God in the Brothel by Michael Ford

In her small apartment not far from the blustery coast of northern England, mystic and poet Edwina Gateley spoke about her inspirational life as a feminist laywoman in the Roman Catholic Church.

Residents of the small block near the beach at Morecambe would probably have little idea that the cheerful neighbor with the elderly cat had once set up a girls’ school in Uganda, founded an international missionary movement, and spent over a decade on the streets of Chicago ministering to women involved in prostitution.

“The women were always vulnerable—and they’d all been raped,” she disclosed. “None of them wanted to be hookers selling their bodies on the street. They felt guilty.”

Gateley explained how many of the women had their innocence “taken away from them” at very young ages.

“The more I talked to them on the streets, particularly at night, the more I heard stories that shocked me,” Gateley continued. “Most people didn’t know where these women are coming from. But I saw their vulnerability. I saw what was hidden deep inside them—fear, guilt, and pain from childhood.”

Gateley said that she “was angry at society” who looked down on these women. She was also upset with “the church who referred to them as sinners and fallen women.”

“These were not temptresses,” she said, “but young women had been hurt, abused, and violated. What I felt was important was to let society and the church know they had it wrong. The women needed support. They needed help.”

Even in its most difficult moments, Gateley felt the presence of God throughout her ministry. “I did sense that God was there, that Christ was there in the brothel—that if I hadn’t been there, Christ wouldn’t have been there. We bring Christ with us.”

Gateley emphasized the “power” she felt in her unique vocational calling. “I felt it was a direct call from God. I felt that God was walking with me. It was personal. It was a call to discipleship in a very real, alive, sense.”

As Gateley described her experience, I wondered if she had become unnerved at times.

“I am a very strong woman, and I was never really conscious of being scared,” she replied. “I did have real courage. I knew that God was with me. I really did believe that. I felt I had to face whatever danger would be involved.”

She was, however, struck by the hypocrisy she observed as “professional men came [into the brothel] in their business suits from the suburbs—doctors, teachers, architects who’d then go home to their wives and kids.” She even noticed a young priest, who became “upset and very embarrassed” when she confronted him.

“I remember speaking to middle-class women in the suburbs who were shocked by what they heard,” she said. “Some of them came into the city to visit me and bring food. I also sought donations from the church. The main thing was to get these women out of prostitution.”

Apart from a small project run by two nuns in California, there appeared to be no residential program in the US in the 1980s to help release the women. After roaming the city for more than a month and making a few friends, mostly among the homeless in soup kitchens, Edwina resolved to make a difference. With the help of a $12,000 start-up grant from Catholic Charities, she founded Genesis House, an oasis of safety and calm from the violence and sexual abuse of the streets. She invited the prostitutes she’d befriended inside for a chat and a cup of coffee. They were also offered a bed for up to three years.

Within two years, six to seven women a day were turning up, seeking help in freeing themselves from drug addiction, exploitative pimps, and prostitution itself. A decade after its founding, Genesis House had an annual budget of half a million dollars, two-thirds of which was provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, touching the lives of more than 20,000 prostitutes in the Chicago area through social service and outreach programs. Genesis House was a place of beauty for those degraded by the ugliness of their trade.

“These women had never had a home—they’d lived in institutions, brothels, or on the streets, so I felt environment was really important,’ said Gateley. “I made sure we had flowers in vases, plants, and pictures on the wall. They were worthy of that. I wanted to create a home that would make them feel at home, make them feel good.”

Gately also arranged for counselors to help the women receive the therapy they needed.

“Most women were on drugs,” she explained. “You can’t be sober and all together, then sleep with six guys next door. You have to be a bit out of it. But we shouldn’t criticize or condemn them. We don’t know what they’re going through.”

“I got to know them as women, as human beings,” she added.

Gateley remembered a volatile woman named Sandy who had “her man” on the streets. Everything she earned from prostitution went to him. She protected and cared for him, even when he was jailed for murder. One day Sandy revealed the violence done to her by her mother throughout her childhood. This included beatings and being tied up. “But she’s still my mom, isn’t she?” she asked Gateley.

Over the years, Sandy worked desperately hard to get a good job and pass exams. Eventually she had her own apartment and a car, and announced she was adopting three children.

“Sandy, who had never been loved or nurtured, drew from a reservoir of compassion deep within herself which left me astounded and awed by the power of God’s grace,” Gateley wrote in her book Christ in the Margins.

Another story involved the arrival of a tearful call girl with long blonde hair and blue eyes. Anna was another victim of abuse and violence who had hit rock bottom and was desperate to shake off the shackles of prostitution. But after a few days at Genesis House, it was evident the others were unusually hostile towards the newcomer as she didn’t seem to fit in.

Edwina was puzzled, then it dawned that Anna was, in fact, a gay man who needed love and shelter. Once the truth was shared, Anna stayed on “and all of us were richer for her presence,” Gateley recalled.

Gateley believes that many labelled outcasts are, in fact, angels and messengers sent to draw us closer to God. Our task is to recognize who they are. Anna led Gateley “to a deeper place of love, if I would dare go there,” she said. The world of prostitution thus became sacred ground for Gateley, a place of potential rather than despair.

“It was the joy of seeing that wonder of a woman moving from a from a lifestyle of degradation and diminishment to looking for new possibilities,” she said. “They were being opened out to a new world. I felt so privileged to be central to that.”

Gateley was keen to instill in the women a sense of the spiritual, even arranging trips to a Benedictine monastery. She also invited them to Mass when she had been asked to preach. Many had never been in a church before.

When it came to communion, “good” Catholics started clambering over them as the women remained in their places. She inquired afterwards why they didn’t go up to the altar. They replied that they were not worthy, which horrified Edwina.

“I was transformed personally,” she recalled. “I saw a perspective of the world I hadn’t experienced. It wasn’t talked about, or known about, or seen.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Gateley was born in a small village near Lancaster in northwest England during the Second World War. She had visionary experiences as a child and was devoted to the Catholic Church. After gaining a degree in teaching, she volunteered to work in a mission school in Uganda. After a year, she set up a school of her own in the village of Kyamaganda, 18 miles from the nearest town. There was no electricity or running water, and the main diet was steamed banana with peanut sauce.

“Africans taught me about friendship, love and hospitality,” Gateley explained. “They took me in. They shared with me the little food they had. They stretched me, stretched my little heart to be a little bigger, my vision to be wider. It was my first experience of conversion.”

Back in Britain, she set up the Volunteer Missionary Movement, training hundreds of men and women for work in Africa, Central America, and the Far East. But despite its ultimate success, there were many struggles and setbacks along the way. But, as she says in her bestselling Psalms of a Laywoman, “We held on in faith.”

Never one for half measures, in 1979 (when she was named Catholic Woman of the Year in England and Wales), she left the movement and lived for three months in solitude in the Sahara Desert, “a time of abundant joy and renewal” spent listening for her next step.

She was drawn to the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago for a master’s in theology, after which, she says, St. Teresa of Avila appeared to her in a vision during a monastic retreat. This led to her living alone in a trailer in an Illinois forest for nine months of prayer. Her active life had always needed to be balanced by periods of contemplation, she said. “It’s been part of my life since I was a teenager to withdraw.”

For the next decade, she worked among the prostitutes of Chicago and, though a devoted and loyal Catholic all her life, became a controversial speaker clashing with the clerical hierarchy, being banned from speaking in churches and having public engagements cancelled because of her feminist stance. One bishop reportedly said, “I don’t want that woman anywhere near my diocese.” Edwina believes she was a threat because she was a theologically educated woman who knew how to critique church structures.

The adoption of a newborn African American baby, Niall, brought her “to a far deeper understanding of the love of God and the notion of the Motherhood of God than I could ever have imagined.” She then raised funds to build the House of Sophia on the lakeside property of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania, “a silent corner of peace in God’s womb.” It served as a place of prayer for women and men seeking silence, nurturing, and healing.

Continuing to become well known as a poet and popular author, Gateley was invited to lead conferences and retreats which provided income for mother and son, while at the same time allowing her to share something of her unique spiritual pilgrimage.

“I think my mission was to see the world and the church differently, and to make a difference in it,” she reflected days before her 80th birthday. “God wants us to change the world, love one another, to stop poverty and hunger, to share and be vulnerable. Look what Jesus did! We go to church instead of being church. We are not open to God’s stretching us.”

Much of Edwina Gateley’s work has been focused on the margins, “where nobody gives a damn, and you don’t know what is going to happen.” She adds that there “you are vulnerable, but you also experience new life, a new perspective, a new way of looking at things.”

“The edge is the place of transformation, but who wants to go there?” she asked. “I’ve tried to be on the edge and go on the edge. It’s changed me and transformed me.” 

Her life has emerged from an incontrovertible vocation which she describes as “the voice of God in your guts, not your mind. It’s deep inside you. Your body feels it. Your soul feels it. It’s a living thing. It takes over.”

“My call on the streets affected my whole self,” she said. “It wasn’t just an idea. I knew it was significant, different, risky. I felt impelled to sit on the streets all night because I knew there was something bigger than the experience itself.” ♦

Michael Ford may be contacted at hermitagewithin@gmail.com.