A medieval Catholic ritual for new mothers, widely practiced in Europe and the Americas until the middle of the twentieth century. It is much less popular today than it once was, and it is often condemned by feminists as an oppressive ritual with an oppressive message. Even in the Middle Ages it was not always a compulsory rite, and it seems to have been controversial in many times and places long before the advent of feminism. Nevertheless, the rite does survive in some Catholic and Anglican prayer books in the "Occasional Services" section, along with other little-used rites such as comminations and prayers to be used at sea.

A churching is a blessing bestowed upon a woman immediately after she has given birth. There is nothing offensive about this in and of itself, of course, and in fact, many Catholic women seek to reclaim the churching ritual so that they may mark this rite of passage in an authentically Catholic way.

However, churching rituals have a dark side; namely, their implicit connection to the text of Leviticus 12.

^12:2If a woman conceives and bears a male child, she shall be ceremonially unclean seven days; as at the time of her menstruation, she shall be unclean. ³On the eighth day, the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcized. ⁴Her time of blood purification shall be thirty-three days; she shall not touch any holy thing, or come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purification are completed. ⁵If she bears a female child, she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her menstruation; her time of blood purification shall be sixty-six days. ⁶When the days of her purification are completed, whether for a son or for a daughter, she shall bring to the priest at the entrance of the tent of meeting a lamb in its first year for a burnt offering, and a pigeon or a turtledove for a sin offering. ⁷He shall offer it before the LORD, and make atonement on her behalf; then she shall be clean from her flow of blood.

Christian and Jewish commentators have spilled a lot of ink trying to understand this commandment. It certainly does seem to harbour a lot of misogynistic assumptions.

• First of all, there is the assertion that childbirth is intrinsically polluting, and that it requires a lengthy period of purification afterward. (Many feminists are uneasy with the parallel assertion, found in Leviticus 15 and alluded to here, that menstruation is not only impure but contagious -- anyone who touches a menstruating woman, or who sits on furniture that she sat on, is not permitted in the sanctuary for the rest of the day. Note, however, that this also goes for emissions of semen, so women are not the only targets of these purity laws. Still, the assumption that natural bodily fluids are somehow "impure" strikes a lot of modern people as neurotic and unhealthy.)
• Secondly, there is the even more troubling assumption that having a son is somehow "less" polluting than having a daughter.
• Thirdly, there is the requirement that the mother find a (male) priest to make a sin offering on her behalf, as if childbirth is somehow sinful.
• And finally, there is the confusing distinction between periods of "uncleanliness" (one week for boys, two for girls) and "blood purification" (thirty-three days for boys, sixty-six for girls), which is never explained.

I hasten to add that the Catholic churching rite does not mention Leviticus, and that it does not contain any language about purity or impurity whatsoever. It is framed as a thanksgiving, and it does not have any explicit echoes of the text quoted above.

However, early Christian writers swiftly fixed on the Levitical text in an effort to "prove" that childbirth contaminates the new mother. Their beliefs created an atmosphere of fear and guilt surrounding childbirth even if the text itself does not call for it. A negative attitude toward childbirth (which, in some texts, even extends to midwives) became part of the Christian tradition, meaning that the churching rite was strongly associated with "purifying" the new mother even if that's not what it said it was doing.

Moreover, the physical form that the rite took -- the new mother takes the end of the priest's stole and follows him into the church -- seems to reinforce the woman's lack of worth and agency. A stole is a kind of linen scarf that the priest wears around his neck; when the woman takes one end of it and walks behind him, it's hard not to think of a child on a field trip, or a dog on a leash. Afterward she kneels in silence as he recites a prayer, making the woman into a passive recipient of a man's blessing.

Throughout the Middle Ages, a new mother was not permitted to enter a church or receive communion until she had been churched. This means, in the more extreme cases, that she would not even be permitted to witness her own child's baptism. In one penitential book, called the Canons of Theodore, any woman who sets foot in a church before her purification is completed must fast for forty days as penance, which strikes me as a pretty terrible thing to inflict on a breastfeeding mother. In some cases, a woman who had died in childbirth was not buried in the church cemetery because of her "impurity," though again, this attitude was controversial and there were conflicting rules about it in different parts of the world.

Can anything about this ritual be salvaged? Religious women from both the Christian and Jewish traditions have tried to reinterpret various rites in ways that allow them to celebrate their bodies and their lives; perhaps the most obvious example is the creation of the bat mitzvah to provide Jewish girls with the same opportunities as the bar mitzvah did for Jewish boys. Clearly the Catholic tradition recognizes motherhood and offers a role model for new mothers, though admittedly she is an ambivalent one. How much rewriting would it take to create a satisfying, positive ritual out of this ugly history?

There are those who say that churching rites are so rotten and abusive that they need to be thrown out entirely; and of course there are those who say that Catholicism itself is so rotten and abusive that it has to be thrown out entirely. But there are also women who believe that the good things about the churching rite can be retained, creating something that is meaningful and life-affirming to mark this significant moment in women's lives.

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