The role of women should not be reduced to “servitude”, either in the Church or in society, Pope Francis has told a Vatican-sponsored seminar, writes Robert Mickens.
“I suffer – I say this truthfully – when I see in the Church or in some ecclesial organisations … that woman’s role of service slips into a role of ‘servitude’,” he said on Saturday to a symposium at the Pontifical Council for the Laity to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of John Paul II’s apostolic letter Mulieris dignitatem.
Francis said that the 1988 papal document was “historic” because it was the first dedicated entirely to woman. But he said that the role of woman in the Church was still “not understood well” and asked if she couldn’t be “more greatly valued”. “This is a reality very close to my heart,” the Pope said. However, he warned of “two extreme opposites” that could “destroy woman and her vocation”. The first was “to reduce maternity to a social role, to a task, albeit noble, but that in fact sets woman aside with her potential and does not value her fully in the building of the community”.
He said that the other danger came from efforts to emancipate woman from her “precious [feminine] traits” so she can “occupy spaces taken away from the masculine”.
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