Besides the one above, there’s also this interesting article from BBC, of a ‘debate’ between the founder of “Feminists against censorship” and A Catholic journalist/broadcaster. BBC NEWS | Europe | Head-to-Head: The Vatican on women Very interesting differences of thought there. According to the Catholic journalist, the Vatican’s latest document actually strengthens the position of women…because they are encouraged to participate in “the world of work”…and also because, apparently it also states that “a woman should be respected whether she is fertile or not, whether she procreates or not” – which i guess was NOT included in previous statements/papers issued by the Vatican ?
Anyways. How do people react to this ? How often does the Vatican come out with reports/papers regarding women? And how strictly does any one church have to adhere to their guidelines ?
A woman’s place is to wait and listen, says the Vatican, John Hooper and Jo Revill, The Observer, 1 August 2004
The Vatican yesterday depicted what it claimed were women’s characteristic traits: ‘Listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.’
In its most important statement on the role of women in almost a decade, the Roman Catholic Church said these virtues of the Virgin Mary were ones that women displayed ‘with particular intensity and naturalness’.
The 37-page statement, published in full yesterday, was written by the Pope’s top theologian, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. As a statement of official doctrine, it would have been read, and very likely amended, by the Pope himself before publication.
The document, which will prompt a fierce debate about the attributes of women, added: ‘Although a certain type of feminist rhetoric makes demands “for ourselves”, women preserve the deep intuition of the goodness in their lives of those actions that elicit life, and contribute to the growth and protection [of others]. This intuition is linked to women’s physical capacity to give life. Whether lived out or remaining potential, this capacity is a reality that structures the female personality in a profound way.’
In his ‘Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World’, Ratzinger takes aim at ‘currents of thought that are often at variance with the authentic advancement of women’. Chief among these is a tendency to ‘emphasise strongly, conditions of subordination in order to give rise to antagonism’.
It implied that ‘women, in order to be themselves, must make themselves the adversaries of men’. Such confrontational thinking was ‘leading to harmful confusion … which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family’. Gender war also encouraged a perilous blurring of the distinctions. ‘To avoid the domination of one sex or the other, their differences tend to be denied, viewed as mere effects of historical and cultural conditioning.’
Such a view ignored qualities that arose from a woman’s unique ability to give birth. This ‘allows her to acquire maturity very quickly, and gives a sense of the seriousness of life and of its responsibilities. A sense and a respect for what is concrete develop in her, opposed to abstractions which are so often fatal for the existence of individuals and society,’ says the first high-level pronouncement on gender issues since the Pope’s 1995 ‘Letter to Women’.
Ratzinger uses the document to argue that, because they have something unique to contribute, ‘women should be present in the world of work and in the organisation of society’.
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