to receive guidance and answers to their prayers left for Marthe.

In both stories, the bodily destitution of women and their substitutional suffering for their followers plays a marked role in answering the question Why the Eucharist? 

Though different interpretations exist, at its core, the Eucharist is “a ritual enactment of Jesus’s sacrifice at Calvary”. In contemporary eucharistic practices, the priest is thought to act in place of Christ, a mediator between God and the congregation. Because Christ was a man, sacrificing his blood and body—both seen as masculine ideals—men, by the Catholic Church, are ordained the only individuals fit to act in such a role. However, the why of the Eucharist is, infallibly, for the forgiveness of sins and to provide eternal salvation for the followers of Christ—a rather nurturing, maternal cause. In closer examination, modern theologians have teased out the notion that, in the Church, “female functions have been appropriated by men and, in the process, disconnected from actual women;” the tradition of the Catholic Eucharist hailed the most profound of the phenomena. 

In the light of Lidwina, Marthe, and their fellow holy women who have performed feeding and healing miracles through the Eucharist, the feminine sacrifice of the Eucharist as a more maternal, nurturing ritual provides sufficient cause for today’s religious women communities’ distress and frustration with the lasting patriarchal foundations and operations of the Holy Catholic Church. In this context, the exclusion of women from carrying out the ritual is believed to misappropriate the core of the Eucharistic Sacrifice as strictly a masculine, gender-specific role—warrior-like, Savior figure—whereas, in the literature and in practice, it moreso represents the maternal/nurturing sacrifice for the salvation of children.