María Pilar Aquino

Aquino was born into a rural family in Ixtlán del Río, Nayarit, Mexico on March 6, 1956.[1] Her parents participated in the Bracero Program and emigrated to San Luis, Arizona, where she had contact with César Chávez's farm workers movement.[2] From the age of 18 until 1983, Aquino belonged to the Society of Helpers of the Souls in Purgatory, an Ignatian spiritualist female congregation of French origin, devoted to caring for the most vulnerable.[3] Aquino acknowledges that, as a young catechist, she was influenced by liberationist Catholic nuns working on the U.S.-Mexico border.[4]

Aquino obtained her degree in theology at the now-defunct Theological Institute of Higher Studies in Mexico City, and her degree was validated by the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In 1991, she obtained a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical University of Salamanca in Madrid, under the supervision of Casiano Floristán, a professor of practical theology. She was the first Catholic woman to earn a doctorate in theology from this university.[5]

She was Professor of Theology at Mount Saint Mary's University, Los Angeles, a women's university of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. She was on the board of directors of the Catholic Theological Society of America, and was a member of the advisory committee of the international theology journal Concilium.[6] In 2000, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki. She participated in the founding of the Academy of Hispanic Catholic Theologians in the U.S., and served as its president in 1993.[7][8][9]

In 1988, she brought together Latin American theologians for the Intercontinental Conference of Third World Women Theologians, held in 1986 in Oaxtepec, Mexico, organized by the Women's Commission of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians. (ASETT/EATWOT). The motto of the meeting was "Theology from the perspective of Third World women".[10] During the Congress, topics such as biblical hermeneutics, Christology, ecclesiology, and spirituality were discussed.

She was co-founder and first President of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States. [11]She was a member of the USD Theology and Religious Studies faculty from 1993 to 2018 and was named Professor Emerita in the College of Arts and Sciences in 2019.[8]

In her first forays into theology, Aquino was strongly influenced by the work and thought of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.[12] [11]For Aquino, theology is understood "as a discipline […] that articulates the language of faith. It refers to an experience of life, rather than a speculative exposition of abstract truths."[13]

Aquino has been critical of both Latin American liberation theology and U.S. Hispanic theology. Of the first, she questions its androcentric perspective; the second, its assimilation of the paradigms of liberal modernity and its excessive emphasis on cultural identity issues, disdaining the socioeconomic reality of Latinos and Latinas in the U.S. and in Latin America.[9]

In 1992, her doctoral thesis, Nuestro clamor por la vida. Teología latinoamericana desde la perspectiva de la mujer (Our Cry for Life. Latin American Theology from the Perspective of Women) was published, in which she details the specific contribution of women to the historic processes of change and the theology of liberation, as subjects of reflection and not as mere objects of study. She also proposes a new relationship between compassion and passion for relieving the suffering of others.[14]

According to Aquino, the assumptions of theological production from the perspective of Latin American women include:

1. A unitary anthropology, centered on the human being, egalitarian, realistic, and multidimensional.
2. The use of the word as a means to express their own understanding of their identity as full subjects.
3. Sexuality as an inherent dimension of human existence, a source of liberation, and a fundamental part in the construction of identity.
4. The logic of life and resistance as an expression of the defense of life and as a rejection of submission to the sexist socioeconomic system.
5. Creativity as a manifestation of the collective strength of women.
6. Compelling solidarity, understood as a genuine compassionate inclination.[14]
7. Freedom as abandonment of the paths that enslave, the development of new paths, and the practice of original possibilities.
8. Hope in a new future where life triumphs over death, truth over lies, good over evil, love over hate, justice over injustice, solidarity over selfishness, and grace over sin.

Other characteristics of Aquino's feminist theology are socio-analytic mediation, biblical interpretations of distrust, hermeneutical humiliations of women in the Bible, and the importance of the Bible in women's lives as a source of revelation.

In the work Latin American Feminist Theology, co-authored with Elsa Tamez, Aquino argues for a Latin American feminist theology based on the following points:

1. Daily life, which opens various windows for the construction of an alternative project to the present reality.
2. The experience of women as participants in new political, religious, and theological practices.
3. Gender awareness, which implies a change in the understanding of God as a creative force for well-being and not as "an eternal patriarchal being sitting on the throne."
4. The logic of life in its entirety, its integral development and ecological equilibrium balance against the destructive logic of death.
5. One's subjectivity through the recovery of self-esteem, value, and power.
6. The historical memory of the emancipatory traditions of women.
7. The authority of women as social agents in the face of their invisibility in the historic processes of transformation.
8. The practice of affection as an alternative to dehumanizing practices in order to overcome conceptual coldness.
9. The vital relationship between reason and passion.[14]
10. Alternative ecumenism.