This paper examines the construction and performance of gender in the Catholic Church through narratives of spiritual motherhood and spiritual fatherhood among celibate women and men. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in monasteries and parishes across the Nordic countries, I analyse how gender is negotiated in everyday religious practice within the institutional structures of the Church. I show how narratives of spiritual motherhood and spiritual fatherhood function as gendered frameworks of authority that enable both women and men to exercise forms of spiritual influence within the Catholic community. At the same time, these narratives remain embedded within the Catholic gender anthropology and clerical hierarchy. I argue that while these roles provide forms of both "power to" and "power over," for both women and men, the distribution of authority remains uneven between the genders. The narratives of spiritual motherhood and spiritual fatherhood are narratives with deep historical and theological roots but also examples of current reinterpretation of the Catholic tradition showing how gender is contested in lived religious practice.