Faith & Spirit Quote by Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s line lands like a half-smile with a sharpened edge: it treats conversion not as a mystical surrender but as a consumer choice made under patriarchy’s lousy options. The barb is in “at least.” Catholicism isn’t praised as liberating; it’s graded on a curve, winning by the bare minimum of symbolic female presence. That phrasing exposes the problem Atwood keeps returning to in her fiction: when institutions are built by men, women are often offered icons instead of agency.

The appeal she names is tellingly visual and narrative rather than doctrinal. “Female saints and the Virgin Mary” are allowable forms of womanhood within a heavily male clerical structure: sanctified suffering, maternal purity, obedience made radiant. Atwood’s subtext is that representation matters, but the kind of representation matters more. Saints are exceptionalized; Mary is venerated precisely because she is impossible. They function as a pressure valve, a way to make a system feel hospitable without redistributing power.

Contextually, Atwood writes out of a North American Protestant cultural backdrop where the divine family can look aggressively masculine and where women’s spiritual authority is often informal, domestic, or denied. Her quip doubles as a feminist diagnostic: if even a tradition known for restricting women can look comparatively inclusive, that’s less a defense of Catholicism than an indictment of everyone else. It’s Atwood doing what she does best - turning a wry aside into a map of how institutions launder hierarchy through myth.