Patrons of Catherine of Siena College

Sr. Mary John Mananzan

Sr. Mary John Mananzan,OSB is a Missionary Benedictine sister. She obtained her doctorate degree in Philosophy major in Linguistic Philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Italy, and a degree in Missiology at the Wilhelmsuniversitaet in Muenster, Germany.

Her involvement includes charting new paths in the academe and working with the masses especially the women. As a feminist-activist she has given birth to women-centered programs among them are the Institute of Women’s Studies, Women Ecology and Wholeness Farm, and the Women Crisis Center.

• She was the National Chairperson of GABRIELA, a broad alliance of women’s organization for 18 years.(1986-2004)
• She is actively involved in developing a distinct Third World Theology and was the Executive Secretary and Treasurer of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) until September, 2001.
• She served for 5 years as the International Coordinator of the Women’s Commision of EATWOT which developed a Feminist Theology of Liberation from the perspective of Third World women.
• She was President of St. Scholastica’s College for 6 years (1996-2002) and has just been elected Prioress of the Missionary Benedictine Sisters in the Manila Priory.

She was awarded the Dorothy Cadbury Fellowship in 1994 in Birmingham and Henry Luce Fellowship at the Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1995.

She was granted a Fellowship as an Asian Public Intellectual of 2002 by the Nippon Foundation and undertook a research on Woman, Religion and Spirituality in Asia in four Asian countries. Her book entitled Woman, Religion and Spirituality was published by Anvil and was launched during the International Book Fair at the World Trade Center in Manila on August 15, 2004.

See her Curriculum Vitae here.

Sr Naoko Iyori

• MA History, and Diploma from Pastoral Institute of Pontifical University of Salamanca,Spain.
• Retired lecturer at Dept. of Sociology at various Universities in Japan.
• Lecturer at Institutes of On-going Religious Formation and of Lay Missionary Formation.

Sr Iyori was visiting research associate at the Centre for Religion, Culture and Gender in the Dept. of Religions and Theology at Manchester University, UK (1998~1999).
She has worked with the Japanese Council for Justice and Peace since 1980 as well as with Asia Partnership for Human Development, a Catholic International Development Organization (1989 ~ 1998).
She collaborated with UN Human Rights Committee and with HABITAT for the cause of Asian women and children(1988 ~1996).
She works for the reconciliation and recovery of justice of the women in Asia and Pacific Area coerced into army prostitution during WW II.

Publications

• Report on People's Development in Asia (1990)
• Issues of Environment and Development of the Squatters in Asia & Latin America (1992)
• Democratization of Asia and Women (1994)
• Guatemalan Indigenous Women (1997)
• Japanese translation of Sister Earth: Ecology and the Spirit by Helder Camara, (1998)
• Japanese translation of The Ordination of Women in the Catholic Church by John Wijngaards (2005)

Professor Kari Elisabeth Børresen

Kari Elisabeth Børresen is Senior Professor (emerita) at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo. International pioneer of Gender Studies in Religion, she started her research already in 1961. She is a specialist in historical Western theology from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance and has analysed the interaction of androcentric anthropology and Godlanguage in the formation of Christian doctrine.

She has introduced the term "matristics", in order to correlate the Greco-Roman enculturation of ancient Church Fathers (mainly third to fifth centuries) with the Northern European inculturation of medieval Church Mothers (mainly twelfth to fifteenth centuries), both considered to be leading agents in formative Christian theology.

Professor Børresen has been visiting professor at leading North-American and European universities and has co-ordinated several scholarly networks and international research groups.

A reforming Catholic, she is currently investigating the conflict between religious freedom and women's universal human rights, with focus on gender models in Christianity and Islam.

Professor Børresen has written many books and articles.

Honors

• 1992: Doctor theologiae honoris causa, Uppsala University.
• 1995-: Member of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

For more information, see:

• Professor Børresen's Curriculum Vitae
• Professor Børresen's Publications

Professor Maria Clara Luchetti Bingemer

• BA Social Coomunications, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.
• Doctorate of Theology, Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, Italy.
• Dr Maria Clara Bingemer is currently Professor in Theology at the Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil; and Dean of the Center for Theology and Human Sciences of the same University.

Dr Bingemer, along with her husband Dr Einardo Bingemer, act as advisors to the progressive Brazilian Catholic Bishops' Conference on issues of justice for women, and the importance of married people exercising leadership within the Church and society.

She is regarded as an expert on lay spirituality and leadership in the Church, particularly in regard to the new model of Church emerging from the Basic Christian Communities, which are springing up everywhere in Latin America. Dr Bingemer is a leader in the Jesuit-founded lay movement, Christian Life Communities. She was also Regional Coordinator of the Latin American Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians from 1986 to 1992. She is the member of the board of many journals of theology, among them Revista Eclesiastica Brasileira, the most well known theological journal in Brazil, and Concilium, international review of theology. She was also from 2004 to 2008 member of the borad of JAAR (Journal of the American Academy of Religion)

A selection of her publications

• ¿Un rostro para Dios? - ed. Madrid: San Pablo, 2008
• Jesus Cristo: servo de Deus e Messias glorioso - Vol 8 . Ed Paulinas,2008
• Simone Weil. Acción y contemplación, Bilbao: Desclée de Brouwer, 2007.
• A bala, a flor e o perdão: violência e reconciliação. 1. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora PUC/ Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2006
• A globalização e os jesuitas, SP, Loyola, 2007, 2 volumes
• Cuerpo de mujer y experiência de Dios. Sentir y experimentar a Dios de un modo femenino. Buenos Aires, San Benito, 2007
• Simone Weil. A força e a fraqueza do amor, RJ, Rocco, 2007

For more information, visit her website

Professor Ann Gilroy

• MA (Education)
• MA (Theology)
• PhD ( Cambridge)

Professor Ann Gilroy is now Director of Undergraduate Studies in the School of Theology at the University of Auckland, and a member of the Catholic Institute of Theology.

Her research interests centre around Christian spiritualities - of individuals, specific groups, family, schools, contexts and not necessarily in a church context. I have a particular interest in women and children’s theologies and spiritualities, Catholic spiritualities, Aotearoa-New Zealand spiritualities.

Publications

• "Around Cups of Tea and Coffee: Pakeha Women's Spirituality." In Spirituality in Aotearoa New Zealand: Catholic Voices, edited by Helen Bergin & Susan Smith, 157-74. Auckland: Accent Publications, 2002.
• "Sustaining the Vision from Adelaide to Temuka: A Josephite Community Is Founded in New Zealand in 1883." In Communities of Women: Historical Perspectives, edited by Barbara Brookes & Dorothy Page, 81-98. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2002.
• O'Grady, Kathleen, Ann L Gilroy, and Janette Gray, eds. Bodies, Lives, Voices: Gender in Theology. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. honors.