Church structures ‘fail to give women appropriate decision-making roles’

A landmark conference on women at the Vatican this week accepted that there is a major discrepancy between the status of women in Western culture and their role in the Church.

“In modernity, where work is the main way to avoid poverty and exclusion, women want to work, have a career and recognition of this commitment in terms of status and money equal to men. They want space in the public sphere equal to that given to men … not as secondary citizens,” the outline document for the plenary assembly at the Pontifical Council for Culture on “Women’s Cultures: Equality and Difference” said.

The paper went on to acknowledge  “women who, perhaps with great difficulty, have reached places of prestige within society, but have no corresponding decisional role nor responsibility within ecclesial communities”.

In a pointed contrast between past and present the working document, produced by 15 women advising president of the Pontifical Council for Culture Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, asserted: “Women no longer spend their afternoons reciting the Rosary or taking part in religious devotions; they often work, sometimes as top managers engaged as much as, if not more than, their male counterparts, and frequently they also have to care for their families.”

However, the document also adopted some controversial positions on sexual differences and on women’s attitudes to their own bodies. Women are “much more capable of tenderness and forgiveness than men”, it said. Moreover, the conference would not discuss female priests, the paper said, because the priesthood “is something that women do not want, according to statistics”.

On motherhood and “generativity”, the paper pointed out that this “turns, without doubt, on the bodies of women. It is the female universe that … has always looked after, conserved, nurtured, sustained, created attention, consent and care around the conceived child who must develop, be born, and grow”. But if the body is the place of “truth” of the feminine self, it is also the place of the “betrayal” of this truth, the women writers argued. They referred to cosmetic surgery as “a burka made of flesh”, that “amputates” facial expressions, reducing women’s unique ability to empathise.

The greater betrayal was in the subjugation of women globally. According to the UN, “70 per cent of those who live in poverty worldwide are women”. Referring to the principles and values embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the paper itemised how these principles are violated. “Selective abortion, infanticide, genital mutilation, crimes of honour, forced marriages, trafficking, sexual molestation, rape – [sometimes] on a massive level  – are some of the deepest injuries inflicted daily on the soul of the world, on the bodies of women and of girls, who become silent and invisible victims,” it said.
(See Joanna Moorhead, page 10.)