Ellen Leonard

Leonard joined the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph on September 8, 1951.[1] She completed a six-month postulancy period and then entered the novitiate on March 19, 1952, receiving her religious habit and the name "Sister Loyola."[2] As part of her postulancy, she completed a teaching program (1954–55) offered by Toronto Normal School. She then spent most of the next 18 years (1955–73) as an elementary school teacher, principal, and religious resource teacher in Niagara and the greater Toronto area. While working full time, she also returned to college for evening, weekend and summer study, completing her Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Toronto in 1967.

Leonard's life was deeply affected by a larger movement within the Roman Catholic church, the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). As she recounted in archival records quoted by Chown, "I exchanged my religious name, Sister Loyola, for my baptismal name, Ellen; I set aside the distinctive habit and veil to join the rest of God's people; I moved from the big motherhouse on Bayview to a small community of six sisters; and I left elementary education for the study of theology."[4]

The Toronto Metropolitan Separate School Board had encouraged those teaching catechism to update their religious education in the wake of Vatican II. For Leonard, this updating began with a master's degree in religious studies earned from Manhattan College in New York (1971). As she recounted in a magazine article on Vatican II and the role of women religious, "I was one of those women religious for whom Vatican II was a formative experience. In 1969-70, I spent a year of theological study with women and men from many religious congregations and different ecclesiologies. That year began the transformation of Sister Loyola into Professor Ellen Leonard, CSJ."[5] When she began subsequent doctoral studies at the University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto in 1974, she stopped teaching children and became a teaching assistant in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Toronto, and then joined the Faculty of Theology at St. Michael's as a lecturer during her final year of doctoral studies. She completed her doctorate in 1978 and achieved the rank of assistant professor that same year. She became associate professor in 1982 and a full professor in 1991, and remained a full-time faculty member there until she retired in 1999 and became an emerita professor. She was among the first women in Canada to study systematic theology and then among the first women in Canada to teach on a Faculty of Theology.[1]

Leonard's dissertation and subsequent first book was on George Tyrrell, a Jesuit priest and key theologian in the modernist movement. Catholic modernism is a controversial orientation through which scholars at the turn of the twentieth century attempted to grapple with advances in science, philosophical ideas about individual autonomy and changing methods of biblical interpretation.[2] Leonard contributed the definition of Roman Catholic Modernism to The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, noting that "Viewed in its historical context, Modernism can be interpreted as a renewal within Catholicism that offered an alternative to the liberal Protestant outlook and in some ways anticipated the Second Vatican Council."[6] She also served on the steering committee of the Roman Catholic Modernism group of the American Academy of Religion.[3]

Chown quotes Leonard as discussing George Tyrrell's ideas on "'the place of the episcopacy within the universal Church, a more active role for the laity, a clear recognition of the limits of ecclesiastical authority, and the acceptance of criticism and dissent within the church."[2] Leonard argued that Tyrrell's response to those issues was pastoral rather than developmental of a systematic theology of reform. Leonard wrote subsequent books on two other figures related to modernism, Maude Petre and Friedrich von Hügel, noting that "While some have considered them to be only marginally Catholic, they considered their lives to be shaped decisively by their Catholicism" and that "their understanding of Catholicism was broad enough and deep enough to sustain their Catholic identity--an identity that was at once both critical and faithful.".[7] This work prompted Leonard to reflect on "how she might participate in the theological and ecclesial questions of renewal in her own time."[2]

All of the issues important to Tyrrell were again in the forefront after Vatican II. As Leonard points out in her magazine article, the Second Vatican Council (which resulted in sixteen documents) "reveals dramatic changes in worldview. We were instructed to discern the signs of the times. . . .One of the most significant teachings of the Council was its emphasis on the universal call to holiness. Baptism was recognized as the common sacrament."[5] That emphasis on the universal call to holiness required a re-examination of the use of experience as a source for theology. Ellen Leonard provided such a review in a paper she presented to the Catholic Theological Society of America, "Experience as a Source for Theology."[8] She clarified that the task that she was undertaking was a consideration not of whether experience should be used "but how [emphasis added] experience is being used as a source for theology today, with an emphasis on the foundational role of present experience and a recognition of the widening experiential base for theological reflection."[8] That discussion formed the first part of her paper, followed by consideration of her own experience as a Canadian woman and parallel transitions in the Canadian and feminist context. The final section of her paper discussed how her "Canadian and feminist experiences may be used as a source for theology." Leonard later reworked this paper into a 1990 article in Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses.[9]

In 2009, when Leonard was asked to reflect on the future of theological education in Canada, she began by considering her past thirty years in theological education. She identified "three particularly significant and formative developments for me: ecumenism, feminism, and ecology."[10] The Second Vatican Council issued a decree on ecumenism, Unitatis redintegratio, which enabled collaboration with Protestant denominations. This led to the development of the Toronto School of Theology (TST), consisting of seven colleges from Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican, and United Church denominations. Leonard joined in this endeavor and met other female theology professors, working with them and their male colleagues in a supportive environment. She also saw changes within her own Roman Catholic-affiliated college as it shifted from being "exclusively concerned with the education of male clerics" to "the admission of women and lay men and the appointment of women faculty. . . .New questions were raised, new concerns expressed by a more diverse student body and faculty."[10] She became a member of the Roman Catholic-United Church National Dialogue, appointed to serve (1975–84) by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. Although the Roman Catholic Church is not a member of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Ellen Leonard was an accredited visitor who attended Assemblies of the WCC in Vancouver, Canada in 1983 and in Canberra, Australia in 1991. In Vancouver, she was especially moved by the voices of women speaking on behalf of their people and children. Her experience in Australia reinforced her conviction that Western feminist theologians need to hear and absorb the voices of a more diverse set feminist theologians.[2]

Leonard situates the women's movement and the ecological movement within the "signs of the times" that Vatican II called upon the Church to address, and specifies that "for me feminism is a prophetic movement, one that calls for conversion."[10] She addresses some of the ways in which change was needed in her article, "Contemporary Christologies in Response to Feminist and Ecological Challenges."[11] After a literature review of works that identified the androcentric and anthropocentric bias in traditional Christology, she focuses on the work of theologians Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sallie McFague, and Elizabeth Johnson, and focuses on "four aspects: (1) biblical foundation; (2) continuity with the tradition; (3) promotion of the full humanity of women; and (4) openness to the whole of creation."[11] Her recommendation is for a Wisdom Christology. "The image of Sophia provides a fluid symbol, which can embrace all of creation while her incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth reveals to us the concrete way that God chose to be present in our world. That presence continues through the Spirit of the resurrected Christ-Sophia to offer hope of transformation to everyone and everything."[11]

Leonard has addressed the "difficulty of re-imagining Christology for our age as persons with different experiences reflect on the christological question: 'Who do you say that I am?'"[11] To explore that question, she joined three other women in January 1981 to invite others across Canada to start an organization whose goal was the ordination of women in the Catholic Church. That invitation led to a conference held July 3–5, 1981 and the founding of an organization that was first named Canadian Catholics for Women's Ordination (CCWO).[2] Leonard was a core member of the group for the next seven years as it formalized an organizational structure, began a newsletter, and connected with groups pursuing the same goal in other countries. During that period she also helped to bring discussions of feminist theology to a broader audience than just those enrolled in schools of theology by presenting public lectures and workshops in parishes. She stepped down from CCWO's core leadership group in 1986, and the organization was reshaped into the Catholic Network for Women's Equality (CNWE) in 1988. Ellen Leonard was a keynote speaker at the CNWE conference in 2001, which CNWE marked as the 20th anniversary of the group's founding, and was "enthusiastically honoured as a co-founder" at the 2015 CNWE conference.[2]