A New Congregation/ The Community To Come
Magdalena Ujma

photo: Jan Przypkowski,  Galeria m²

For the most part of the West European painting’s history a woman was depicted as a creature of beauty posing for a nude in either a bucolic, a bourgeois, or some other scene. Not associated with creation, earnestness or activity, but with the passive acceptance of meanings ascribed to her by men. Yet – however it may be – nudity leads towards an endless realm of cultural associations which then lead to astonishing conclusions. Giorgio Agamben recently reminded us that nudity in Western culture is entangled within the theological heritage where – according to Bible and its early interpreters – first naked bodies, those of Adam and Eve, were blessed with glory, whereas covering them with gowns meant disgrace.1 Jerzy Nowosielski said that for the first time people dressed themselves after their Downfall, not in order to curtain nudity, but to shelter the spiritual defenselessness of their bodies.2 For this reason a gown served mainly as protection for Eden expatriates, providing them with strength and dignity. Nowosielski also noted that nowadays elderly women have nothing to wear, since attire used to indicate their eminence. He said: an old Indian or Gipsy woman knows what to wear , and dresses with dignity until her last day, since her gowns have an element of sacrum to them. 3

In her paintings from the “popesses, cardinalesses and bishopsesses” series Iwona Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska creates a female attire which not only implicates dignity, but would suit all women, never mind their age. The artist, making a clear reference to Catholic Church, has touched an issue which in Poland seems unconceivable – women’s priesthood. These “popesses, cardinalesses and bishopsesses” wear cassocks similar to those worn daily by Catholic priests of various ranks. In Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska’s canvases there are different models of cassocks cut to fit women – with emphasized waist and bust areas, buttoned up under the very chin. Popesses are wearing distinct skullcaps – the so called calottes. During an exhibition at the m² Gallery we could come closer to the “[women’s cassocks]” triptych, and symbolically ‘try on’ the painted attire, as if we were trying on an idea which in Poland remains solely hypothetical. As if we were violating the ages-old ‘Polish rule’.

The cut of a clerical gown - vestis ecclesiastica, habitus ecclesiasticus vel clericalis - is set by the Church law. Liturgical vestment, depending on the season, change their color within the range of white to golden and red, to green and violet. However, the gown Catholic priests wear every day is black – it is the so called soutane. At times, certain local rules allow a priest who is not performing his liturgical duties […] to wear a short, black attire […] cut in a secular manner  – so mention regulations of the Church. The symbolical meaning of attire is highlighted as well: clergymen should avoid all situations which could possibly diminish the significance of the clerical gown in the eyes of the people. One can also find advice concerning more intimate parts of the attire: The black color of a soutane is matched best by white undergarments. Most importantly, however, priests are advised to avoid pretentious exaggeration and appalling neglect.4 That is because a cassock is more than just protection from the cold, and it certainly has nothing to do with creations of fashion.

So, the rank and function of men is indicated daily by their attire which Catholics call a “vestment”. It demands an appropriate body posture, and in fact it is only when dressed in such vestment a regular man becomes a priest. One sits with dignity when wearing a soutane , one walks with dignity: dressed in a soutane one is more than oneself, one becomes a representative of an institution as old as two thousand years. This institution, the Church, the Ecclesia, has for centuries promoted men and men only, having committed at least one act of misogyny on a grand scale – the witch hunt. According to Zuzanna Razik, the Catholic Church’s rejection of women’s pretense to priesthood boils down to power which men do not want to share. The question of power seems fairly simple: it is shared between less than one percent of people united by the Church, between ordained men. This body holding power over spiritual and administrational matters recruits itself, beyond any control of the rest of the Church members […]. In Church power is administered without consulting parishioners, but within the whirl of misted nominations and dependencies, with no possibility to prosecute those who abuse this power. 5

The Church has meticulously concealed evidence concerning active female followers of Christ, who at the very beginning of the religion were so spirited that a pagan Celsus in the II century described Christianity as the religion of women, children and slaves. The presence of deaconesses, female founders and other women leading the early Christian communities was evident. And I do not mean only women serving close to Jesus. Many women financially aided first communities, or dealt with teaching. The misogynist fragments within the Pauline Epistles seem to contradict these facts, yet they are often considered to be alterations introduced into the later editions of the epistles. 

Nowadays in countries as conservative as Poland the idea of women’s priesthood is considered a blasphemy. If one tackles the issue it is for the sake of ending the discussion once and for all, as it was done – following John Paul II and his Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis from 1994 – by a Jesuit Dariusz Kowalczyk. Referring to the tendency concerning women being engaged in priesthood in the Protestant Church, he expressed an opinion that it did not do a lot of good. Kowalczyk claimed strongly: If this crisis does not indicate beyond doubt how very wrong the idea of women’s priesthood is, it certainly means that it is not the time, and it is not God’s will to alter the traditional way of ordainment. […] The Christian Church is in need of a reform […] yet – for now – the hierarchical priesthood of women is definitely not the reform sought for, and maybe it never will be…6

It is in response to such discipline-imposing statements, which remain in the center of the Polish public discourse, Iwona Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska creates her canvases. Slender, dignified silhouettes painted in a simplified and meaningful manner. The main character here is surely the vestment which elevates the body of a woman wearing it to a spiritual level, making her a priestess. The soutanes widening towards the bottom can pull women slightly to the ground, yet their arms are lifted up to the sky. The women lack feet and bottom rims of the cassocks are arched, which make vested women seem to levitate within the color-saturated space. The ceremonial, praying poses of the painted popesses, cardinalesses and bishopesses are characteristic of early Christianity. A figure with lifted open arms used to be interpreted as a figure of an orant, a symbol of practiced prayer or a soul rising up to Heaven. This pose, taken from ancient iconography, can often be found in Roman catacombs . Today it is also considered characteristic of a figure delivering an ardent sermon.

Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska’s paintings make strong references to the first avant-garde, and more precisely its mystical fraction. The canvases are based on simple and distinct, or even terse juxtapositions of powerful colors, such as: red, chrome green, ‘blue’ – a blend of indigo and white, pure indigo put on top of red – imitating black, and white. The paintings are combinations of flat, geometrical areas and figures whose edges are drafted by hand – this means the canvases bear traces of the artist’s gesture - they are, thus, kept alive; and the repetitiveness of shapes never seems monotonous or boring. Her paintings “[one, two, three – starting the game]” are composed in rather small, triangular canvases. The triangles can be arranged in various compositions, which the artist does, allowing the viewers to see the vested priestesses in endless reflections and repetitions – as elements of bigger compositions. The artist creates kaleidoscopic arrangements, clouds of ornament. In addition to this, her triangular, as well as rectangular canvases display the history of the avant-garde - its heroic version being ‘qeered’ by Iwona Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska, softened and broken up into minute pieces; these pieces fall into the viewers’ eyes to irritate them, change the way they look… One can consider the canvases a sort of feministic repainting of Malewicz’s work – this spirited minister of new art whose vision reached beyond canvases, turned towards the spirituality coming from the depths of icon painting. I can see here also the artist’s creative references to the style of her professor – Jarosław Modzelewski from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts – and his paintings whose spirituality is drawn from heavy, earthy colors, and is expressed in some simple, plain scenes of ordinary life.

In her book, Beyond God the Father, Mary Daly, one of the most important feminist anthropologists and philosophers, writes that God is a role model for patriarchs, and unless He is dethroned women shall not achieve the rights of a complete human being. Nowadays we still live within in a civilization characterized by misogyny. In another book, Gyn/ecology. The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Daly wrote about the unholy trinity – the trinity of abuse, homicide and war. 7 This arose from the doings of this old, transcendent God who tore women away from his universe by making them enslaved, endlessly dependent from men. When women try to free themselves from the patriarchal tyranny they reenact the biblical story of Eve in order to lead it to a very different, non-biblical end. Daly has foreseen the second downfall of mankind based on tasting the forbidden fruit – knowledge proscribed by the patriarchal society. It will result in abandoning our fake innocence and achieving a new kind of adulthood…8 Mary Daly’s Gyn/ecology delivers ideas that can help us rescue the gravely endangered natural environment, endangered in consequence of the ever thriving patriarchal civilization based on greediness and exploitation – with the old God as its patron. The rotting natural world is also the habitat of women’s spirituality – today still endangered, balancing on the very brink of survival. Nowadays we can see , more clearly than Mary Daly in the seventies, the necrophilic character of the patriarchal civilization. We can see that the new world will arise from sisterhood. Sisterhood is a mechanism to work with our imagination; it spits on Hegel, dialectics, faith in progress, brotherhood, the patriarchal culture of domination and the fight to subdue – these being the forecast of Joanna Sokołowska who can actually weave the thread of utopia into the fabric of the upcoming reality.9 It is to be guided by the spirit of priestesses declaring new order which would reject the hierarchy of domination and power. Popesses in Iwona Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska’s canvases are whirling gloriously, without losing dignity. Today condemned, excluded and killed as those who dared touch the forbidden knowledge, those known in the patriarchal language as witches, crones, furies, harpies shall be the popesses of communities to come, of the new world.

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translated by Katarzyna Podpora

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1

Giorgio Agamben. Nudities. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, pp. 59 - 64.

2

Zbigniew Podgórzec. Mój Chrystus. Rozmowy z Jerzym Nowosielskim, Białystok: „Łuk”, 1993, p. 145.

3

Ibidem. p, 150.

4

See: Ks. dr A. Witkowiak, Strój osób duchownych, msza.net/i/czytaj,decus_clericorum,21.html [accessed: 20.10.20200.].

5

Zuzanna Radzik. Wojownicy Pana i księżniczki Maryi. Po co takie podziały?. deon.pl/wiara/wojownicy-pana-i-ksiezniczki-maryi-po-co-takie-podzialy,781278 [accessed: 18.10.2020].

6

Dariusz Kowalczyk SJ. O kapłaństwie kobiet. www.rozmawiamy.jezuici.pl/articles/52/n/38 [accessed: 18.10.2020].

7

Mary Daly. Gyn/ecology. The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Beacon Press: Boston 1978, pp. 96-102.

8

Mary Daly. Beyond God the Father. Beacon Press: Boston 1973, pp. 44-68.

9

Joanna Sokołowska. Maszyna do pracy z wyobraźnią. widok.hmfactory.com/index.php/one/article/view/563/1125 [(access: 21.10.2020]. 

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