Feminine Presence in the Church

On Mary, Mother of Priests

2009-08-28T17:43:00.000-07:00

"The Perfect Model for Their Existence"

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy, AUG. 27, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is a Vatican translation of the address Benedict XVI gave Aug. 12 during the general audience given at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo

The celebration of the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, next Saturday, is at hand and we are in the context of the Year for Priests. I therefore wish to speak of the link between Our Lady and the priesthood. This connection is deeply rooted in the Mystery of the Incarnation.

When God decided to become man in his Son, he needed the freely-spoken "yes" of one of his creatures. God does not act against our freedom. And something truly extraordinary happens: God makes himself dependent on the free decision, the "yes" of one of his creatures; he waits for this "yes".

St Bernard of Clairvaux explained dramatically in one of his homilies this crucial moment in universal history when Heaven, earth and God himself wait for what this creature will say.

Mary's "yes" is therefore the door through which God was able to enter the world, to become man. So it is that Mary is truly and profoundly involved in the Mystery of the Incarnation, of our salvation. And the Incarnation, the Son's becoming man, was the beginning that prepared the ground for the gift of himself; for giving himself with great love on the Cross to become Bread for the life of the world. Hence sacrifice, priesthood and Incarnation go together and Mary is at the heart of this mystery.

Let us now go to the Cross. Before dying, Jesus sees his Mother beneath the Cross and he sees the beloved son. This beloved son is certainly a person, a very important individual, but he is more; he is an example, a prefiguration of all beloved disciples, of all the people called by the Lord to be the "beloved disciple" and thus also particularly of priests.

Jesus says to Mary: "Woman, behold, your son!" (Jn 19: 26). It is a sort of testament: he entrusts his Mother to the care of the son, of the disciple. But he also says to the disciple: "Behold, your mother!" (Jn 19: 27).

The Gospel tells us that from that hour St John, the beloved son, took his mother Mary "to his own home".

This is what it says in the [English] translation; but the Greek text is far deeper, far richer. We could translate it: he took Mary into his inner life, his inner being, "eis tà ìdia", into the depths of his being.

To take Mary with one means to introduce her into the dynamism of one's own entire existence. It is not something external and into all that constitutes the horizon of one's own apostolate.

It seems to me that one can, therefore, understand how the special relationship of motherhood that exists between Mary and priests may constitute the primary source, the fundamental reason for her special love for each one of them.

In fact, Mary loves them with predilection for two reasons: because they are more like Jesus, the supreme love of her heart, and because, like her, they are committed to the mission of proclaiming, bearing witness to and giving Christ to the world.

Because of his identification with and sacramental conformation to Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary, every priest can and must feel that he really is a specially beloved son of this loftiest and humblest of Mothers.

The Second Vatican Council invites priests to look to Mary as to the perfect model for their existence, invoking her as "Mother of the supreme and eternal Priest, as Queen of Apostles, and as Protectress of their ministry". The Council continues, "priests should always venerate and love her, with a filial devotion and worship" (cf. Presbyterorum Ordinis, n. 18).

The Holy Curé d'Ars, whom we are remembering in particular in this Year, used to like to say: "Jesus Christ, after giving us all that he could give us, wanted further to make us heirs to his most precious possession, that is, his Holy Mother (B. Nodet, Il pensiero e l'anima del Curato d'Ars, Turin 1967, p. 305).

This applies for every Christian, for all of us, but in a special way for priests. Dear brothers and sisters, let us pray that Mary will make all priests, in all the problems of today's world, conform with the image of her Son Jesus, as stewards of the precious treasure of his love as the Good Shepherd. Mary, Mother of priests, pray for us!

Pope's Address: link between Mary and the Holy Spirit

2009-05-31T17:49:00.001-07:00

I greet all of you with affection at the end of the traditional Marian vigil that concludes the month of May in the Vatican. This year it has acquired a very special value since it falls on the eve of Pentecost. Gathering together, spiritually recollected before the Virgin Mary, contemplating the mysteries of the Holy Rosary, you have relived the experience of the first disciples, gathered together in the room of the Last Supper with "the Mother of Jesus," "persevering and united in prayer" await ing the coming of the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 1:14). We too, in this penultimate evening of May, from the Vatican hill, ask for the pouring out of the Spirit Paraclete upon us, upon the Church that is in Rome and upon the whole Christian people.

The great Feast of Pentecost invites us to meditate upon the relationship between the Holy Spirit and Mary, a very close, privileged, indissoluble relationship. The Virgin of Nazareth was chosen beforehand to become the Mother of the Redeemer by the working of the Holy Spirit: in her humility, she found grace in God's eyes (cf. Luke 1:30). In effect, in the New Testament we see that Mary's faith "draws," so to speak, the Holy Spirit. First of all in the conception of the Son of God, which the archangel Gabriel explains in this way: "The Holy Spirit will descend upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you" (Luke 1:35). Immediately afterward Mary went to help Elizabeth, and when her greeting reached Eliza beth's ears, the Holy Spirit made the child jump in the womb of her elderly cousin (cf. Luke 1:44); and the whole dialogue between the two mothers is inspired by the Spirit of God, above all the "Magnificat," the canticle of praise with which Mary expresses her sentiments. The whole event of Jesus' birth and his early childhood is guided in an almost palpable manner by the Holy Spirit, even if he is not always mentioned. Mary's heart, in perfect consonance with the divine Son, is the temple of the Spirit of truth, where every word and every event are kept in faith, hope and charity (cf. Luke 2:19, 51).

We can thus be certain that the most Sacred Heart of Jesus, in his whole hidden life in Nazareth, always found a "hearth" that was always burning with prayer and constant attention to the Holy Spirit in Mary's Immaculate Heart. The wedding feast at Cana is a witness to this singular harmony between Mother and Son in seeking God's will. In a situation like the wedding feast, charged with symbols of the covenant, the Virgin Mary intercedes and, in a certain sense, provokes, a sign of superabundant divine grace: the "good wine" that points to mystery of the Blood of Christ. This leads us directly to Calvary, where Mary stands under the cross with the other women and the Apostle John. Together the Mother and the disciple spiritually taken in Jesus' testament: his last words and his last breath, in which he begins to send out the Spirit; and they take in the silent crying out of his Blood, poured out completely for us (cf. John 19:25-34). Mary knew where the blood came from: it was formed in her by the work of the Holy Spirit, and she knew that this same creative "power" would raise Jesus up, as he promised.
In this way Mary's faith sustains the faith of the disciples until the meeting with the risen Lord, and will continue to accompany them even after his ascension into heaven, as they await the "baptism of the Holy Spirit" (cf. Acts 1:5). At Pentecost, the Virgin Mary appears again as Bride of the Spirit, having a universal maternity with respect to those who are born from God through faith in Christ. This is why Mary is for all generations the image and model of the Church, who together with the Holy Spirit journeys through time invoking Christ's glorious return: "Come, Lord Jesus" (cf. Revelation 22:17, 20).
Dear friends, in Mary's school we too learn to recognize the Holy Spirit's presence in our life, to listen to his inspirations and to follow them with docility. He makes us grow in the fullness of Christ, in those good fruits that the apostle Paul lists in the Letter to the Galatians: "Love, joy, peace, magnanimity, benevolence, goodness, fidelity, meekness, self-control" (Galatians 5:22). I hope that you will be filled with these gifts and will always walk with Mary according to the Spirit and, as I express my praise for your participation in t his evening celebration, I impart my Apostolic Benediction to all of you from my heart.

Mary Ann Glendon's Address to Benedict XVI

2009-05-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

VATICAN CITY, MAY 4, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is the text of the address given today by Mary Ann Glendon, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, to Benedict XVI upon being received by the Pontiff during the plenary session of the academy. The members of the academy are gathered in the Vatican through Tuesday, focusing on Catholic social doctrine and human rights.
* * *
Holy Father,
Your Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences comes before you this morning with immense gratitude for the encouragement you have given us, as we strive to be ever more useful to the Church in the development of her social teachings.
Over the years, no matter what aspect of economics, law, sociology or political sciences claimed our attention, there has been o ne central theme, one golden thread that has stitched all our work together. Our central focus has always been on the dignity of the human person and the common good. This week, Your Holiness, our Plenary Session has been entirely devoted to the way that theme has found expression in the concept of universal human rights.
In so doing, we have been mindful of the Church's long engagement with human rights, of her own decisive contributions to the dignitarian vision of rights embodied in so many human rights instruments, including a Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and of the Holy See as a fearless champion of that vision in international settings. That engagement has been characterized by a prudent recognition that the modern human rights project, like all human enterprises, constantly needs to be called to what is highest and best in its aspirations.
We have also been mindful of the fact that in today's world, ironically, many threats to the dignity of the pe rson have appeared in the guise of human rights. As you pointed out in your memorable speech to the United Nations last year, there are mounting pressures to "move away from the protection of human dignity towards the satisfaction of simple interests, often particular interests."
Accordingly in these days, with the help of experts in all the social sciences, we have reviewed the long reciprocal relationship between Christianity and human rights ideas. We have explored the expanding circle of human rights protection in an effort to discern how new rights claims are, or are not, conducive to human flourishing. We have paid special attention to rights that are currently under assault such as the right to life, the right to found a family, freedom of conscience and religion, and to rights that have too long awaited fulfillment such as the right to decent subsistence. Then building on our previous studies of globalization, we have taken up the question of the proper rol es of states, private actors, and international entities in bringing human rights to life.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you on behalf of all our members for your teachings on faith, hope and charity that provide an unconditional foundation for human rights, and for the example you set in the difficult Petrine mission to which Providence has called you. We are deeply grateful for your constant solicitude towards our Academy, which is also manifested in the appointment of our new Academician Lubomir Mlcoch.
It only remains for me, dear Holy Father, to ask you to bless this Academy and all those who have generously shared their wisdom with us over the past few days. We thank you most sincerely for the gift of this encounter

Kudos to Mary Ann Glendon

2009-04-27T18:02:00.002-07:00

Glendon's Letter to Notre Dame President

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, APRIL 27, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is the text of the letter Mary Ann Glendon, the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, sent today to the president of Notre Dame, Father John Jenkins, in which she declines the university's offer to give her the Laetare Medal at this year's commencement.

* * *

Dear Father Jenkins,

When you informed me in December 2008 that I had been selected to receive Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, I was profoundly moved. I treasure the memory of receiving an honorary degree from Notre Dame in 1996, and I have always felt honored that the commencement speech I gave that year was included in the anthology of Notre Dame’s most memorable commencement speeches. So I immediately began working on an acceptance speech that I hoped would be worthy of the occasion, of the honor of the medal, and of your students and faculty.

Last month, when you called to tell me that the commencement speech was to be given by President Obama, I mentioned to you that I would have to rewrite my speech. Over the ensuing weeks, the task that once seemed so delightful has been complicated by a number of factors.

First, as a longtime consultant to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, I could not help but be dismayed by the news that Notre Dame also planned to award the president an honorary degree. This, as you must know, was in disregard of the U.S. bishops’ express request of 2004 that Catholic institutions “should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles” and that such persons “should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” That request, which in no way seeks to control or interfere with an institution’s freedom to invite and engage in serious debate with whomever it wishes, seems to me so reasonable that I am at a loss to understand why a Catholic university should disrespect it.

Then I learned that “talking points” issued by Notre Dame in response to widespread criticism of its decision included two statements implying that my acceptance speech would somehow balance the event:

• “President Obama won’t be doing all the talking. Mary Ann Glendon, the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, will be speaking as the recipient of the Laetare Medal.”

• “We think having the president come to Notre Dame, see our graduates, meet our leaders, and hear a talk from Mary Ann Glendon is a good thing for the president and for the causes we care about.”

A commencement, however, is supposed to be a joyous day for the graduates and their families. It is not the right place, nor is a brief acceptance speech the right vehicle, for engagement with the very serious problems raised by Notre Dame’s decision -- in disregard of the settled position of the U.S. bishops -- to honor a prominent and uncompromising opponent of the Church’s position on issues involving fundamental principles of justice.

Finally, with recent news reports that other Catholic schools are similarly choosing to disregard the bishops’ guidelines, I am concerned that Notre Dame’s example could have an unfortunate ripple effect.

It is with great sadness, therefore, that I have concluded that I cannot accept the Laetare Medal or participate in the May 17 graduation ceremony.

In order to avoid the inevitable speculation about the reasons for my decision, I will release this letter to the press, but I do not plan to make any further comment on the matter at this time.

Yours Very Truly,

Mary Ann Glendon

The Invisible Mother

2008-10-22T12:31:00.001-07:00

I received this inspiring writing from a friend. It is a tribute to so many wonderful invisible women.

THE INVISIBLE MOTHER

It all began to make sense, the blank stares, the lack of response,
the way one of the kids will walk into the room
while I'm on the phone and ask to be taken to the store.
Inside I'm thinking, 'Can't you see I'm on
the phone?' Obviously not; no one can see if I'm on
the phone, or cooking, or sweeping the floor, or even
standing on my head in the corner, because no one can see me
at all.

I'm invisible. The invisible Mom. Some days I am only a
pair of hands, nothing more: Can you fix this? Can you tie
this? Can you open this? Some days I'm not a pair of
hands; I'm not even a human being. I'm a clock to
ask, 'What time is it?' I'm a satellite guide to
answer, 'What number is the Disney Channel?' I'm
a car to order, 'Right around 5:30, please.'

I was certain that these were the hands that once held
books and the eyes that studied history and the mind that
graduated summa cum laude - but now they had disappeared
into the peanut butter, never to be seen again. She's
going, she's going, she's gone!

One night, a group of us were having dinner, celebrating
the return of a friend from England .. Janice had just
gotten back from a fabulous trip, and she was going on and
on about the hotel she stayed in. I was sitting there,
looking around at the others all put together so well. It
was hard not to compare and feel sorry for myself. I was
feeling pretty pathetic, when Janice turned to me with a
beautifully wrapped package, and said, 'I brought you
this.' It was a book on the great cathedrals of Europe .

I wasn't exactly sure why she'd given it to me
until I read her inscription: 'To Charlotte , with
admiration for the greatness of what you are building when
no one sees.'

In the days ahead I would read - no, devour - the book. And
I would discover what would become for me, four
life-changing truths, after which I could pattern my work:
No one can say who built the great cathedrals
we have no record of their names.

These builders gave their whole lives
for a work they would never see finished. They made great
sacrifices and expected no credit. The passion of their
building was fueled by their faith that the
eyes of God saw everything.

A legendary story in the book told of a rich man who came
to visit the cathedral while it was being built, and he saw
a workman carving a tiny bird on the inside of a beam. He
was puzzled and asked the man, 'Why are you spending so
much time carving that bird into a beam that will be covered
by the roof? No one will ever see it.' And the workman
replied, 'Because God sees.'

I closed the book, feeling the missing piece fall into
place. It was almost as if I heard God whispering to me,
'I see you, Charlotte. I see the sacrifices you make
every day, even when no one around you does. No act of
kindness you've done, no sequin you've sewn on, no
cupcake you've baked, is too small for me to notice and
smile over. You are building a great cathedral, but you
can't see right now what it will become.'

At times, my invisibility feels like an affliction But it
is not a disease that is erasing my life. It is the cure for
the disease of my own self-centeredness. It is the antidote
to my strong, stubborn pride. I keep the right perspective
when I see myself as a great builder. As one of the people
who show up at a job that they will never see finished, to
work on something that their name will never be on.

The writer of the book went so far as to say that no
cathedrals could ever be built in our lifetime because there
are so few people willing to sacrifice to that degree.

When I really think about it, I don't want my child to
tell the friend he's bringing home from college for
Thanksgiving, 'My Mom gets up at 4 in the morning and
bakes homemade pies, and then she hand bastes a turkey for
three hours and presses all the linens for the table.'
That would mean I'd built a shrine or a monument to
myself. I just want him to want to come home. And then, if
there is anything more to say to his friend, to add,
'You're gonna love it there.'

As mothers, we are building great cathedrals. We cannot be
seen if we're doing it right. And one day, it is very
possible that the world will marvel, not only at what we
have built, but at the beauty that has been added to the
world by the sacrifices of invisible women.

Great Job, MOM!

The Vindication of Humanae Vitae by Mary Eberstadt

2008-10-22T10:34:00.004-07:00

This is an excellent study published in the magazine First Things (August/September 2008)in which the author argue intelligently on the solidity and actuality of the moral teaching of the Catholic Church regarding contraception.

That Humanae Vitae and related Catholic teachings about sexual morality are laughingstocks in all the best places is not exactly news. Even in the benighted precincts of believers, where information from the outside world is known to travel exceedingly slowly, everybody grasps that this is one doctrine the world loves to hate. During Benedict XVI’s April visit to the United States, hardly a story in the secular press failed to mention the teachings of Humanae Vitae, usually alongside adjectives like “divisive” and “controversial” and “outdated.” In fact, if there’s anything on earth that unites the Church’s adversaries—all of them except for the Muslims, anyway—the teaching against contraception is probably it.
To many people, both today and when the encyclical was promulgated on July 25, 1968, the notion simply defies understanding. Consenting adults, told not to use birth control? Preposterous. Third World parents deprived access to contraception and abortion? Positively criminal. A ban on condoms when there’s a risk of contracting AIDS? Beneath contempt.
“The execration of the world,” in philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe’s phrase, was what Paul VI incurred with that document—to which the years since 1968 have added plenty of just plain ridicule. Hasn’t everyone heard Monty Python’s send-up song “Every Sperm Is Sacred”? Or heard the jokes? “You no play-a the game, you no make-a the rules.” And “What do you call the rhythm method? Vatican roulette.” And “What do you call a woman who uses the rhythm method? Mommy.”
As everyone also knows, it’s not only the Church’s self-declared adversaries who go in for this sort of sport. So, too, do many American and European Catholics—specifically, the ones often called dissenting or cafeteria Catholics, and who more accurately might be dubbed the “Catholic Otherwise Faithful.” I may be Catholic, but I’m not a maniac about it, runs their unofficial subtext—meaning: I’m happy to take credit for enlightened Catholic positions on the death penalty/social justice/civil rights, but of course I don’t believe in those archaic teachings about divorce/homosexuality/and above all birth control.
Thus FOX News host Sean Hannity, for example, describes himself to viewers as a “good” and “devout” Catholic—one who happens to believe, as he has also said on the air, that “contraception is good.” He was challenged on his show in 2007 by Father Tom Euteneuer of Human Life International, who observed that such a position emanating from a public figure technically fulfilled the requirements for something called heresy. And Hannity reacted as many others have when stopped in the cafeteria line. He objected that the issue of contraception was “superfluous” compared to others; he asked what right the priest had to tell him what to do (“judge not lest you be judged,” Hannity instructed); and he expressed shock at the thought that anyone might deprive him of taking Communion just because he was deciding for himself what it means to be Catholic.
And so we have a microcosm of the current fate of Humanae Vitae and all it represents in the American Church—and, for that matter, in what is left of the advanced Western one, too. With each passing year, it seems safe to assume, fewer priests can be found to explain the teaching, fewer parishioners to obey it, and fewer educated people to avoid rolling their eyes at the idea that anyone in 2008 could possibly be so antiquarian as to hold any opinion about contraceptive sex—any, that is, other than its full-throttle celebration as the chief liberation of our time.
And in just that apparent consensus about the ridiculousness of it all, amid all those ashes scattered over a Christian teaching stretching back two millennia, arises a fascinating and in fact exceedingly amusing modern morality tale—amusing, at least, to those who take their humor dark.
“He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh,” the Psalmist promises, specifically in a passage about enjoying vindication over one’s adversaries. If that is so, then the racket on this fortieth anniversary must be prodigious. Four decades later, not only have the document’s signature predictions been ratified in empirical force, but they have been ratified as few predictions ever are: in ways its authors could not possibly have foreseen, including by information that did not exist when the document was written, by scholars and others with no interest whatever in its teaching, and indeed even inadvertently, and in more ways than one, by many proud public adversaries of the Church.
Forty years later, there are more than enough ironies, both secular and religious, to make one swear there’s a humorist in heaven.
II
Let’s begin by meditating upon what might be called the first of the secular ironies now evident: Humanae Vitae’s specific predictions about what the world would look like if artificial contraception became widespread. The encyclical warned of four resulting trends: a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.
In the years since Humanae Vitae’s appearance, numerous distinguished Catholic thinkers have argued, using a variety of evidence, that each of these predictions has been borne out by the social facts. One thinks, for example, of Monsignor George A. Kelly in his 1978 “Bitter Pill the Catholic Community Swallowed” and of the many contributions of Janet E. Smith, including Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later and the edited volume Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader.
And therein lies an irony within an irony. Although it is largely Catholic thinkers who have connected the latest empirical evidence to the defense of Humanae Vitae’s predictions, during those same forty years most of the experts actually producing the empirical evidence have been social scientists operating in the secular realm. As sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox emphasized in a 2005 essay: “The leading scholars who have tackled these topics are not Christians, and most of them are not political or social conservatives. They are, rather, honest social scientists willing to follow the data wherever it may lead.”
Consider, as Wilcox does, the Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof. In a well-known 1996 article in theQuarterly Journal of Economics, Akerlof explained in the language of modern economics why the sexual revolution—contrary to common prediction, especially prediction by those in and out of the Church who wanted the teaching on birth control changed—had led to an increase in both illegitimacy and abortion. In another work published in theEconomic Journal ten years ago, he traced the empirical connections between the decrease in marriage and married fatherhood for men—both clear consequences of the contraceptive revolution—and the simultaneous increase in behaviors to which single men appear more prone: substance abuse, incarceration, and arrests, to name just three.
Along the way, Akerlof found a strong connection between the diminishment of marriage on the one hand and the rise in poverty and social pathology on the other. He explained his findings in nontechnical terms in Slate magazine: “Although doubt will always remain about what causes a change in social custom, the technology-shock theory does fit the facts. The new reproductive technology was adopted quickly, and on a massive scale. Marital and fertility patterns changed with similar drama, at about the same time.”
To these examples of secular social science confirming what Catholic thinkers had predicted, one might add many more demonstrating the negative effects on children and society. The groundbreaking work that Daniel Patrick Moynihan did in 1965, on the black family, is an example—along with the critical research of psychologist Judith Wallerstein over several decades on the impact of divorce on children; Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s well-known work on the outcomes of single parenthood for children; Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur’s seminal book, Growing Up with a Single Parent; and David Blankenhorn’s Fatherless America, another lengthy summarization of the bad empirical news about family breakup.
Numerous other books followed this path of analyzing the benefits of marriage, including James Q. Wilson’s The Marriage Problem, Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s The Case for Marriage, Kay Hymowitz’s Marriage and Caste in America, and Elizabeth Marquardt’s recent Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. To this list could be added many more examples of how the data have grown and grown to support the proposition that the sexual revolution has been resulting in disaster for large swaths of the country—a proposition further honed by whole decades of examination of the relation between public welfare and family dysfunction (particularly in the pages of the decidedly not-Catholic Public Interest magazine). Still other seminal works have observed that private actions, notably post-revolution sexual habits, were having massive public consequences; Charles Murray’s Losing Groundand Francis Fukuyama’s The Great Disruption come especially to mind.
All this is to say that, beginning just before the appearance of Humanae Vitae, an academic and intellectual rethinking began that can no longer be ignored—one whose accumulation of empirical evidence points to the deleterious effects of the sexual revolution on many adults and children. And even in the occasional effort to draw a happy face on current trends, there is no glossing over what are still historically high rates of family breakup and unwed motherhood. For example, in “Crime, Drugs, Welfare—and Other Good News,” a recent and somewhat contrarian article inCommentary, Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin applauded the fact that various measures of social disaster and dysfunction seem to be improving from previous lows, including, among others, violent crime and property crime, and teen alcohol and tobacco use. Even they had to note that “some of the most vital social indicators of all—those regarding the condition and strength of the American family—have so far refused to turn upward.”
In sum, although a few apologists such as Stephanie Coontz still insist otherwise, just about everyone else in possession of the evidence acknowledges that the sexual revolution has weakened family ties, and that family ties (the presence of a biologically related mother and father in the home) have turned out to be important indicators of child well-being—and more, that the broken home is not just a problem for individuals but also for society. Some scholars, moreover, further link these problems to the contraceptive revolution itself.
Consider the work of maverick sociobiologist Lionel Tiger. Hardly a cat’s-paw of the pope—he describes religion as “a toxic issue”—Tiger has repeatedly emphasized the centrality of the sexual revolution to today’s unique problems. The Decline of Males, his 1999 book, was particularly controversial among feminists for its argument that female contraceptives had altered the balance between the sexes in disturbing new ways (especially by taking from men any say in whether they could have children).
Equally eyebrow-raising is his linking of contraception to the breakdown of families, female impoverishment, trouble in the relationship between the sexes, and single motherhood. Tiger has further argued—as Humanae Vitae did not explicitly, though other works of Catholic theology have—for a causal link between contraception and abortion, stating outright that “with effective contraception controlled by women, there are still more abortions than ever. . . . Contraception causes abortion.”
Who could deny that the predictions of Humanae Vitae and, by extension, of Catholic moral theology have been ratified with data and arguments that did not even exist in 1968? But now comes the question that just keeps on giving. Has this dramatic reappraisal of the empirically known universe led to any secular reappraisals, however grudging, that Paul VI may have gotten something right after all? The answer is manifestly that it has not. And this is only the beginning of the dissonance that surrounds us in 2008.
III
Just as empirical evidence has proved that the sexual revolution has had disastrous effects on children and families, so the past forty years have destroyed the mantle called “science” that Humanae Vitae’s detractors once wrapped round themselves. In particular, the doomsday population science so popular and influential during the era in whichHumanae Vitae appeared has been repeatedly demolished.
Born from Thomas Robert Malthus’ famous late-eighteenth-century Essay on Population, this was the novel view that humanity itself amounted to a kind of scourge or pollution whose pressure on fellow members would lead to catastrophe. Though rooted in other times and places, Malthusianism of one particular variety was fully in bloom in America by the early 1960s. In fact, Humanae Vitae appeared two months before the most successful popularization of Malthusian thinking yet, Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb—which opened with the words: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
If, as George Weigel has suggested, 1968 was absolutely the worst moment for Humanae Vitae to appear, it could not have been a better one for Ehrlich to advance his apocalyptic thesis. An entomologist who specialized in butterflies, Ehrlich found an American public, including a generation of Catholics, extraordinarily receptive to his direst thoughts about humanity.
This was the wave that The Population Bomb caught on its way to becoming one of the bestsellers of recent times. Of course, many people with no metaphysics whatsoever were drawn to Ehrlich’s doom-mongering. But for restless Catholics, in particular, the overpopulation scare was attractive—for if overpopulation were the problem, the solution was obvious: Tell the Church to lift the ban on birth control.
It is less than coincidental that the high-mindedness of saving the planet dovetailed perfectly with a more self-interested outcome, the freer pursuit of sexuality via the Pill. Dissenting Catholics had special reasons to stress the “science of overpopulation,” and so they did. In the name of a higher morality, their argument went, birth control could be defended as the lesser of two evils (a position argued by the dissenter Charles Curran, among others).
Less than half a century later, these preoccupations with overwhelming birth rates appear as pseudo-scientific as phrenology. Actually, that may be unfair to phrenology. For the overpopulation literature has not only been abandoned by thinkers for more improved science; it has actually been so thoroughly proved false that today’s cutting-edge theory worries about precisely the opposite: a “dearth birth” that is “graying” the advanced world.
In fact, so discredited has the overpopulation science become that this year Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly could publish Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population and garner a starred review inPublishers Weekly—all in service of what is probably the single best demolition of the population arguments that some hoped would undermine church teaching. This is all the more satisfying a ratification because Connelly is so conscientious in establishing his own personal antagonism toward the Catholic Church (at one point asserting without even a footnote that natural family planning “still fails most couples who try it”).
Fatal Misconception is decisive proof that the spectacle of overpopulation, which was used to browbeat the Vatican in the name of science, was a grotesque error all along. First, Connelly argues, the population-control movement was wrong as a matter of fact: “The two strongest claims population controllers make for their long-term historical contribution” are “that they raised Asia out of poverty and helped keep our planet habitable.” Both of these, he demonstrates, are false.
Even more devastating is Connelly’s demolition of the claim to moral high ground that the overpopulation alarmists made. For population science was not only failing to help people, Connelly argues, but also actively harming some of them—and in a way that summoned some of the baser episodes of recent historical memory:

The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think that one could know other people’s interests better than they knew it themselves. . . . The essence of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the “unfit,” or families that seemed either too big or too small, was to make rules for other people without having to answer to them. It appealed to people with power because, with the spread of emancipatory movements, it began to appear easier and more profitable to control populations than to control territory. That is why opponents were essentially correct in viewing it as another chapter in the unfinished business of imperialism.

The forty years since Humanae Vitae appeared have also vindicated the encyclical’s fear that governments would use the new contraceptive technology coercively. The outstanding example, of course, is the Chinese government’s long-running “one-child policy,” replete with forced abortions, public trackings of menstrual cycles, family flight, increased female infanticide, sterilization, and other assaults too numerous even to begin cataloguing here—in fact, so numerous that they are now widely, if often grudgingly, acknowledged as wrongs even by international human-rights bureaucracies. Lesser-known examples include the Indian government’s foray into coercive use of contraception in the “emergency” of 1976 and 1977, and the Indonesian government’s practice in the 1970s and 1980s of the bullying implantation of IUDs and Norplant.
Should governments come to “regard this as necessary,” Humanae Vitae warned, “they may even impose their use on everyone.” As with the unintended affirmation by social science, will anyone within the ranks of the population revisionists now give credit where credit is due?
IV
Perhaps the most mocked of Humanae Vitae’s predictions was its claim that separating sex from procreation would deform relations between the sexes and “open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards.” Today, when advertisements for sex scream from every billboard and webpage, and every teen idol is sooner or later revealed topless or worse online, some might wonder what further proof could possibly be offered.
But to leave matters there would be to miss something important. The critical point is, one might say, not so much the proof as the pudding it’s in. And it would be hard to get more ironic than having these particular predictions ofHumanae Vitae vindicated by perhaps the most unlikely—to say nothing of unwilling—witness of all: modern feminism.
Yet that is exactly what has happened since 1968. From Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem to Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer on up through Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf, feminist literature has been a remarkably consistent and uninterrupted cacophony of grievance, recrimination, and sexual discontent. In that forty-year record, we find, as nowhere else, personal testimony of what the sexual revolution has done to womankind.
Consider just what we have been told by the endless books on the topic over the years. If feminists married and had children, they lamented it. If they failed to marry or have children, they lamented that, too. If they worked outside the home and also tended their children, they complained about how hard that was. If they worked outside the home and didn’t tend their children, they excoriated anyone who thought they should. And running through all this literature is a more or less constant invective about the unreliability and disrespect of men.
The signature metaphors of feminism say everything we need to know about how happy liberation has been making these women: the suburban home as concentration camp, men as rapists, children as intolerable burdens, fetuses as parasites, and so on. These are the sounds of liberation? Even the vaunted right to abortion, both claimed and exercised at extraordinary rates, did not seem to mitigate the misery of millions of these women after the sexual revolution.
Coming full circle, feminist and Vanity Fair contributor Leslie Bennetts recently published a book urging women to protect themselves financially and otherwise from dependence on men, including from men deserting them later in life. Mothers cannot afford to stay home with their children, she argues, because they cannot trust their men not to leave them. (One of her subjects calls desertion and divorce “the slaughter of the lambs.”) Like-minded feminist Linda Hirschman penned a ferocious and widely read manifesto in 2005 urging, among other bitter “solutions,” that women protect themselves by adopting—in effect—a voluntary one-child policy. (She argued that a second child often necessitates a move to the suburbs, which puts the office and work-friendly conveniences further away).
Beneath all the pathos, the subtext remains the same: Woman’s chief adversary is Unreliable Man, who does not understand her sexual and romantic needs and who walks off time and again at the first sashay of a younger thing. What are all these but the generic cries of a woman who thinks that men are “disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium” and “no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection”?
Perhaps the most compelling case made for traditional marriage lately was not on the cover of, say, Catholic World Report but in the devoutly secular Atlantic. The 2008 article “Marry Him!” by Lori Gottlieb—a single mother who conceived her only child with donor sperm rather than miss out on motherhood as she has on marriage—is a frank and excruciatingly personal look into some of the sexual revolution’s lonelier venues, including the creation of children by anonymous or absent sperm donors, the utter corrosiveness of taking a consumerist approach to romance, and the miserable effects of advancing age on one’s sexual marketability.
Gottlieb writes as one who played by all the feminist rules, only to realize too late that she’d been had. Beneath the zippy language, the article runs on an engine of mourning. Admitting how much she covets the husbands of her friends, if only for the wistful relief of having someone else help with the childcare, Gottlieb advises: “Those of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget that we, too, will age and become less alluring. And even if some men do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own biological children. Which is all the more reason to settle before settling is no longer an option.”
To these and other examples of how feminist-minded writers have become inadvertent witnesses for the prosecution of the sexual revolution, we might add recent public reflection on the Pill’s bastard child, ubiquitous pornography.
“The onslaught of porn,” one social observer wrote, “is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as �porn-worthy.’” Further, “sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity. . . . If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.” And perhaps most shocking of all, this—which with just a little tweaking could easily have appeared in Humanae Vitae itself: “The power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time.”
This was not some religious antiquarian. It was Naomi Wolf—Third Wave feminist and author of such works as The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities, which are apparently dedicated to proving that women can tomcat, too. Yet she is now just one of many out there giving testimony, unconscious though it may be, to some of the funny things that happened after the Pill freed everybody from sexual slavery once and for all.
That there is no auxiliary literature of grievance for men—who, for the most part, just don’t seem to feel they have as much to grieve about in this new world order—is something else that Humanae Vitae and a few other retrograde types saw coming in the wake of the revolution. As the saying goes, and as many people did not stop to ask at the time,cui bono? Forty years later, the evidence is in. As Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver observed on Humanae Vitae’s thirtieth anniversary in 1998, “Contraception has released males—to a historically unprecedented degree—from responsibility for their sexual aggression.” Will any feminist who by 2008 disagrees with that statement please stand up?
V
The adversaries of Humanae Vitae also could not have foreseen one important historical development that in retrospect would appear to undermine their demands that the Catholic Church change with the times: the widespread Protestant collapse, particularly the continuing implosion of the Episcopal Church and the other branches of Anglicanism. It is about as clear as any historical chain can get that this implosion is a direct consequence of the famous Lambeth Conference in 1930, at which the Anglicans abandoned the longstanding Christian position on contraception. If a church cannot tell its flock “what to do with my body,” as the saying goes, with regard to contraception, then other uses of that body will quickly prove to be similarly off-limits to ecclesiastical authority.
It makes perfect if unfortunate sense, then, that the Anglicans are today imploding over the issue of homosexuality. To quote Anscombe again:

If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here—not indulging in bad language), when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? It can’t be the mere pattern of bodily behavior in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference! But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example. I am not saying: if you think contraception all right you will do these other things; not at all. The habit of respectability persists and old prejudices die hard. But I am saying: you will have no solid reason against these things. You will have no answer to someone who proclaims as many do that they are good too. You cannot point to the known fact that Christianity drew people out of the pagan world, always saying no to these things. Because, if you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition.

By giving benediction in 1930 to its married heterosexual members purposely seeking sterile sex, the Anglican Church lost, bit by bit, any authority to tell her other members—married or unmarried, homosexual or heterosexual—not to do the same. To put the point another way, once heterosexuals start claiming the right to act as homosexuals, it would not be long before homosexuals start claiming the rights of heterosexuals.
Thus in a bizarre but real sense did Lambeth’s attempt to show compassion to married heterosexuals inadvertently give rise to the modern gay-rights movement—and consequently, to the issues that have divided their church ever since. It is hard to believe that anyone seeking a similar change in Catholic teaching on the subject would want the Catholic Church to follow suit into the moral and theological confusion at the center of today’s Anglican Church—yet such is the purposeful ignorance of so many who oppose Rome on birth control that they refuse to connect these cautionary historical dots.
The years since Humanae Vitae have seen something else that neither traditionalist nor dissenting Catholics could have seen coming, one other development shedding retrospective credit on the Church: a serious reappraisal of Christian sexuality from Protestants outside the liberal orbit.
Thus, for instance, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, observed in FIRST THINGS in 1998 that “in an ironic turn, American evangelicals are rethinking birth control even as a majority of the nation’s Roman Catholics indicate a rejection of their Church’s teaching.” Later, when interviewed in a 2006 article in the New York Times Sunday magazine about current religious thinking on artificial contraception, Mohler elaborated: “I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the Pill. . . . The entire horizon of the sexual act changes. I think there can be no question that the Pill gave incredible license to everything from adultery and affairs to premarital sex and within marriage to a separation of the sex act and procreation.”
Mohler also observed that this legacy of damage was affecting the younger generation of evangelicals. “I detect a huge shift. Students on our campus are intensely concerned. Not a week goes by that I do not get contacted by pastors about the issue. There are active debates going on. It’s one of the things that may serve to divide evangelicalism.” Part of that division includes Quiverfull, the anti-contraception Protestant movement now thought to number in the tens of thousands that further prohibits (as the Catholic Church does not) natural family planning or any other conscious interference with conception. Such second thoughts among evangelicals are the premise of a 2002 book titled Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Re-Thinks Contraception.
As a corollary to this rethinking by Protestants, experience seems to have taught a similar lesson to at least some young Catholics—the generation to grow up under divorce, widespread contraception, fatherless households, and all the other emancipatory fallout. As Naomi Schaefer Riley noted in the Wall Street Journal about events this year at Notre Dame: “About thirty students walked out of The Vagina Monologues in protest after the first scene. And people familiar with the university are not surprised that it was the kids, not the grownups, who registered the strongest objections. The students are probably the most religious part of the Notre Dame. . . . . Younger Catholics tend to be among the more conservative ones.” It is hard to imagine that something like the traditionalist Anscombe Society at Princeton University, started in 2004, could have been founded in 1968.
One thing making traditionalists of these young Americans, at least according to some of them, is the fact of their having grown up in a world characterized by abortion on demand. And that brings us to yet another irony worth contemplating on this fortieth anniversary: what widespread rejection of Humanae Vitae has done to the character of American Catholicism.
As with the other ironies, it helps here to have a soft spot for absurdity. In their simultaneous desire to jettison the distasteful parts of Catholicism and keep the more palatable ones, American Catholics have done something novel and truly amusing: They have created a specific catalogue of complaints that resembles nothing so much as a Catholic version of the orphan with chutzpah.
Thus many Catholics complain about the dearth of priests, all the while ignoring their own responsibility for that outcome—the fact that few have children in numbers large enough to send one son to the priesthood while the others marry and carry on the family name. They mourn the closing of Catholic churches and schools—never mind that whole parishes, claiming the rights of individual conscience, have contracepted themselves out of existence. They point to the priest sex scandals as proof positive that chastity is too much to ask of people—completely ignoring that it was the randy absence of chastity that created the scandals in the first place.
In fact, the disgrace of contemporary American Catholicism—the many recent scandals involving priests and underage boys—is traceable to the collusion between a large Catholic laity that wanted a different birth-control doctrine, on the one hand, and a new generation of priests cutting themselves a different kind of slack, on the other. “I won’t tattle on my gay priest if you’ll give me absolution for contraception” seems to have been the unspoken deal in many parishes since Humanae Vitae.
A more obedient laity might have wondered aloud about the fact that a significant number of priests post-Vatican II seemed more or less openly gay. A more obedient clergy might have noticed that plenty of Catholics using artificial contraception were also taking Communion. It is hard to believe that either new development—the widespread open rebellion against church sexual teachings by the laity, or the concomitant quiet rebellion against church sexual teachings by a significant number of priests—could have existed without the other.
During Benedict’s recent visit to the United States, one heard a thousand times the insistence that Humanae Vitaesomehow sparked a rebellion or was something new under the sun. As Peter Steinfels once put the over-familiar party line, “The pope’s 1968 encyclical and the furor it created continue to polarize the American church.” On this account, everything was somehow fine until Paul VI refused to bend with the times—at which point all hell broke loose.
Of course, all that Paul VI did, as Anscombe among many other unapologetic Catholics then and since have pointed out, was reiterate what just about everyone in the history of Christendom had ever said on the subject. In asking Catholics to be more like contraceptive-accepting Protestants, critics have been forgetting what Christian theologians across centuries had to say about contraception until practically the day before yesterday.
It was, in a word, No. Exactly one hundred years ago, for example, the Lambeth Conference of 1908 affirmed its opposition to artificial contraception in words harsher than anything appearing in Humanae Vitae: “demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare.” In another historical twist that must have someone laughing somewhere, pronouncements of the founding fathers of Protestantism make the Catholic traditionalists of 1968 look positively diffident. Martin Luther in a commentary on Genesis declared contraception to be worse than incest or adultery. John Calvin called it an “unforgivable crime.” This unanimity was not abandoned until the year 1930, when the Anglicans voted to allow married couples to use birth control in extreme cases, and one denomination after another over the years came to follow suit.
Seen in the light of actual Christian tradition, the question is not after all why the Catholic Church refused to collapse on the point. It is rather why just about everyone else in the Judeo-Christian tradition did. Whatever the answer, the Catholic Church took, and continues to take, the public fall for causing a collapse—when actually it was the only onenot collapsing.
VI
From time to time since 1968, some of the Catholics who accepted “the only doctrine that had ever appeared as the teaching of the Church on these things,” in Anscombe’s words, have puzzled over why, exactly, Humanae Vitae has been so poorly received by the rest of the world. Surely part of it is timing, as George Weigel observed. Others have cited an implacably secular media and the absence of a national pulpit for Catholics as contributing factors. Still others have floated the idea that John Paul II’s theology of the body, an elaborate and highly positive explication of Christian moral teaching, might have taken some of the sting out of Humanae Vitae and better won the obedience of the flock.
At the end of the day, though, it is hard to believe that the fundamental force behind the execration by the world amounts to a phrase here and there in Humanae Vitae—or in Augustine, or in Thomas Aquinas, or in anywhere else in the long history of Christian teaching on the subject. More likely, the fundamental issue is rather what Archbishop Chaput explained ten years ago: “If Paul VI was right about so many of the consequences deriving from contraception, it is because he was right about contraception itself.”
This is exactly the connection few people in 2008 want to make, because contraceptive sex—as commentators from all over, religious or not, agree—is the fundamental social fact of our time. And the fierce and widespread desire to keep it so is responsible for a great many perverse outcomes. Despite an empirical record that is unmistakably on Paul VI’s side by now, there is extraordinary resistance to crediting Catholic moral teaching with having been right about anything, no matter how detailed the record.
Considering the human spectacle today, forty years after the document whose widespread rejection reportedly broke Paul VI’s heart, one can’t help but wonder how he might have felt if he had glimpsed only a fraction of the evidence now available—whether any of it might have provoked just the smallest wry smile.
After all, it would take a heart of stone not to find at least some of what’s now out there funny as hell. There is the ongoing empirical vindication in one arena after another of the most unwanted, ignored, and ubiquitously mocked global teaching of the past fifty years. There is the fact that the Pill, which was supposed to erase all consequences of sex once and for all, turned out to have huge consequences of its own. There is the way that so many Catholics, embarrassed by accusations of archaism and driven by their own desires to be as free for sex as everyone around them, went racing for the theological exit signs after Humanae Vitae—all this just as the world with its wicked old ways began stockpiling more evidence for the Church’s doctrine than anyone living in previous centuries could have imagined, and while still other people were actually being brought closer to the Church because she stood exactly as that “sign of contradiction” when so many in the world wanted otherwise.
Yet instead of vindication for the Church, there is demoralization; instead of clarity, mass confusion; instead of more obedience, ever less. Really, the perversity is, well, perverse. In what other area does humanity operate at this level of extreme, daily, constant contradiction? Where is the Boccaccio for this post-Pill Decameron? It really is all very funny, when you stop to think about it. So why isn’t everybody down here laughing?

________________________________________
MARY EBERSTADT is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, author of Home-Alone America, and editor of Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys.

Mary's Yes

2008-07-20T17:05:00.002-07:00

I find this reflection on the Anunciation very original and thought provoking.

Benedict XVI: God's Proposal Brought Mary's Yes

SYDNEY, Australia, JULY 19, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI says the scene of the Annunciation is like a marriage proposal from God, to which Mary, on behalf of the human race, said yes.
The Pope affirmed this today at the close of the 23rd World Youth Day before reciting the midday Angelus with as many as 500,000 people gathered at Randwick Racecourse.
"In the beautiful prayer that we are about to recite, we reflect on Mary as a young woman, receiving the Lord's summons to dedicate her life to him in a very particular way, a way that would involve the generous gift of herself, her womanhood, her motherhood," he said. "Imagine how she must have felt. She was filled with apprehension, utterly overwhelmed at the prospect that lay before her."
The Holy Father recalle d, however, that the angel Gabriel understood Mary's anxiety and sought to reassure her, saying, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you."
"It was the Spirit who gave her the strength and courage to respond to the Lord's call," the Pontiff said. "It was the Spirit who helped her to understand the great mystery that was to be accomplished through her. It was the Spirit who enfolded her with his love and enabled her to conceive the Son of God in her womb.
"This scene is perhaps the pivotal moment in the history of God's relationship with his people. During the Old Testament, God revealed himself partially, gradually, as we all do in our personal relationships. It took time for the chosen people to develop their relationship with God."
Courting
Benedict XVI compared God's relationship with humanity to the relationship of a couple.
"The covenant with Israel was like a period of courtship, a long engagement," he said. "Then came the definitive moment, the moment of marriage, the establishment of a new and everlasting covenant. As Mary stood before the Lord, she represented the whole of humanity. In the angel's message, it was as if God made a marriage proposal to the human race. And in our name, Mary said yes."
"In fairy tales, the story ends there, and all 'live happily ever after.' In real life it is not so simple," Benedict XVI continued. "For Mary there were many struggles ahead, as she lived out the consequences of the 'yes' that she had given to the Lord. [...] Throughout her trials she remained faithful to her promise, sustained by the Spirit of fortitude. And she was gloriously rewarded."
"Dear young people, we too must remain faithful to the 'yes' that we have given to the Lord's offer of friendship," the Pope concluded. "We know that he will never abandon us. We know that he w ill always sustain us through the gifts of the Spirit. Mary accepted the Lord's 'proposal' in our name. So let us turn to her and ask her to guide us as we struggle to remain faithful to the life-giving relationship that God has established with each one of us. She is our example and our inspiration, she intercedes for us with her Son, and with a mother's love she shields us from harm."

Women and Priesthood

2008-07-14T08:45:00.002-07:00

By GIANNI CARDINALE
Rome

The decision of the Anglican Synod of England to open the door to the nomination of female bishops has generated ample media coverage. On the subject of why the Catholic church admits only men to the priesthood, Avvenire put certain questions to Monsignor Antonio Miralles, of the clergy of Opus Dei, and an ordinary professor of sacramental theology at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. A Spaniard from Salamanca who has spent 47 years in Rome, Miralles is a consultor of the Congregation for the Clergy and, since 1990, of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Monsignor Miralles, why does the Catholic church not admit women to the priesthood?

In 1975, the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Donald Coggan, informed Pope Paul VI that the Anglicans were on the verge of admitting women to the priesthood, which they later did. Pope Montini wrote him a letter to explain that the Catholic church does not feel authorized to do the same, because it is constrained by the choice made by Jesus, the Lord, to choose only men as his apostles. In that context, the pope asked the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to prepare a document that provided the reasons for this position, which was how the declaration Inter insigniores, published in 1976, was born. In it, the argument given by Paul VI is explained more fully. In May 1994, this position was confirmed in a definitive way with the apostolic letter of Pope John Paul II, Ordinatio sacerdotalis.

But some object that the choice of Jesus may have been determined by the historical context, the mentality of the epoch.

It’s an objection that does not have any foundation. Jesus demonstrated that he felt free from the conditioning of the society in which he was born. He demonstrated this freedom, to take just one example, when he opposed the custom of Jewish society of his day, as well as of Greco-Roman society, permitting men to repudiate their wives … in other words, divorce. Certainly, women were among the most faithful followers of Jesus, beginning with his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary – at the foot of the Cross there were several women, but only one disciple! Nevertheless, Jesus deliberately and freely chose only men as his apostles. This choice cannot be anything but binding for the community that wants to be his church.

Why did Jesus make this choice?

Theologians try to answer this question, which is their duty. But all the explanations that can be given in response to this question always remain secondary with respect to the choice itself made by Jesus, which the church must follow. The church can’t change that choice to suit its own tastes, or on the basis of the desires of sectors of public opinion, however large they may be.
Isn’t the exclusion of women from the priesthood an offense against their dignity?
The dignity of women in the church certainly does not depend upon access to the priesthood. The history of the church, from the Blessed Virgin Mary to so many saints and beatified women, makes the point.

Why did the magisterium wait until 1975 to solemnly proclaim that women cannot be admitted to the priesthood?

Simply because prior to that moment, the fact that the priesthood is reserved to men was an uninterrupted praxis that had not been placed into discussion for almost 2,000 years, not even when the church began to expand in cultural and religious contexts where there were already forms of female ‘priesthood’ (I’m thinking, for example, about the Greco-Roman world), and not even in the face of vocational scarcity or a shortage of clergy. The magisterium normally does not intervene to resolve a dispute when a given truth is peacefully accepted and not under discussion.

Is it possible that in the future the Catholic magisterium, having reflected more on the question, could arrive at a different conclusion and thereby open the door to women’s ordination?

This possibility is excluded. That’s because the all-male priesthood is a truth considered part of the inviolable deposit of faith – in other words, it belongs to Tradition with a capital “T”. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith underscored the point in a formal way with its document ‘Response to a doubt concerning the doctrine of the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis’ published in October 1995, with the approval and at the request of Pope John Paul II. Some Catholic authors have insinuated that the ‘no’ to women’s ordination should be considered provisional and open to future reconsideration, but in fact that’s not how things are.

Monsignor Miralles, will the decision of the Anglican Synod to admit women to the episcopacy further distance it from the Catholic church?

Relatively.The dramatic rupture occurred with the Anglican decision to admit women to the priesthood. The choice to admit them also to the episcopacy is, in itself, a secondary consequence, which cannot help but worsen a situation that has already deteriorated.

A final ‘secondary’ question. What’s the status quaestionis on the issue of the ordination of women to the diaconate?

On this issue, there has not yet been a pronouncement from the magisterium as there has been on women priests. The current norms, however, and ecclesiastical practice restrict the diaconate to men. It’s true that in the early centuries of Christianity there were references to ‘deaconesses,’ but it would seem that they were not simply a female equivalent of male ‘deacons.’ For now, the permanent diaconate is restricted to men, but the question is still under study.

Testimony: from Catholicism to radical feminism, and back

2008-07-09T16:34:00.002-07:00

Interview With Author and Ex-feminist Lorraine Murray

By Teresa Tomeo

DECATUR, Georgia, JULY 9, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Lorraine Murray went to college with a basic Catholic education, an education it only took a few philosophy classes to undo.

Murray, who has a doctorate in philosophy, is the author of “Confessions of an Ex-Feminist," in which she traces her journey from Catholicism to radical feminism, and back.

In this interview with ZENIT, Murray, who is a religion columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Georgia Bulletin, comments on the insights she has gained in her journey back to the Catholic faith.

Q: You were born and raised in the Catholic faith but lost that faith in college. Can you outline the weaknesses in y our faith or Catholic education that may have caused your faith to crumble?

Murray: When I headed off to college, I was quickly overwhelmed by the atmosphere of nihilism that pervaded the campus. As a child, I had dutifully memorized the questions and answers in “The Baltimore Catechism,” which was the gold standard for Catholic instruction at that time.

Unfortunately, my Catholic upbringing ignored the nefarious ways that Satan attacks the Catholic faith, so I was unprepared for college courses in which arguments against God’s existence were pervasive. In short, I lacked the tools to defend my faith.

Q: You had earned your doctorate in philosophy and had studied many of the secular thinkers. Did you ever stop and think about actually studying or examining the Bible or Catholic teachings to make sure your had come to the right conclusions?

Murray: Arrogance was my big sin. I thought that my background in philosophy qualified me to critique -- and reject -- Church teachings. Also, I was surrounded by professors who scoffed at claims of the supernatural and thought religion was outdated.

As I pursued my doctorate in philosophy, I studiously avoided examining the great teachers of the Catholic faith, such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. And sadly, it never occurred to me to go back and re-examine the faith I had once held so dear, nor did it dawn on me to test some of my conclusions by reading the Bible.

Like many people in their 20s, I thought that I knew it all.

Q: I have spoken with many reverts who share similar experiences such as leaving the Church while never really being familiar with Church teachings. Why do you think this pattern occurs so often and what can lay Catholics as well as priests and other religious do to prevent more people from walking away from their Catholicism?

Murray: I believe it is crucial for priests, who have received extensive education in theology, to take active roles in parish RCIA programs. Converts to the faith should become well-schooled in the teachings of orthodox Catholicism, so they will really understand the beliefs they are embracing.

I also would love to see more priests leading occasional “refresher” courses open to all parishioners, because many people in the pews are eager to defend their faith but lack the tools to do so. Lay Catholics need to have a copy of “The Catechism of the Catholic Church” handy and to consult it often.

It would also be helpful for folks to subscribe to orthodox Catholic publications so they can learn about Catholic news through the eyes of writers who are well versed in the faith.

Q: What first attracted you to feminism?

Murray: I was quite enchanted by books such as “The Feminine Mystique” and “The Second Sex,” in which woman’s condition wa s painted with dark and dreary brushstrokes. Thinkers such as Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir saw evidence of women’s oppression and misery everywhere they looked.

My own experience showed few signs of oppression: My mother had graduated from college, and I was pursuing a doctorate in philosophy and had received many honors and fellowships. Still, I saw signs of injustice in the world and thought that feminism had the answer.

In many ways, I clung to this “ism” as a way to achieve a utopian society on earth, in which everyone would be happy and equal. It took me a while to see that the cost of this feminist utopia was terrible indeed, since the “ideal world” envisioned by feminists was built on abortion and daycare centers.

Generally, the feminist agenda depicted children as a problem, not a blessing, and marriage as the source of women’s unhappiness, rather than as a wellspring of happiness, security an d joy.

Q: In your book you discuss your own abortion, and that even after struggling with the physical and emotional consequences of it, you still clung tightly to feminist dogma regarding abortion and sexual freedom. Why is it so difficult to see the empty promises of the feminist movement?

Murray: For many years after the abortion, I suffered terrible flashbacks, stinging regret and bouts of serious depression. However, when I finally returned to Catholicism, I still held onto many of my feminist beliefs.

For example, I thought artificial contraception was fine, and abortion should remain legalized. I was very upset about having ended my own child’s life, but I still had this ingrained notion that although abortion had been wrong for me, it might be right for other women in different circumstances.

In short, I was a typical moral relativist, failing to realize that some acts, like abortion, murder, and rape, are wrong for ever yone. It seems that feminists have so artfully deified the notion of “choice” that it takes many women a long time to recognize the underlying moral truth: Some choices are absolutely wrong.

Q: How did you finally start to make your way back to Christ and the Catholic Church?

Murray: A mysterious series of events happened, and they left me rather stunned and shaken up.

First, my husband, who had little knowledge of Catholicism, went on a business trip to New York. While in the city he stopped in at St. Patrick's Cathedral and, for some mysterious reason, decided to light votive candles in memory of his father and my parents.

When he told me that, I realized I had never prayed for the repose of my parents' souls, although they had been dead for many years.

I also read Thomas Merton's "Seven Storey Mountain," and was very moved by his journey. Little by little, I began to experience a mysterious sense of "someone" reaching into my life and tugging at me.

Q: When you first came back to the Church, you were a self-described “cafeteria Catholic.” What happened in your life that brought you to full acceptance of Church teachings?

Murray: I was diagnosed with breast cancer eight years ago, and my life went through some serious changes. I truly thought I was facing imminent death, and I longed for spiritual guidance.

Through the grace of God, I found Father Richard Lopez, a religion teacher at a local Catholic high school, and he became my spiritual director. At first he helped me accept the cancer diagnosis, but over time, I began asking him questions about Church teachings, for example about contraception, abortion and euthanasia.

He explained difficult concepts, gave me books to read, and patiently answered my many questions. As I grasped the real truth of the Catholic perspective, I gave up the cafeteria line an d started enjoying the full feast.

Q: If you could boil your testimony down to one message for your readers, what would it be?

Murray: God’s abundant mercy is there for every sinner, no matter how far afield he or she has strayed. I was someone who promoted atheism in the classroom, lived according to the precepts of “free love,” and turned my back on traditional notions of motherhood and family. Still, God gently called me home, and through the sacrament of penance, restored grace to my soul.

The Eucharist and the Virgin Mary

2008-05-12T17:44:00.002-07:00

Excerpt from the Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (n. 33)

From the Annunciation to Pentecost, Mary of Nazareth appears as someone whose freedom is completely open to God's will. Her immaculate conception is revealed precisely in her unconditional docility to God's word. Obedient faith in response to God's work shapes her life at every moment. A virgin attentive to God's word, she lives in complete harmony with his will; she treasures in her heart the words that come to her from God and, piecing them together like a mosaic, she learns to understand them more deeply (cf. Lk 2:19, 51); Mary is the great Believer who places herself confidently in God's hands, abandoning herself to his will.

This mystery deepens as she becomes completely involved in the redemptive mission of Jesus. In the words of the Second Vatican Council, "the blessed Virgin advanced in her pilgrimage of faith, and faithfully persevered in her union with her Son until she stood at the Cross, in keeping with the divine plan (cf. Jn 19:25), suffering deeply with her only-begotten Son, associating herself with his sacrifice in her mother's heart, and lovingly consenting to the immolation of the victim who was born of her. Finally, she was given by the same Christ Jesus, dying on the Cross, as a mother to his disciple, with these words: ‘Woman, behold your Son."

From the Annunciation to the Cross, Mary is the one who received the Word, made flesh within her and then silenced in death. It is she, lastly, who took into her arms the lifeless body of the one who truly loved his own "to the end" (Jn 13:1).
Consequently, every time we approach the Body and Blood of Christ in the eucharistic liturgy, we also turn to her who, by her complete fidelity, received Christ's sacrifice for the whole Church. The Synod Fathers rightly declared that "Mary inaugurates the Church's participation in the sacrifice of the Redeemer." (104) She is the Immaculata, who receives God's gift unconditionally and is thus associated with his work of salvation. Mary of Nazareth, icon of the nascent Church, is the model for each of us, called to receive the gift that Jesus makes of himself in the Eucharist.

What the Pope Said to Women in US

2008-05-06T16:12:00.001-07:00

Interview With President of Catholic Organizations Union

By Miriam Díez i Bosch

ROME, MAY 6, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI's zealous promotion of human rights during his trip to the United States has direct consequences for women, says the president of a Catholic women's group.

Karen Hurley is the president of the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organizations, which aims to promote the presence, participation and co-responsibility of Catholic women in society and Church.

In this interview with ZENIT, Hurley gives a review of the Pope's trip to the United States last month, and explains why his trip brought such a positive reaction.

Q: What is your personal impression of Benedict XVI's apostolic visit to the United States?
Hurley: We are still basking in the glow of the apostolic visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the USA. For me it was such a joy to have our Holy Father visit my homeland.

Through my service in the World Union of Catholic Women's Organizations, I have been blessed to be able to greet both Pope John Paul II as well as Pope Benedict XVI, both in Rome and at Castel Gandolfo. But most Americans only see our Holy Father from a distance through the media. People traveled from every state to Washington, D.C., and New York City to catch a glimpse of our Holy Father in person.

There was such elation, as well as deep abiding peace, when one saw the Pope. People clutching cameras forgot to take photographs because they were smiling and waving at the Pope.

Stadiums packed with worshippers were hushed with silence so all could hear each and every word spoken by our Holy Father.

Beginning on the sunny afternoon our Holy Father stepped off Shepherd One and was welcomed by President Bush until six days and nights later as the Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Sambi, Vice President and Mrs. Cheney stood on the airport runway waving good-bye, the spiritual and emotional connections deepened.

There was a tremendous witness of faith, a greater conviction that Christ is our hope, and an outpouring of love on the part of all whose lives were touched by this visit.

Q: The Pope himself has confessed he learned a lot about you, American Catholics. Is this encouraging for you?

Hurley: Yes, this is very encouraging because I believe our Holy Father found Americans who are committed to professing and living our Catholic faith in the midst of secular cultural influences.

Pope Benedict's words reflected his knowledge of the history of our nation, but also his awareness of the challenges and opportunities that face us in the present day.

The Holy Father, in his quiet, caring manner, was able t o "meet people where they are": clergy and vowed religious, laity, women and men, young people, children with disabilities, representatives of other religions, and, quite poignantly, survivors of clergy sexual abuse.

In Pope Benedict's own words, he came as "a friend, a preacher of the Gospel." But he certainly spent his time listening, as well as preaching, learning as well as educating, and praying as well as being a sign of Christ's healing and peace to all whose lives he touched.

Americans also learned a lot about Pope Benedict XVI whom they compare to his predecessor, beloved John Paul II.

Clearly they are two different personalities with unique gifts which the Lord has called forth in his service.

Any earlier misperceptions held by some Americans of Cardinal Ratzinger in his previous role as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith were shattered by this personal encounter with a compass ionate Pope Benedict XVI who pastorally enunciated the truths of our faith.

Q: Is there a special message for the mission of women that you could learn from this papal trip?

Hurley: Our Holy Father spoke clearly of the dignity of every human person created in the image and likeness of God. His words resonate particularly during this 20th anniversary year of Pope John Paul II's apostolic letter, “Mulieris Dignitatem," On the Dignity and Vocation of Women.

Referring to the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the role of the United States of America in the international community, Pope Benedict XVI encouraged efforts to build "a world where the God-given dignity and rights of every man, woman and child are cherished, protected and effectively advanced."

For the members of the World Union of Catholic Women's Organizations, this encompasses our mission to work for human rights beginni ng with the fundamental right to life, the education of women and girls, caring for the poor, the sick and the stranger, and advocating for justice based on God's moral law.

Before his election, then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World":

“It is women, in the end, who even in very desperate situations, as attested by history past and present, possess a singular capacity to persevere in adversity, to keep life going even in extreme situations, to hold tenaciously to the future, and finally to remember with tears the value of every human life."

Our Holy Father reminded all men and women of our God-given dignity. A reality of the dignity of women is a "capacity for the other," which elicits life and contributes to the growth and protection of all those entrusted to our care.

Q: Everybody seems happy abou t this visit. Why has it been so important at this particular moment in history?

Hurley: So many people are searching for meaning and purpose in their lives.

Others may have grown lukewarm in their faith. Still others were actively seeking a more intimate union with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

Pope Benedict came to the United States of America to preach the Gospel message, "Christ our Hope." This was the message people of all ages and stages of life needed to hear and to respond to.

Our Holy Father's visit presented a unique opportunity for all people of good will to experience a personal encounter with the Lord; an encounter which impels one to share the good news with others, like the Samaritan woman at the well.

Indeed, people are now sharing their faith, hope and love with renewed fervor.

With the grace of God, the fruits of this visit will continue to flourish for years to come as the seeds that were planted begin to grow.

Mary, Star of Hope

2007-12-31T08:10:00.000-08:00

Extract of Benedict XVI's Encyclical Letter on Christian Hope

With a hymn composed in the eighth or ninth century, thus for over a thousand years, the Church has greeted Mary, the Mother of God, as “Star of the Sea”: Ave maris stella. Human life is a journey. Towards what destination? How do we find the way? Life is like a voyage on the sea of history, often dark and stormy, a voyage in which we watch for the stars that indicate the route. The true stars of our life are the people who have lived good lives. They are lights of hope. Certainly, Jesus Christ is the true light, the sun that has risen above all the shadows of history. But to reach him we also need lights close by—people who shine with his light and so guide us along our way. Who more than Mary could be a star of hope for us? With her “yes” she opened the door of our world to God himself; she became the living Ark of the Covenant, in whom God took flesh, became one of us, and pitched his tent among us (cf. Jn 1:14).

So we cry to her: Holy Mary, you belonged to the humble and great souls of Israel who, like Simeon, were “looking for the consolation of Israel” (Lk 2:25) and hoping, like Anna, “for the redemption of Jerusalem” (Lk 2:38). Your life was thoroughly imbued with the sacred scriptures of Israel which spoke of hope, of the promise made to Abraham and his descendants (cf. Lk 1:55). In this way we can appreciate the holy fear that overcame you when the angel of the Lord appeared to you and told you that you would give birth to the One who was the hope of Israel, the One awaited by the world. Through you, through your “yes”, the hope of the ages became reality, entering this world and its history. You bowed low before the greatness of this task and gave your consent: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). When you hastened with holy joy across the mountains of Judea to see your cousin Elizabeth, you became the image of the Church to come, which carries the hope of the world in her womb across the mountains of history. But alongside the joy which, with your Magnificat, you proclaimed in word and song for all the centuries to hear, you also knew the dark sayings of the prophets about the suffering of the servant of God in this world. Shining over his birth in the stable at Bethlehem, there were angels in splendour who brought the good news to the shepherds, but at the same time the lowliness of God in this world was all too palpable. The old man Simeon spoke to you of the sword which would pierce your soul (cf. Lk 2:35), of the sign of contradiction that your Son would be in this world. Then, when Jesus began his public ministry, you had to step aside, so that a new family could grow, the family which it was his mission to establish and which would be made up of those who heard his word and kept it (cf. Lk 11:27f). Notwithstanding the great joy that marked the beginning of Jesus's ministry, in the synagogue of Nazareth you must already have experienced the truth of the saying about the “sign of contradiction” (cf. Lk 4:28ff). In this way you saw the growing power of hostility and rejection which built up around Jesus until the hour of the Cross, when you had to look upon the Saviour of the world, the heir of David, the Son of God dying like a failure, exposed to mockery, between criminals. Then you received the word of Jesus: “Woman, behold, your Son!” (Jn 19:26). From the Cross you received a new mission. From the Cross you became a mother in a new way: the mother of all those who believe in your Son Jesus and wish to follow him. The sword of sorrow pierced your heart. Did hope die? Did the world remain definitively without light, and life without purpose? At that moment, deep down, you probably listened again to the word spoken by the angel in answer to your fear at the time of the Annunciation: “Do not be afraid, Mary!” (Lk 1:30). How many times had the Lord, your Son, said the same thing to his disciples: do not be afraid! In your heart, you heard this word again during the night of Golgotha. Before the hour of his betrayal he had said to his disciples: “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (Jn 16:33). “Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (Jn 14:27). “Do not be afraid, Mary!” In that hour at Nazareth the angel had also said to you: “Of his kingdom there will be no end” (Lk 1:33). Could it have ended before it began? No, at the foot of the Cross, on the strength of Jesus's own word, you became the mother of believers. In this faith, which even in the darkness of Holy Saturday bore the certitude of hope, you made your way towards Easter morning. The joy of the Resurrection touched your heart and united you in a new way to the disciples, destined to become the family of Jesus through faith. In this way you were in the midst of the community of believers, who in the days following the Ascension prayed with one voice for the gift of the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 1:14) and then received that gift on the day of Pentecost. The “Kingdom” of Jesus was not as might have been imagined. It began in that hour, and of this “Kingdom” there will be no end. Thus you remain in the midst of the disciples as their Mother, as the Mother of hope. Holy Mary, Mother of God, our Mother, teach us to believe, to hope, to love with you. Show us the way to his Kingdom! Star of the Sea, shine upon us and guide us on our way!

Given in Rome, at Saint Peter's, on 30 November, the Feast of Saint Andrew the Apostle, in the year 2007, the third of my Pontificate.

BENEDICTUS PP. XVI

Woman's Spiritual Motherhood Attests to God's Mercy and Love

2007-05-25T14:13:00.002-07:00

By Jutta Burggraf
published in L'Osservatore Romano 7:14 (April 1993):10.

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you" (Jer 1:5). God speaks with clarity to his prophet, and his words could be directed to every one of us: it is he who gives life and, when he desires the birth of a new human being, it is he who has a wonderful design for the child, deeply rooted in his eternal plan.

Why do these ideas trouble us so much today? Do we perhaps fear that our freedom might be threatened, our self-fulfillment hindered or our "dignity" limited, if we are unable to "plan ourselves," to "make ourselves" what we want to be—and instead we feel indebted to someone other than ourselves? Perhaps in these fears we have unconsciously yielded to the depressing and destructive influence of atheistic existentialism. In fact, for a Christian, it ought to be a joy that we are known and understood by the good God even to the depths of our being, loved in all the circumstances of life and thus taken with radical seriousness. For each of us, considered in our individuality, the Creator has a particular design; he is counting on each of us for the realization of his plans, and he invites each of us to follow his call. If only we had the courage really to abandon ourselves to him, we would walk more happily through life; we could develop harmoniously within the "immeasurable" love of God, and our lives would acquire ultimate meaning.
It is generally known that no one exists as a human being per se, but only as male or female. From the first moment of our existence the sexual difference is established. It is not something accessory or supplementary, nor a mere circumstance, which need not be present. Carefully considered, it appears as an expression of the divine will to see human existence realized in two reciprocally correlative and complementary expressions. God must have had a precise intention if he did not create man androgynous. A parthenogenetic or a totally asexual form of propagation, or other possibilities corresponding to the many types of relations found in the animal world, could be imagined.

Man and Woman Are Distinguished "Ontologically"

Nor does "woman" as such exist, but only "this concrete woman" with her nature and her history, her social milieu and her talents, her strong points and her weaknesses. This explains the tendency toward the multiplicity and diversity of tasks in the family, in the Church, in society. If in what follows we prescind now and then from all personal characteristics, we do so consciously in order to bring to light the root of "being woman." This procedure is obviously risky, and in some cases it can certainly miss the mark. Nevertheless, within the context of a personal reflection it does not seem totally inappropriate, considering how heatedly people throughout the world are discussing the question of "emancipation."
What does it mean to be "male" or "female"? How are the sexes distinguished? Unfortunately, not all the answers given to this question throughout the history of humanity have been intelligent and constructive. Sometimes the man has been ridiculed in summary, superficial judgments; other times (and, to tell the truth, much more often) the tendency has been to lock woman into a narrow stereotype, humiliating her in theory and in practice. In fact each of the sexes has its specific qualities; moreover, each in its own sphere is superior to the other. Man and woman are not distinguished by the level of their respective intellectual or moral qualities, but rather by a much more profound, more "ontological" consideration: namely, the capacity to be a father or a mother, and the special gifts that derive from this.

Woman is called to motherhood. The debate that has arisen in recent decades over this self-evident factual datum is surprising. Some radical feminists see motherhood as a "sickness," a "threat," a "shackle of nature," from which the emancipated woman should free herself. Many women are unaware of how greatly they are influenced by this perspective, how much their own scale of values depends on it in regard to "self-fulfillment," the number of children, and salaried employment. Nevertheless, an ever increasing number of Christians are managing to escape this cultural terrorism. To the extent that they enjoy an ever deepening experience of faith, they understand that rebellion against their own nature means rebelling against the Creator—and that one can have a balanced personality only by living at peace with oneself and one's body. The "self-liberation" of woman cannot be reduced to a banal leveling according to the male model. One must aim at something much more challenging, much more fruitful, but also much more difficult: woman's acceptance of her diversity, of her singularity as woman.

As mother, woman is called to be the "locus" of a divine creative act; in fact, whenever a new human being is born, parents cooperate in an indescribable way with God. The child is entrusted to the woman even before it is entrusted to the man; it is she who will welcome (above all in her very self), guard, and nourish it. To be sure, pregnancy is often characterized by tiredness and exhaustion, but is this not perhaps a special honor for woman, allowing her to feel the creative love of God even in the innermost depths of her body? Only a very superficial perspective, one which has lost its sensitivity to the essentials of life, can claim that a woman is lessened or put at disadvantage by being a mother. The Christian viewpoint holds the exact opposite: precisely because of her motherhood, woman possesses a certain "precedence over man," as John Paul II expressed it so delicately (Mulieris Dignitatem, no. 19).

Woman Cooperates Actively in Spreading God's Kingdom

This does not mean that the mother is "bound to the house as if by a chain," "condemned to the work of a slave," even if for some time feminist circles have held that this is obviously true. The fact is that many women experience the birth of a child as a burden—a fact which can in part depend on the lack of understanding from others and in part also on unjust social structures. Nevertheless, these are consequences of sin, not circumstances intrinsic to motherhood. Therefore they can never justify denying life to a new human being; rather, these circumstances themselves should be eliminated! This is one of the most urgent challenges in all societies precisely for Christians.
"When a woman consents to be a mother, then she is able to follow Christ in a more interior though probably unspectacular way. She can testify to the "kindness and love of God" (Ti 3:4) by offering a welcoming home, providing hospitality, handing on cultural and religious values. Thus she will learn that Christ can be found only on the cross. Undoubtedly she will also discover that she is called by her position to cooperate actively in spreading the kingdom of God. For this reason it is not at all desirable for her to be "confined" within four walls. Depending on her own personal ability and her family situation, she can actually consider it her duty also to seek other forms of involvement in society (professional, volunteer, or even personal engagement) and to open her home to many persons. However, it is undeniable that the welfare of the family must always be the first concern of good parents.

Motherhood, moreover, cannot be reduced to the physical realm. From the psychological-spiritual viewpoint all women are called in some way to be "mother." What does it actually mean to be a mother if not to break through people's anonymity, to offer others a willing ear, to share their concerns—and to make them open to the grace of God? Normally this all comes naturally to a woman (if she has not been subjected to distorting influences); her capacity to size up concrete situations, her sense of reality, and her sensitivity to the spiritual needs of others can be of great help to her. She has received from her Creator the capacity for solidarity and friendship and for a more personalized transmission of the faith. Why should one deny these gifts rather than use them gratefully and make life more agreeable and more in accord with the will of God? "Whenever a person realizes," Blessed Edith Stein points out, "that in the workplace, where everyone runs the risk of becoming a cog in a great machine, there await him a sharing and even a willingness to help, then in his heart much of what otherwise would have wilted can be kept alive or rekindled."

Here we can see so clearly what great good a Christian can do in the world! Is it not a highly significant mission to create an environment in which people can feel at ease? Precisely as a Christian, woman has the supremely important task of bearing witness to God's love for the individual. She is called to convey to others the awareness that they are accepted and taken seriously (by God too), and that their life has value. To be Christian means to live in union with Christ and to act as he would, even amid the hectic pace of the big city, in the supermarket and in the factory, in the office and in the university, in the hospital and in Parliament, and above all at home, at work, in sports and recreation. It means showing that there is someone to whom a person can turn when problems become too great, someone who does not judge or pose as an expert, but understands, forgives, and comforts, and who asks more of herself than of others.

Spiritual Motherhood Brings Happiness and Love

The "Church" is to be found wherever a human person follows Christ, even without an explicit mission or the presence of a parish council. A woman who takes her ecclesial mission in the world seriously has an almost unlimited panorama before her. There is no sorrow or need which can leave her indifferent because she knows the state of the world, but at the same time she always experiences that peace which comes from faith. Through the example of her life she will proclaim the joyful message, whose demands should shake and confound all nearsighted selfishness. Acting in a Christian way means to act humanely; it means to work with magnanimity and untarnished fidelity, as much for the present world as for the world to come.

Women who spend themselves in a spiritual motherhood are usually very happy and very much loved. There is no sense in trying to alert them to the fact that they may be "exploited." If Christ died for mankind, then those who follow him cannot afford to be concerned with the narrow calculation of their own advantage—which on the other hand leads only to neurotic benumbing and sadness. We continually have to learn to repent of our own hardness of heart and to change our lives; then we will experience the joy of a new beginning.

The silent but effective work of "motherhood" deepens and broadens the Church's life all over the world. It is not triumphs and external splendor that constitutes what Is essential in the Church of Christ; it is not careers or production. It is certainly not status or position. Much more important is a personal, strong, interior union with Christ himself. More important is the love of God which is expressed in love of human beings. Women are called to be an enduring reminder of this truth.

Does this perhaps mean that men are incapable of love and friendship? Certainly not! Fortunately, the opposite often proves to be true. However, since by his very nature man is more remote from concrete life, he can and should learn much from women—first of all from his mother, and then from his sisters, his women friends, his wife, and his co-workers.

On the other hand, women are not prevented from holding office or receiving appointments—even in the Church's institutions. Here they are not inferior to lay males, and they have amply demonstrated that they too have the capacity to organize and manage. However, in God's sight this is secondary. A woman who wishes to be faithful to herself and to Christ will in any case desire an authoritative position only in order to be better able to spend herself for the happiness of others. And she will never forget that it is holiness which confers value on a human being—not the world's acclaim.

The Male Priesthood: A violation of Women's Rights?

2007-05-25T13:58:00.000-07:00

By Joseph Ratzinger
published in L'Osservatore Romano ( May 12, 1977):6-7.

The restriction of the priestly and episcopal ministry to men was clearly reaffirmed by the declaration Inter Insigniores, as the expression of the whole tradition of the Church. Faced with this fact the objection particularly raised today is that this is a violation of the fundamental equality of rights and dignity of men and women. This equality of fundamental rights of all human beings, which was first expressed in the early documents of the North American nation in formation, and was founded on the Christian belief in creation,(1) was expressly confirmed by the Second Vatican Council: "Forms of social or cultural discrimination in basic personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language or religion, must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God's design."(2) The declaration mentions this text, but does it not, at the same time, tacitly contradict it?

In order to be able to give an answer, we must clarify the conceptions in question. We must explain what a fundamental right is and what the priesthood is. Only then can we establish whether the priesthood can be numbered among the fundamental rights in which a differentiation of the sexes is "incompatible with God's design."
Without having to lose ourselves in the difficult discussion of the problem of fundamental rights, we can note that, from the historical point of view, there are two principal forms in which the concept of fundamental right emerges.
We have already referred to the Anglo-Saxon type with its Christian foundation. Its essential idea can be described as follows: the concept of fundamental right is inseparably bound up with the idea of creation. For creation alone can be the basis of rights which underlie all historical institutions and are binding on them in advance. Fundamental rights are, therefore, in the first place those claims of the human being which are the consequence of his origin in creation. Fundamental rights are rights bestowed by creation and that is the reason for their unconditional equality and their strictly necessary character for everything that has a human face.

With the declaration of the rights of man of the French Revolution, there appears, on the other hand, a new form of "human rights" the full significance of which became evident only in the course of time and which is taking over from the Christian form more and more today. According to this form right appears as a merely human institution. From man's understanding of a suitable organization of human society, he lays down what is to be valid as right. The premise here is that man, behind whom there is no creative will, has reality completely at his disposal and, in proportion as his reason grows, sets himself the task of seeking the most rational and therefore optimal organization of reality. The institution of right is therefore a means of rational mastery of the world. Human rationality is the source of right, which is formed by the will of the majority and is progressively improved. Here rationality is opposed to authority and since in this case everything is continually decided by the majority, it is just and necessary that everyone should take part in the same way in the process of the formation of opinion and the formation of the majority.

Summing up we can say: the concept of fundamental right is derived either from belief in creation or from the conception of the "constructability" of the world and its functionality in the context of human reasoning. It is not necessary to say here that the council accepted only the first form of the concept of fundamental right and confirmed it as the doctrine of the Church; nor do the different consequences of the two principles concern us here.
What happens if we apply this model to the question of the priesthood? Well, first and foremost it should be clear that the Christian priesthood is not something that is immediately derived from the order of creation or that is the right of the human being as a human being. If we wish to speak in a broad sense of a priesthood emerging from creation, then it certainly belongs to man and to woman, each in his and her own way: in the unity of the couple they are called to be bridges to the Creator for each other. As human beings they are called to carry on the testimony of creation and to join in that message which invests the whole of creation: "The heavens are telling the glory of God . . ." (Ps 19[18]:2). Expressed in other words: the vocation of the human being—man and woman—is to complete the silent worship of creation and thus bring back creation to its origin. But all this does not concern us here, although it is certainly not out of place to mention this original vocation of man, which the Christian faith has not eliminated, but deepened and made concrete.

Let us establish, therefore, that the Christian priesthood is not a consequence of creation. Neither has it anything to do with any kind of equality of supernatural destiny. As is known, St. Augustine was even of the opinion that the priesthood, with its immense responsibility, made salvation more difficult to attain rather than easier.(3) Therefore this first examination of the context must give rise to the suspicion that the bringing up of human rights in matters of the priesthood betrays a dulling of the sense of the "supernatural," of the new, non-deducible, and specific aspect of Christianity.

But, it will be objected, in this way the sense of the argumentation is completely misunderstood. "We do not think at all of claiming the priesthood as part of the order of creation: the principle of equality refers not simply to realities that belong to every human being. The principle under discussion refers then to the exclusion of disadvantages on account of sex, no more no less. In fact the conferring of the priesthood on both men and women is defended in Protestant circles, which are certainly far from the concept of deriving the priestly ministry from creation. In their argumentation it is understood that the priesthood appears as an institution of the Church, which she must regulate according to the points of view of opportuneness and observing the principle of equal opportunities. In this way the Church herself is seen as a functioning apparatus and her relationship to right is conceived in the perspective of the concept of right of Enlightenment. If this were so, if the priesthood were a possibility to be conferred and freely regulated by the Church, then there would really be a corresponding right to this possibility and the prohibition of the priestly office for women would be a clear case of prejudice "on account of sex," something which Vatican II expressly opposed.
But is it really so? With this question we have arrived at the second problem mentioned above: what is the priesthood in its essence? This question could be answered at once very simply: according to the tradition of the Catholic faith (which on this point may perhaps partly contradict Protestant conceptions) the priesthood is a sacrament. This means: it is not a mere profession at the disposal of the Church as an "institution" but is an independent, pre-existing datum. The sacrament has, with regard to the Church, a position similar to natural law with regard to the civil legislator. It reveals immediately what is specific and different in the ecclesial institution as compared with secular institutions of every kind and level. On the one hand the sacrament constructs the Church as an "institution," a constituted reality sui generis, only because of the sacrament. On the other hand the sacrament does not belong to the sector of her institution that the Church can change at will. Rather it sets a limit on her free disposal of herself, a limit in which her fundamental task must be faithfulness to her mandate.
The conflict about the question of a new formulation of the conditions of access to the priestly ministry is seen here, in the last analysis, as a dispute between the functionalist conception of law and the sacramental conception of the Church. In this connection we can first ask the question whether the complete victory of functionalism, which assigns all rights to the institution and regards planning rationality as the only determinant yardstick, can in the long run lead to a victory of woman and her rights; we will come back to this later. For the moment we must keep in mind that the Church cannot just act regarding herself as she likes and that the priesthood is not an opportunity that she can assign on her own authority. It is not to be considered in the sense of an opportunity or a right, but is to be seen as a vocation which no one can claim as a right and which cannot be simply bestowed by the Church either (even though a vocation is not complete without the consent of the Church), In the course of the vocation the call through the Church is certainly part of the process, but this call of the Church can construct only on the call of God and it finds as one of the measures of this the aforesaid fundamental structures of sacramental tradition.

It could be objected now: very well, the Church does not invent the sacraments but finds them already there. Nevertheless, a considerable area of action is left to the Church and it is just this area of action that should be exploited here, for nothing proves that being male belongs to the inalienable substance of the priesthood. There is every likelihood, on the contrary, that it is a question of a concession to times bygone which are now obsolete. Now, it is correct that no one can bring forward compelling metaphysical proofs to show that the priesthood can only be as it is and not otherwise. Anyone who says so is taking too much upon himself. The declaration Inter Insigniores rightly points this out too (no. 5): it does not wish to give a proof from which it follows that things must be so, but tries to understand the admittedly contingent fact from the inner structure of faith. But this contingency belongs to the way of constructing of Christian faith in general, which is based on the history of salvation and therefore on accidental elements which would be quite conceivable in other forms. No one can prove that the Word of God could become man only precisely in Palestine and precisely in the times of the emperor Augustus. On principle, of course, it would be conceivable and "possible" in another way. No one can prove that Christianity then had to spread first to Europe, and so on. The Protestant theologian J. J. Von Allmen has developed this thought very well in connection with the species of the eucharist: why should the Church celebrate the Lord's Supper everywhere and in all times with the typical food of the Mediterranean? The answer lies in the fact that "the initiative of the Supper does not come from the Church," "because it is Christ himself who lays the table, and when he invites us to table, then it is he, too, who should choose the food. . . . The eternal Son of God came as Jesus of Nazareth, to bring salvation to all men. "When he 'converted' men to this being-a-Jew . . . , he called upon them to accept the fact that he cannot be recognized unless in this period far away in the past.... Because in a certain sense one cannot but become a Jew when one becomes a Christian, these elements . . . , i.e., the bread and wine, must be respected. . . ."(4)

The direct connection with this history, the connection with God's concrete will for salvation, as it took form in this history, belongs fundamentally to the essence of the sacrament. In faithfulness to what is "accidental," the connection is established with what is indispensable in God's action for us. In this, too, lies clearly the limit of the action of the Church in the sphere of the sacraments, of which the declaration Inter Insigniores speaks very effectively in no. 4. The Church acts, but she acts upon preexisting elements. In the last resort only she herself can distinguish between substance and what is changeable, but it is precisely in this distinction that she experiences that she is bound. Moreover the declaration in question has shown in a convincing way that the argument that Israel, Christ, and the apostles had yielded here to contemporary necessities just does not hold water (nos. 2 and 3). L. Bouyer has set out this problematic even more thoroughly and with regard to the affirmation of a choice motivated by historical reasons, he said in his drastic way: "One feels one is dreaming when one hears men, "who consider themselves enlightened and free of all prejudice, come out with such impossible things."(5) "An argumentation of this kind is sheer nonsense."(6)

Let us establish, therefore, that the priesthood is no opportunity on the professional plane and so there is no corresponding right. It is from the theological standpoint not a bestowing of a privilege on anyone, but a sacrament, the expression of the historical faithfulness of the Church to her origin, which precisely in its "accidental" historical form is the concrete expression of God's action for men.

At the same time, however, something else must be said. If these affirmations, incontestable on the theological plane, are to convince people in actual fact, the priesthood in its empirical form must correspond to the theological idea and must continually be purified of any appearance of being a privilege. Indeed, any appearance of privilege has been renounced when, historically, the priesthood was lived purely: in missionaries, in all the messengers of divine love, ever wearing themselves out and consuming themselves for the word.
We might perhaps content ourselves with what has been said, but the concept of the sacrament is not yet exhausted. The sacrament is, in its essence, symbolical representation, the making present in symbols of a concealed reality. Only in this way does its contrast with a rationalistic, functionalistic outlook emerge clearly. For rationalism, everything that exists is fundamentally "material," which man causes to "function" and sets him up as a function in his activity. The equality of the whole of reality is based on its total functionality, that is, on the fact that "function" becomes the only category of thought and action. The sacrament, on the other hand, knows pre-existing symbolic structures of creation, which contain an immutable testimony. The symbolic place of man and of woman also falls within this interpretation of reality; they both have equal rights and equal dignity, but each has a different testimony. It is just this that functionalism cannot admit, for its complete activism implies also complete equality, in which everything receives its definition only from the activity of man himself.
L. Bouyer has rightly pointed out that this type of equality through uniformity actually contains the sole dominion of the male form and produces equality through the negation of woman.(7)

It is significant that the two qualifications in which the particular way and dignity of femininity is expressed in an unchangeable way—virginity and motherhood—should be slandered and ridiculized in an unprecedented way today. In other words: the two fundamental ways of being in which woman, in a way granted to her alone, expresses the high point of being human, have become forbidden concepts and anyone who brings them positively into action is suspected a, priori of obscurantism. In other words, in this form of the concept of equality what is specifically feminine is, in the last analysis, forbidden. One can find in it a masculinzation of unprecedented proportions, within which a Manichean feature can easily be discerned: the human being is ashamed of the sexual, of his masculinity or femininity, because here is something which eludes complete planning and modeling and binds him to his created origin. The sexual is therefore deliberately relegated to the purely biological and the latter is then treated as not belonging specifically to humanity (which means "rationality"). Licentiousness is fundamentally a Manichean contempt for man's biological roots, which must be pulled out of the human. This Manichean spiritual slant is paid for by woman in the first place: the incarnation of the spirit, which constitutes what is specific in the human being, the peculiar characteristic of this creature of God called man—this incarnation of the spirit is manifested in her in a more radical and essential way than in man. It is easier for him to limit fatherhood to a biological parenthesis than is possible in the case of motherhood; it is easier for him to escape from the preconstituted structure of created life to the fictitious emancipation of operating rationality than it is for woman. The Manichean slant contained in all this is tantamount to the destruction of the human, the denial of the creature, man, and above all the denial of the femininity of woman. Behind the mask of emancipation, of the attainment, at last, of equal rights, is concealed complete assimilation and contestation of the right of being a woman and just in this way being supremely a human being.(8) Of course to say so does not mean to deny that prejudice really exists and that the struggle for equality of opportunity is justified. The danger lies in the fact that what is justified may so easily serve as a vehicle for what is destructive and untrue.

But what has all this to do with our subject? It would be too simple to want to tack these dangers onto the question of the priesthood for woman. This is not the question. What is important, on the other hand, is the confrontation between functionality and symbolic representation as the limit of functionality. And from what has just been said the following should be clear: the defense of the symbolic representation, on which the decision of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is based, is the defense of woman offered for today. Indeed the defense of the person as a person before the overall claims of technology and its contempt of creation. Though it may not seem so at first sight, it is a question here of woman's right to be herself, not in an equivocal equality which considers the sacrament as a career and so changes it into a dish of lentils which is not worth buying.

In conclusion, we must add once more that the finest ideas remain incredible, and are even falsified, if the facts of the Church's life do not correspond to them—if the priesthood really becomes a career and if woman's service does not find in the Church its proper scope, its own greatness and dignity. Herein lies the important task which the declaration Inter Insigniores sets the Church today.

1 Cf. W Wertenbruch, Menschenreckte, in RGG II (3) 869f.
2 Gaudium et Spes, nos. 2, 29.
3 See in Lumen Gentium, no. 32 the well-known passage (St. Augustine, Serm. 340,1: PL 38, 1483): "When I am frightened by what I am to you, then I am consoled by what I am with you. To you I am the bishop, with you I am a Christian. The first is an office, the second is a grace; the first a danger, the second salvation."
4 J. J. van Allmen, Okumene im Herrenmahl (Kassel, 1968), 48f. Actually, van Allmen wastes the fruit of his consideration in the end when he tries again to justify in one way or another the thesis that the Church is free to do as she likes.
5 L. Bouyer, Mystère et ministère de la femme (Paris 1976), 12.
6 Ibid., p. 21. See also p. 23: Mais, dans le cas présent, aussi bien, le massif consensus fidelium (de plus de vingt siècles) est appuyé sur une surabondance, en réalité, d'enseignement biblique et d'expérience spirituelle chrétienne qui ne peut échapper qu'a une vue myope des textes et des faits.
7 Ibid., 23-27.
8 Cf. Bouyer, op. cit. See also the important article of the Viennese pediatrician H. Asperger, Kind und Familie. Moderne Modelle, in: Communio 2 (1973) (German edition).

Expert Says Pope Opened Way for Women

2007-05-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

Hopes for Discussion on Marian Aspect of the Church

APARECIDA, Brazil, MAY 16, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI's inaugural address at the bishops' general conference in Aparecida opened the door for a discussion on the role of women in the Church and society, says an expert.

Sandra Ferreira Ribero, who is attending the 5th General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean as an expert, pointed to the Pope's comments on chauvinism in Latin American societies.

The Pope said, "In some families in Latin America there still unfortunately persists a chauvinist mentality that ignores the 'newness' of Christianity, in which the equal dignity and responsibility of women relative to men is acknowledged and affirmed."

Ferreira Ribero, a specialist in physics, theology and the sociology of religion, and the national coordinator of the Focolare movement in Brazil, said that she believes the Holy Father mentioned chauvinism and its relation to women as an invitation for further discussion at the conference.

"It is true that the Holy Father underlined this aspect in speaking about the family, but obviously, this goes beyond just the family," Ferreira Ribero said. "Pope John Paul II highlighted what he called the feminine genius. And because the Church is a vast reality, one can look at this from many different points of view."

The conference expert also highlight that the Marian element of the Church -- being equally important to the Petrine-Apostolic element -- "has not been, historically speaking, sufficiently discussed, and this is a challenge for us today."

"Mary is the Queen of Apostles without claiming to have apostolic powers. One thinks immediately of female priesthood, but that is not it," Ferreira Ribero explained, adding that there is "a much greater mission open to women."

"The role of a woman is, practically speaking, the role of Mary in the Church and in society," she said. "Mary is the lay woman par excellence, and therefore the disciple of Christ par excellence."

Promotion of Female Priests Overemphasizes Masculinity

2007-05-05T13:01:00.000-07:00

Scholar: Ordaining Women Is Disrespectful
Promotion of Female Priests Overemphasizes Masculinity

ROME, MAY 4, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Those who want to ordain women to the priesthood manifest a failure to recognize the dignity of women, said an expert in moral theology and women's issues.

Pia de Solenni asserted this during her April 27 conference at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.

De Solenni won the Pontifical Prize of the Academies in 2001, receiving an award from John Paul II for her doctoral thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas. She is the director of Life and Women's Issues at the Family Research Council in Washinton, D.C.

At the conference, de Solenni used St. Thomas' arguments to analyze the issue of the ordination of women to the priesthood in light of the natural complementarity between the sexes.

St. Thomas taught that woman was not created from man's head in order to rule over him, nor from his foot to be ruled by him, but from his side in order to rule with him, she explained.

Ordinatio Sacerdotalis

The 1994 Vatican document "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis" concentrates on three basic points, de Solenni explained: "Christ, in ordaining only men, acted freely without constraints by cultural norms; nonadmission to the priesthood is not a sign of lesser dignity; the Church does not have the faculty to ordain women."

De Solenni illustrated the first point saying that many claim Christ ordained only men because of the cultural norms of his day. Since the role of women has changed, some say the Church should also adapt and allow women to be ordained to the priesthood, she said.

De Solenni contended, however, that the Gospels show how Christ often broke with the cultural norms of his day: In fact, it was to the Samaritan woman at the well that he revealed himself clearly as the Messiah -- to her as to no other, she said.

Equal dignity

"Ordinatio Sacerdotalis" points out that the non-admission of women to the priesthood does not signify a lesser dignity. The entire history of the Church, said de Solenni, "witnesses to the presence and active participation of women."

"It was the consent, understanding and devotion of a woman that brought the Church to us," and the fact that the Virgin Mary was not chosen by her son to be a priest "indicates that the sacrament does not discriminate on the basis of dignity or merit," de Solenni explained.

De Solenni reiterated a point from "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis" which says the question of women's vocations should not be confined to ordination.

"Woman will never be the bridegroom, in any form. The temptation to force upon women a masculine paradigm arises from our confused notions of power and authority which, in turn, devalue her vocation as a bride, clearly illustrated by Mary," de Solenni said.

Ordaining a woman, she said, "would be, in essence, to show complete disregard for the reality she is as a woman, as a bride."

Masculine vs. feminine

De Solenni asserted: "The promotion of ordaining women to the priesthood is a sign of misunderstanding and even disrespect for the dignity of woman."

The fact that "the significance of the feminine identity is so largely misunderstood or even disregarded, indicates that our very notion of Church is in peril, has lost personality. She has become an 'it,' a mere institution, rather than a living being," de Solenni added.

The discussion of ordaining women to the priesthood has been a sort of "overemphasis of the masculine," she said.

"No doubt," continued de Solenni, "women need a voice in the Church, but it must be an authentic voice and not their voice made to sound like a man's."

Women, she stated, have a unique role in the Church and in society and that role should not be forced into masculine paradigms. "To do so," she said, "runs the risk of losing what is truly feminine -- not the femininity of fashion, but the varied femininity of women saints, whose personalities and strengths span just as far as those of men saints … if not more."
ZE07050410

Courageous Women

2007-04-08T16:26:00.000-07:00

Good Friday Predication of Father Cantalamessa
"There Were Also Some Women"

"Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene" (John 19:25). Let us leave Mary his mother aside this time. Her presence on Calvary needs no explanation. She was his mother, and this by itself says everything; mothers do not abandon their children, not even one condemned to death. But why were the other women there? Who were they and how many were there?

The Gospels tell us the names of some of them: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, Salome, the mother of the sons of Zebedee, a certain Joanna and a certain Susanna (Luke 8:3). Having come with Jesus from Galilee, these women followed him, weeping, on the journey to Calvary (Luke 23:27-28). Now, on Golgotha, they watched "from a distance" (that is from the minimum distance permitted them), and from there, a little while later, they accompanied him in sorrow to the tomb, with Joseph of Arimathea (Luke 23:55).

This fact is too marked and too extraordinary to hastily pass over. We call them, with a certain masculine condescension, "the pious women," but they are much more than "pious women," they are "mothers of courage"! They defied the danger of openly showing themselves to be there on behalf of the one condemned to death. Jesus said: "Blessed is he who is not scandalized by me" (Luke 7:23). These women are the only ones who were not scandalized by him.

There has been animated discussion for quite some time about who it was that wanted Jesus' death: Was it the Jews or Pilate? One thing is certain in any case: It was men and not women. No woman was involved, not even indirectly, in his condemnation. Even the only pagan woman named in the accounts, Pilate's wife, dissociated herself from his condemnation (Matthew 27:19). Certainly Jesus died for the sins of women too, but historically they can say: "We are innocent of this man's blood" (Matthew 27:24).

* * *

This is one of the surest signs of the honesty and the historical reliability of the Gospels: The poor showing of the authors and inspirers of the Gospels and the marvelous figure cut by the women. Clearly the authors and inspirers of the Gospels saw the story they were telling as infinitely greater than their own miserableness and were thus drawn to be faithful to it. Otherwise, who would have allowed the ignominy of their own fear, flight, and denial -- which was made to look worse by the very different conduct of the women -- recorded for posterity.

It has always been asked why it was the "pious women" who were the first to see the Risen Christ and receive the task of announcing it to the apostles. This was the more certain way of making the Resurrection credible. The testimony of women had no weight and much less that of a woman, like Mary Magdalene, who had been possessed by demons (Mark 16:9). It is probably for this reason that no woman figures in Paul's long list of those who had seen the Risen Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:5-8). The same apostles took the words of the women as "an idle tale," an entirely female thing, and did not believe them (Luke 24:11).

The ancient authors thought they knew the answer to this question. Romanos the Melode exhorts the apostles to not be offended by the precedence accorded to the women. They were the first to see the Risen Christ, he said, because a woman, Eve, was the first to sin![1] The real answer is different: The women were the first to see him because they were the last to leave him for dead after his death when they came to bring spices to his tomb to anoint him (Mark 16:1).

* * *

We must ask ourselves about this fact: Why were the women untroubled by the scandal of the cross? Why did they stay when everything seem finished, and when even his closest disciples had abandoned him and were secretly planning to go back home?

Jesus had already given the answer to this question when, replying to Simon, he said of the woman who had washed and kissed his feet: "She has loved much" (Luke 7:47)! The women had followed Jesus for himself, out of gratitude for the good they had received from him, not for the hope of getting some benefit from him or having a career from following him. "Twelve thrones" were not promised to them, nor had they asked to sit at his right hand in his kingdom. They followed him, it is written, "to serve him" (Luke 8:3; Matthew 27:55); they were the only ones, after Mary his mother, to have assimilated the spirit of the Gospel.

They followed the reasoning of the heart and this had not deceived him. In this there presence near to the crucified and risen Christ contains a vital teaching for today. Our civilization, dominated by technology, needs a heart to survive in it without being dehumanized. We have to give more room to the "reasons of the heart," if humanity is not to fail in this ice age.

In this, quite differently than in other areas, technology is of little help to us. For a long time now there has been work on a computer that "thinks" and many are convinced that there will be success. But (fortunately!) no one has yet proposed inventing a computer that "loves," that is moved, that meets man on the affective plane, facilitating love, as computers facilitate the calculation of the distance between the stars, the movement of atoms, and the memorizing of data.

The improvement of man's intelligence and capacity to know does not go forward at the same rate as improvement in his capacity to love. The latter does not seem to count for much and yet we know well that happiness or unhappiness on earth does not depend so much on knowing or not-knowing as much as it does on loving or not loving, on being loved or not being loved. It is not hard to understand why we are so anxious to increase our knowledge but not so worried about increasing our capacity to love: Knowledge automatically translates into power, love into service.

One of the modern idolatries is the "IQ" idolatry, of the "intelligence quotient." Numerous methods of measuring intelligence have been proposed, even if all have so far proved to be in large part unreliable. Who is concerned with the "quotient of the heart"? And yet what Paul said always remains true: "Knowledge puffs up, love builds up" (1 Corinthians 8:1). Secular culture is no longer able to draw this truth from its religious source, in Paul, but perhaps it is ready to underwrite it when it returns in literary garments. Love alone redeems and saves, while science and the thirst for knowledge, by itself, is able to lead Faust and his imitators to damnation.

After so many ages had spoken of human beings by taking names from man -- "homo erectus," "homo faber," and today's "homo sapiens-sapiens" -- it is good for humanity that the age of woman is finally dawning: an era of the heart, of compassion, of peace, and this earth ceases to be "the threshing floor which makes us so fierce."[2]

* * *

From every part there emerges the exigency to give more room to women in society and in religion. We do not believe that "the eternal feminine will save us."[3] Everyday experience shows us that women can "lift us up," but they can also cast us down. She too needs to be saved, neither more nor less than man. But it is certain that once she is redeemed by Christ and "liberated" on the human level from ancient subjugations, woman can contribute to saving our society from some profound evils that threaten it: inhuman cruelty, will to power, spiritual dryness, disdain for life.

But we must avoid repeating the ancient gnostic mistake according to which woman, in order to save herself, must cease to be a woman and must become a man.[4] Pro-male prejudice is so deeply rooted in society that women themselves have ended up succumbing to it. To affirm their dignity, they have sometimes believed it necessary to minimize or deny the difference of the sexes, reducing it to a product of culture. "Women are not born, they become," as one of their illustrious representatives has said.[5]

This tendency seems to have been overcome. In postmodern thought the ideal is no longer indifference but equal dignity. Difference in general is beginning to be seen as creative, whether for men or for women. Each of the two sexes represents "the other" and stimulates openness and creativity, since what defines the human person is precisely his being in relation. "Man is prideful," writes the poet Claudel; "There was no other way to get him to understand his neighbor, to get inside his skin; there was no other way to get him to understand dependence, necessity, the need for another than himself, than through the law of being different [a man or a woman]."[6]

* * *

How grateful we must be to the "pious women"! Along the way to Calvary, their sobbing was the only friendly sound that reached the Savior's ears; while he hung on the cross, their gaze was the only one that fell upon him with love and compassion.

The Byzantine liturgy honored the pious women, dedicating a Sunday of the liturgical year to them, the second Sunday after Easter, which has the name "Sunday of the Ointment Bearing Women." Jesus is happy that in the Church the women who loved him and believed in him when he was alive are honored. Of one of them -- the woman who poured the perfumed oil on his head -- he made this prophecy that has come true over the centuries: "Wherever in the whole world this Gospel is preached what she has done will be told in memory of her" (Matthew 26:13).

The pious women must not only be admired and honored, but imitated. St. Leo the Great says that "Christ's passion is prolonged to the end of ages"[7] and Pascal wrote that "Christ will be in agony until the end of the world."[8] The passion is prolonged in members of the Body of Christ. The many religious and lay women are the heirs of the "pious women" who today are at the side of the poor, those sick with AIDS, prisoners, all those rejected by society. To them, believers and nonbelievers, Christ repeats: "You have done this for me" (Matthew 25:40).

* * *

The pious women are examples for Christian women today not only for the role they played in the Passion but also for the one they played in the Resurrection. From one end of the Bible to the other we meet the "Go!" of the missions ordered by God. It is the word addressed to Abraham and Moses ("Go, Moses, into the land of Egypt"), to the prophets, to the apostles: "Go out to all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature."

They are all "Go's!" addressed to men. There is only one "Go!" addressed to women, the one addressed to the ointment bearers the morning of the resurrection: "Jesus said to them, 'Do not be afraid; go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me'" (Matthew 28:10). With these words they were made the first witnesses of the resurrection.

It is a shame that, because of the later erroneous identification of Mary Magdalene with the sinful woman who washed Jesus' feet (Luke 7:37), she ended up giving rise to numerous ancient and modern legends and she has entered into the devotions and art in "penitent" garments, instead of as the first witness of the resurrection, the "apostolorum apostola" (apostle of the apostles), according to St. Thomas Aquinas' definition.[9]

"The women departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples" (Matthew 28:8). Christian women, continue to bring the successors of the apostles and to us priests, who are their collaborators, the good news: "The Master lives! He has risen! He precedes you into Galilee, that is, wherever you go!" Continue to give us courage, continue to defend life. Together with the other women of the world you are the hope of a more human world.

To the first among the "pious women," and their incomparable model, the mother of Jesus, we repeat this ancient prayer of the Church: "Holy Mary, succor of the miserable, support of the fearful, comfort of the weak: pray for the people, intervene for the clergy, intercede for the devoted female sex" (Ora pro populo, interveni pro clero, intercede pro devoto femineo sexu).[10]

* * *

[1] Romanos the Melode, "Hymns," 45, 6.
[2] Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, 22, v.151.
[3] W. Goethe, "Faust," finale, part II.

[4] Cf. Coptic Gospel of Thomas, 114; Excerpts of Theodotus, 21,3.
[5] Simone de Beauvoir, "The Second Sex," 1949.
[6] P. Claudel, "The Satin Slipper," act III, scene 8.

[7] St. Leo the Great, Sermon 70, 5 (PL 54, 383).
[8] B. Pascal, "Pensées," n. 553 Br.
[9] St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, XX, 2519.

[10] Antiphon to the Magnificat, Common of Virgins.
ZE07040627

Toward a New Feminism

2007-03-08T18:43:00.000-08:00

Interview With Author Michele Schumacher

FRIBOURG, Switzerland, MARCH 8, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Although women's "genius" is as old as woman herself, the work of articulating the theoretical basis of this reality through a new feminism is a relatively new development, says author Michele Schumacher.

Schumacher, a wife and mother of four, is the editor of and contributing author to "Women in Christ: Toward a New Feminism," published by Eerdmans.

In this interview with ZENIT, Schumacher, who is a professor of theological anthropology at the European Institute of Anthropological Studies, Philanthropos, and external research collaborator in theology at the University of Fribourg, comments on the importance of articulating this theoretical basis, and the challenges in doing so.

Q: In his 1995 encyclical "Evangelium Vitae" Pope John Paul II put forth a challenge to found and articulate a new feminism based on the "genius of woman," a challenge you said three years ago had "barely been taken up." Has the situation changed?

Schumacher: I meant by that statement the challenge to articulate the anthropological -- that is, metaphysical -- foundations of a new feminism.

The precision is important, because although the theoretical articulation of a new feminism is recent, the lived reality -- the practical counterpart of the so-called theory -- is as old as woman herself.

From the practical perspective of acting in accord with our female genius -- which is in fact the basis of the theoretical formulation -- it is almost impossible to measure the scope of a new feminism and its influence. There is, however, no doubt that many women are effectively heeding Pope John Paul II's call and challenge to put their female genius "to work" in the promotion of a culture of life.

From the more theoretical perspective, the theme of a new feminism has "gone public": I am aware of a growing number of university classes dedicated to the subject, of conferences, articles and even books. Beyond this, and perhaps more significant, a lot of work is being done under the broader guise of Christian anthropology: from both philosophical and theological perspectives. I need only cite the recent and growing number of international institutes and journals dedicated to this important subject.

I esteem all of this more theoretical interest in a new feminism to be a good thing, for although the priority must be awarded to action -- by which I mean also contemplative "action" -- theory does influence practice. I have read enough mainstream feminist thought, for example, to realize how much these theories have infiltrated our culture -- both for the good and the bad.

Q: Why is that anthropological foundation of a new feminism so important?

Schumacher: It is important for many reasons, one of which is the intrinsic connection between nature -- who we are -- and operation -- what we do.

The very metaphysical anthropology that the Catholic tradition has espoused, and that I emphatically hold as true, presents nature as being both given and achieved.

Nature is the principle of operation; hence we become who we are by the exercise of our freedom and thus by our own -- including shared -- actions. This allows for real self-realization and thus also for vocation.

Another important reason for insisting upon anthropological foundations is the challenge posed by mainstream feminism in its reaction to two significant attacks upon a traditional metaphysics: biological reductionism and the social construction of nature.

The first attack would reduce women to their bodies and their vocation to motherhood, understood in the most diminutive sense of having babies and giving birth.

The second would allow society to dictate what is and what is not "natural' and to educate girls to this end. Hence, women are "maternal," for example, because girls are raised to be mothers and not because of some innate quality.

It is in this context that was born -- with due regard for the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre -- the very influential slogan of Simone de Beauvoir: "One is not born but becomes a woman."

Beauvoir's philosophy is a good example of feminism adopting the "divide and rule" mentality that it would ascribe to "patriarchal" thinking: the setting at odds of nature and nurture -- and thus also of the individual and the community -- of body and soul, of nature and grace, of man and woman.

With regard to that last dualism, allow me to interject that I do not regard male and female "natures" as absolutes: There is, as I have argued in my book, one -- human -- nature which exists in two modes or expressions: the expression of a man and the expression of a woman.

Q: Isn't the process of articulating the philosophical and anthropological nature of woman one that could continue endlessly? Shouldn't a new feminism begin to work simultaneously in other areas -- education, politics and culture -- instead of waiting for the anthropological foundations to be laid first?

Schumacher: I have in part already answered this question above by insisting that we cannot separate -- no more in the epistemological realm than in the practical realm -- the intrinsic connection between nature and its operation, which is to say that our articulations of human nature follow upon our observations of human action.

Similarly, the question of what might constitute our female genius -- and thus what is most proper to a new feminism -- will require that women take seriously John Paul II's call to exercise that genius -- our "unique and decisive" thought and action, as he puts it -- in the promotion of a culture of life.

I am not proposing a paradox. We are capable of living our genius without necessarily articulating it, but the task of articulating it is as important as the connection between the practical and the theoretical spheres.

In other words, the theoretical articulation of that genius should, in turn, incite a wise and well-reflected praxis. Genuine culture requires both, and it is precisely the promotion of a healthy and faith-filled culture of life that is the goal of this endeavor.

Q: You've spoken a lot about the woman's genius. Could you explain what that is?

Schumacher: Pope John Paul II has some wonderful insights into this theme. He addresses, for example -- in "Mulieris Dignitatem," No. 30 -- a certain feminine "sensitivity for human beings in every circumstance," which he attributes to women in view of God's special entrustment to us of the human person.

By this, he certainly has a regard for our maternal vocation, by which we not only receive another human being, but also give of ourselves.

Our unique and privileged contact with the children God has entrusted to us -- already from the moment of their conceptions -- fosters our attentiveness for all human persons, he explains.

Beyond this, or still more fundamental, our experience of menstruation might lead us -- as Sister Prudence Allen has aptly argued in "Women in Christ," page 93 and following -- to a more or less conscious awareness of our natural, bodily orientation to another human being -- our suitability for motherhood.

This is a potential origin of the so-called maternal instinct: an "instinct" which can, however, be cut off by technical or psychological means.

Besides the notion -- disputed by some mainstream feminists -- of a maternal instinct, I tend to agree with many feminist epistemologists who argue -- in a manner altogether compatible with this notion of women's genius -- that we tend to have more relational manners of thinking than do men.

This is to say that we tend to view ourselves within a complex, or tissue, of relations and not as isolated monads: a view which is more likely -- these feminists argue -- to be had by male thinkers.

This is an area where contemporary feminist philosophers and so-called new feminists, who often refer to the works of the 20th-century philosopher Edith Stein, find common ground.

According to Stein's phenomenological analysis, women are much more relational in our self-conceptions and more sympathetic of others than are our male counterparts who tend to be more individualistic and isolated in their thinking.

Q: Given recent trends such as women "donating" their eggs for embryo research and the increasing promiscuity of young girls and women, what is the idea of the nature of woman promoted by mainstream feminism?

Schumacher: These phenomena are excellent examples of the negative outgrowth of the dualistic understanding of nature espoused by mainstream feminism.

The donation of eggs is consistent with a philosophical anthropology that would set a woman at odds with her body -- "my body is a thing that I can do with as I like"; the person with the community -- an embryo is also "a thing" in no need of a mother; nature and grace -- "what does God have to do with it?"; woman and man -- "what need is there for the sexual union if babies can be produced in test tubes?"

Similarly in the case of sexual promiscuity, an artificial wedge is drawn between the person and the body. The "giving" of the body does not imply the gift of the person. From this originates a series of other dualisms: that of the person and community -- "the right to choose" is the name we give to taking another's life; man and woman -- hence the phenomena of contraception and mono-parent families; nature and grace -- "what sense is there in a sacramental marriage anyway?" Or, "what does faith have to do with sexuality?"

Q: In his audience address of Feb. 14, Benedict XVI spoke of the important role women played in the early Church. What contribution can women make to the Church in these modern times?

Schumacher: To answer that question, I suggest we look to the woman who has definitively changed history and continues to incite all Christians -- women and men -- to live faithfully their respective vocations: Mary, who is praised by Benedict XVI, in the words of Elizabeth, as "blessed because she believed," Luke 1:45.

It is Mary's faith -- already at the Annunciation -- that inaugurated the new covenant. Beyond this, the deposit of faith -- all that the Church presents to us as true and worthy of faith -- is born of the "mysteries of faith" that Mary lived, first of all, in obedience to God's word and with hope in his promise. Hence Mary's personal act of faith -- her "yes, I believe" -- to even the most difficult of Christ's mysteries, has effectively become our faith: the "we believe" of the Church and the "I believe" of each one of her members.

Like Mary, we too -- women and men of the Church today -- are called not only to proclaim and live the Gospel message, but also to realize and live heroic acts of faith and most especially to help "bring to birth" the personal faith -- the "yes, I believe" -- of others, especially that of the children entrusted to our care.

This, I believe, is the most important contribution that we have to make to the Church: One that is timeless and one that can be realized in as many vocations as there are persons.

Women of the Early Church

2007-02-17T19:12:00.000-08:00

Women of the Early Church
"The Feminine Presence Was in No Way Secondary"

VATICAN CITY, FEB. 14, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the address Benedict XVI delivered on Feb. 14th, 2007 at the general audience. The Pope dedicated his talk to women who spread the Gospel in the early Church.

* * *

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

We come today to the end of the journey among the witnesses of early Christianity, mentioned in the writings of the New Testament. And we take advantage of the last stage of this first journey to focus our attention on the many feminine figures who played an effective and precious role in spreading the Gospel.

Their testimony cannot be forgotten, in keeping with what Jesus himself said about the woman who anointed his head shortly before his passion: "Truly I say to you, wherever this Gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her" (Matthew 26:13; Mark 14:9).

The Lord wants these witnesses of the Gospel, these figures who have made their contribution so that faith in him would grow, to be known and their memory to remain alive in the Church. Historically we can distinguish the role of women in primitive Christianity, during Jesus' earthly life and during the vicissitudes of the first Christian generation.

Of course, as we know, Jesus chose 12 men among his disciples as fathers of the new Israel "to be with him, and to be sent out to preach" (Mark 3:14-15). This fact is obvious but, in addition to the Twelve, pillars of the Church, fathers of the new People of God, many women were also chosen and numbered among the disciples.

I can only mention briefly those who found themselves on the path of Jesus himself, beginning with the prophetess Anna (cf. Luke 2:36-38), coming then to the Samaritan woman (cf. John 4:1-39), the Syrophoenician woman (cf. Mark 7:24-30), the woman with the hemorrhage (cf. Matthew 9:20-22) and the forgiven woman sinner (cf. Luke 7:36-50).

Nor will I consider the protagonists of some of his effective parables, for example, the woman who makes the bread (Matthew 13:33), the woman who loses the silver coin (Luke 15:8-10), or the vexing widow before the judge (Luke 18:1-8).

More significant for our discussion are the women who played an active role in the context of Jesus' mission. Above all, our thoughts go naturally to the Virgin Mary, who with her faith and maternal endeavor collaborated in a unique way in our redemption, to the point that Elizabeth was able to call her "blessed among women" (Luke 1:42), adding: "Blessed is she who believed" (Luke 1:45).

Becoming a disciple of Christ, Mary manifested at Cana her complete trust in him (cf. John 2:5) and followed him to the foot of the cross, where she received a maternal mission from him for all his disciples of all times, represented by John (cf. John 19:25-27).

There are, moreover, several women who in different ways gravitated around the figure of Jesus with functions of responsibility. The women who followed Jesus to serve him with their properties are an eloquent example of this. Luke gives us some names: Mary of Magdala, Joanna, Susanna "and many others" (cf. Luke 8:2-3). Later, the Gospels tell us that the women, unlike the Twelve, did not abandon Jesus in the hour of his passion (cf. Matthew 27:56.61; Mark 15:40).

Outstanding among these women, in particular, is the Magdalene, who not only was present at the Passion, but also became the first witness and herald of the Risen One (cf. John 20:1,11-18). To Mary of Magdala, in fact, St. Thomas Aquinas dedicates the singular description "apostle of the apostles" ("apostolorum apostola"), dedicating a beautiful commentary to her: "Just as a woman had announced to the first man the words of death, so also a woman was the first to announce to the apostles the words of life" ("Super Ioannem," CAI publishers, Paragraph 2519).

Moreover, in the ambit of the early Church the feminine presence was in no way secondary. This is the case of the four daughters of "deacon" Philip, whose names are not mentioned, residents in Caesarea, all of them gifted, as St. Luke says, with the "gift of prophecy," that is, of the faculty to speak publicly under the action of the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 21:9). The brevity of the news does not allow for more precise deductions.

We owe to St. Paul a more ample documentation on woman's dignity and ecclesial role. He begins with the fundamental principle, according to which, for the baptized "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28), that is, all united in the same nature, though each one with specific functions (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:27-30).

The Apostle admits as something normal that woman can "prophesy" in the Christian community (1 Corinthians 11:5), that is, pronounce herself openly under the influence of the Holy Spirit, on the condition that it is for the edification of the community and in a dignified manner. Therefore, the famous exhortation "the women should keep silence in the churches" must be relativized (1 Corinthians 14:34).

The much-discussed problem on the relationship between the first phrase -- women can prophesy in church -- and the other -- they cannot speak -- that is, the relationship between these two indications which are seemingly contradictory, we leave for the exegetes.

It is not something that must be discussed here. Last Wednesday we already met with Prisca, or Priscilla, wife of Aquila, who in two cases is mentioned surprisingly before her husband (cf. Acts 18:18; Romans 16:3): Both are described explicitly by Paul as his "sun-ergous," or collaborators (Romans 16:3).

There are other observations that must not be neglected. It is necessary to state, for example, that the brief Letter to Philemon is addressed by Paul also to a woman called "Apphia" (cf. Philemon 2). Latin and Syrian translations of the Greek text add to the name "Apphia" the description "soror carissima" (ibid.), and it must be said that in the community of Colossae they must have had an important role. In any case, she is the only woman mentioned by Paul among the recipients of one of his letters.

In other passages, the Apostle mentions a certain Phoebe whom he calls "diakonos" of the church of Cenchreae, the small port city east of Corinth (cf. Romans 16:1-2). Although at that time the title still did not have a specific ministerial value of a hierarchical character, it expresses a genuine exercise of responsibility on the part of this woman in favor of that Christian community.

Paul requests that she be received cordially and "help her in whatever she may require," and then adds: "For she has been a benefactor to many and to me as well." In the same epistolary context, the Apostle, with delicate lines recalls other names of women: a certain Mary, and then Tryphaena, Tryphosa and Persis, "beloved," as well as Julia, of whom he writes openly that they "have worked hard for you" or "have worked hard in the Lord" (Romans 16:6,12a,12b,15), thus underlining their intense ecclesial commitment.

Moreover, two women, called Euodia and Syntyche, are distinguished in the church of Philippi (Philippians 4:2): Paul's appeal to mutual agreement suggests that the two women carried out an important function within that community.

In sum, the history of Christianity would have developed very differently if the generous contribution of many women had not taken place. For this reason, as my venerated and beloved predecessor, John Paul II, wrote in the apostolic letter "Mulieris Dignitatem": "Therefore, the Church gives thanks for each and every woman. ... The Church gives thanks for all the manifestations of the feminine 'genius' which have appeared in the course of history, in the midst of all peoples and nations; she gives thanks for all the charisms which the Holy Spirit distributes to women in the history of the People of God, for all the victories which she owes to their faith, hope and charity: She gives thanks for all the fruits of feminine holiness" (No. 31).

As we see, the praise refers to women in the course of the history of the Church and is expressed in the name of the whole ecclesial community. We also join ourselves to this appreciation, giving thanks to the Lord because he leads his Church, from generation to generation, making use indistinctly of men and women, who are able to make their faith and baptism fruitful for the good of the whole ecclesial Body for the greater glory of God.

2006-06-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

Mary – A Real Woman
By Monique David

When we think of Mary, all kinds of corny images might come to mind; most of them originating from the pastel-coloured devotional statues found in some churches. Those images present someone who is bent over, weepy, submissive and, to put it plainly, dull. We would never dare to imagine a dynamic and inspiring woman.

If I were to tell you that she is God’s Masterpiece, we would already find ourselves on another wavelength. After all, God was able to choose the mother he wanted. He did what we would have done if we had had that chance: to think of the best mother possible and to bring her to life. He has created her without defect, without fault. And Mary took advantage of this richness to love God and others. Only through a solid intellectual exercise and a thorough cleansing of the imagination can we get closer to who this woman really is.

First of all, remember that she was around 16 or 17 years old when the Angel Gabriel broke the news that she was chosen to be the mother of the Son of the Most High, the long-awaited Messiah who would be king over the house of Jacob and of his kingdom there would be no end (cf. St Luke, 1, 31-33).

Let your imagination soar as you begin to catch a glimpse of Mary’s personality:

the woman with the greatest interior beauty possible,
the most tender,
the most maternal,
with the most unshakeable moral strength and maturity,
the woman who has loved the most,
and who has suffered the most precisely on account of her love.

A window into Mary’s suffering opens up before us in the Stabat Mater attributed to Jacopone da Todi (1228-1306). Here is a telling selection of this poem:

“ At the cross, her station keeping,
stood the mournful mother weeping,
close to Jesus to the last.
Through her heart, his sorrow sharing,
all his bitter anguish bearing,
now at length the sword has passed.
Oh, how sad and sore distressed
was that mother highly blessed
of the sole begotten One!
Christ above in torment hangs,
she beneath beholds the pangs
of her dying, glorious Son.
Is there one who would not weep,
whelmed in miseries so deep,
Christ’s dear mother to behold?
Can the human heart refrain
from partaking in her pain,
in that mother’s pain untold? (…)".

We’re now getting closer to the real Mary…

The most generous woman,
with pristine integrity, unswerving faithfulness and loyalty.

The woman who ceaselessly and wholeheartedly renews her full and unconditional adolescent yes – a yes that brought her to the summit of Calvary and beyond.

The woman who has accepted to take the future of the Church on her shoulders. Where did I get that? Remember Christ’s words to His Mother when He was on the Cross: “Woman, behold, thy son” (St John, 19, 26). This son was John, his favorite disciple and he represented all the members of the incipient and future Church. She was then around 49 years old.

The woman who is described in the Apocalypse « And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon was under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”.

I present to you this person who is a woman par excellence. She is the Blessed Virgin, your Mother in the faith. The woman who takes care of all her children with the same love and the same tenderness that she gave to her Son.

It is not surprising that John Paul II, during one of his trips to Poland, told her:

I consecrate to you the whole Church –everywhere and to the ends of the earth! I consecrate to you humanity; I consecrate to you all men and women, my brothers and sisters. All peoples and all nations. I consecrate to you Europe and all the continents. I consecrate to you Rome and Poland, united, through your servant, by a fresh bond of love. Mother, accept us! Mother, do not abandon us! Mother, be our guide!” (Farewell Address at Jasna Gora Shrine, 6 June 1979).