Since its foundation in 1976, the Québec radical feminist and Christian collective L’autre Parole publishes an eponymous journal which includes the celebrations conceived, organized, led, and performed by her members. From a feminist women’s experience and believers’ viewpoint, the collective described, illustrated, adapted, criticized, subverted, and appropriated Catholic celebrations such as Christmas (incarnation), Easter (death and resurrection), Pentecost (mission), and the Eucharist, which celebration can be envisioned as a synthesis of the first three.
Focused on the analysis of a sample of the Eucharist celebrated in 1988, this paper shows how the collective deconstructs, reinterprets, reclaims and subverts Christianity by offering a way to celebrate women’s experience, notably through their bodies and flesh. Consequently, the collective works towards a liberation from feminine stereotypes associated to Christianity, and updates, through liturgical imagination and performance, the experience of sorority and the project of being a Christian community, offering an alternative ecclesiological model: an ekklesia of women being equal disciples of Christ. This blog post is part of a larger project on L’autre Parole, in which I have already discussed issues like maternity (2023) and the collective’s Biblical and theological rewritings (2025). In that sense, this paper also wishes to deepen our understanding and appreciation of the collective’s treatment of topics core to women’s experience such as love, identities, motherhood, and sexualities, which require a specific discussion of fluids, since it can play a crucial role in reinterpreting, and performing feminist Catholic liturgies.
To do so, I first introduce the collective L’autre Parole, situating it also in the context of academic research. In a second place, I try to contextualize the Eucharist I have chosen for analysis, exposing the topics discussed around the same period by the collective. In a third place, I analyze the feminist liturgy of the Christmas Eucharist celebrated in 1988, with this context in mind, exposing their choices of colours, symbols, rituals, etc. in the light of a feminist liberation theological standpoint.
L’autre Parole: Background and Context
L’autre Parole was born in 1976, immediately following the United Nations Year of Women (1975), and during a particularly creative decade known in Quebec for the multiplicity of feminist collectives and initiatives born to make private matters public and political (Dumont et Toupin, 2003). The foundresses were Monique Dumais, a theologian and ethician at Université du Québec à Rimouski as well as a Ursuline, Louise Melançon, a theologian at Université de Sherbrooke, and Marie-Andrée Roy who held a bachelor’s degree in theology and was about to leave for Paris to pursue a masters in sociology of religion. On their encounter, they decided to write a short letter to other women trained and working in the fields of Theology and Religious Studies to discuss matters pertaining to women in the Catholic Church and take back the theological discourse into their own hands and from a feminist viewpoint. This letter launched their magazine named after their collective, L’autre Parole, the oldest feminist magazine published without any interruption in Québec.
The collective works on an affinity basis, through small cells meeting at a regular pace and where the members decide on the modalities of their encounters. They co-organize an annual meeting where they discuss one specific topic, rewrite Biblical and theological documents, create and perform celebrations and rituals from a feminist and Christian standpoint, every cell taking part in the preparation of the annual meeting. Over time, L’autre Parole has developed solidarities with the Québec women’s movement (Foisy, 2025) as well as with other Catholic feminist organizations, and feminist liberation theologians (Foisy, 2025). It also raised the interest of researchers to analyze their Biblical rewritings (Riendeau, 2016), the antifeminist discourse of the Vatican (Couture, 2021), their contribution to the development of a Québec feminist theology of liberation (Couture, 2024), and their feminist liturgical innovation (Manuel, 2021).
What Was L’autre Parole Up To in 1987 and 1988?
From a feminist viewpoint in Canada and especially in Québec, 1988 wasn’t a year like any other, since the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that abortion was now legal and free across the country, after a long mobilization of women from coast to coast. One year before that, L’autre Parole published two important issues of her magazine, respectively in March 1987, taking a collective and pro-choice stand on abortion (no 33) and another one in October of that same year, in retrospect of their annual congress on the new technologies of reproduction (no 35). In 1988, they also dedicated an issue to Mary (no 37), aiming to deconstruct the ‘‘stereotypical femininity’’ and the supposedly “feminine vocation” following from this, as constructed by the teachings of the Catholic Church, especially under Pope John Paul II (Mulieris Dignitatem – 1988 and eventually, Letter to Women – 1995).
In my view, these elements deserve three remarks as they provide a specific context into which the Eucharist celebrated in 1988 emerged. First, all three issues of the magazine offered a counter discourse, both feminist and Christian, to the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. The stance on abortion came after multiple Roman Catholic declarations condemning both abortion and the women having recourse to one. The discussion on the new technologies of reproduction came out as a response to the Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation. Replies to Certain Questions of the Day, published by the Catholic Church in 1987. The issue on Mary offered a collection of alternative interpretations of the mother of Jesus, reenfleshing her and allowing her to have, express, and pursue her desires, as any other woman. In brief, the collective took the opportunity to deconstruct the pedestal from which Mary was both set aside from most women and put up as the model of the perfect woman. Second, these three issues dealt with the female body and sexuality, but also with the ways in which these issues are dealt with on a moral basis by the Catholic Magisterium, leading the collective to contest these moral teachings. Third, these three issues offered not only alternative discourses to and interpretations of the Magisterium, but they all did so by considering the concrete experiences of women. This illustrates one major contribution of L’autre Parole to a feminist critique of Catholic teachings on women and of the Catholic Magisterium on any issue related to women: the collective does so by giving a central place to women’s experience.
The 1988 Eucharist or the Symbolization of Women’s Bodies and Experience
This Eucharist, celebrating Christmas and the birth of Jesus, started with a prayer to the Ecclesia:
From now on, may our Ecclesia be
shaped by our women’s hands
shaped by the Christian hope from the word made flesh
shaped by the spirit of our women wisdom
shaped by the wonder in front of the creation and the creatures
From now on, may our Ecclesia be
enlarged by the transcendence of women’s daily life
Let’s be this living Ecclesia
where one learns to love
where one communicates with transparency
where the truth knows no obstacle
Let’s be this living Ecclesia
full of promises like the first screams of a newborn child
This is no surprise since the notion of Ecclesia has been worked out by the collective almost since her debut, the members putting at least as much energy into creating feminist celebrations and rituals than into developing a feminist critique of the Vatican policies concerning women. In the end, the objective was to build this alternative model of church. We can affirm that this introductive prayer is a way to illustrate how women care for others, their sense of the body (hands, the mystery of the incarnation, the daily life of women, etc.), of love, of the truth, of wisdom, of faith, and of hope. There also is a clear stance in favour of women’s experiences, with a reference to a newborn child.
Five symbols accompanied the celebration: the tree, the light, the colour white, the egg, and the milk. I’m translating, through paraphrase, the words of the collective. Each participant had a fir branch in front of her, as the tree is a symbol of life, duration, power. Briefly, the tree is like women since it mothers everything around itself. Against the tree being a symbol of fertility in the Christian tradition, the members of L’autre Parole claim this symbol for themselves and associate it simply to their own individual fertility and, as a collective, to the growth of their reflection on spirituality. In the case of light, through this symbol, they wish to re-appropriate themselves of the Spirit, this breath that animates the women’s say. It is the symbol of the spirit animating the celebrations of the spiritual life of their collective. The colour white refers to the cosmic, matricial, maternal egg; the colour of the nourishing fluid, the spermatic fluid. White is a symbol of power and dynamism, which these women claim back for themselves. Further, they write about themselves as a group: ‘‘We are a white troop, being neither angels nor blessed, women who forge a new tradition by celebrating the eucharist of our ecclesia with the word/the verb and the gestures, with pageantry and brio, with mastery and memory!’’ After a good dinner and discussion about their reflections over the Christian tradition of the birth of Jesus, the participants recollect and commune together, an egg and a glass of milk is distributed to each of them. I think the prayer of the Eucharist is fundamental to our understanding of what is at stake in this 1988 celebration, and I want to quote it integrally (my translation).
We break the egg, symbol of our bodies
Like those of our sisters here
Or anywhere else in the world
With this gesture we celebrate our women bodies,
Promises of eternally renewed life
We drink milk, symbol of life continued
In memory of women from whom we come from
And for the glory of those we carry
With our body and our spirit
Through the egg and through the milk
let’s commune together today
to the traditional Christian values
of charity, equality, lucidity, and hope.
Finally, this celebration illustrates the level of spiritual, liturgical, and organisational maturity attained by L’autre Parole over the course of her first decade of existence. Core to the way in which it reinterprets Catholic liturgy in a feminist, but still Christian perspective, are the bodies of women. The collective’s members think and reflect upon Catholic rituality and tradition through their own bodies and their daily life experiences. The symbols chosen by the collective refer to different moments in a woman’s life that are related to the female body, most notably periods, pregnancy, and the act of giving birth. They do so in such a way that it connects them to each woman, making this gesture of re-appropriation of a central liturgical moment of Catholic life a political act. In that sense and in line with the stances taken by L’autre Parole on abortion, the new technologies of reproduction, and Mary as the stereotypical Catholic female figure, yet paradoxical in virgin and mother, the collective affirmed her radical understanding of both feminism and Christianity.
