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Commentary, Letter to the
Bishops: On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the
World
For the Catholic Church, the Letter
to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and
Women in the Church and in the World, published by the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith (31 May 2004), is a milestone in the
development, continuity and progress of her Magisterium.
The Document allows for an ever wider and deeper understanding of the
mystery of the creation of the human being, as woman and as man, and of
this mystery's authentic meaning. It examines not only the theological
aspects of the mystery but also its existential dimension with the
respective personal, interpersonal, family, social and cultural
implications in history. At a first reading, it seems essential to
emphasize at least the following points.
In the female perspective
Once again, in an examination of the male/female relationship, it is
the woman's side that is privileged. The loftiest expression of this is
the Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem on the dignity and
vocation of women that John Paul II addressed directly to women across
the world.
It can be said that the Church takes the side of women for their
liberation and true advancement and to prevail over forms of
discrimination against them, which are contrary to God's plan, and
discrimination based on gender in particular.1
And this policy is certainly not new. "In Christianity, in fact", as
Paul VI said, "more than in any other religion, woman has had right from
the beginning a special status of dignity... it is clearly evident that
woman is given a place in the living and operating structure of
Christianity, such an important place that perhaps all its virtualities
have not yet been clarified".2
The cultural debate
It should be noted at the outset that the Document is stirring up a
cultural debate that has lately been downsized to an exclusively
descriptive and thus reductively sociological level. It focuses on the
male and female roles, considered simply with a view to their management
for an ever broader rebalancing of the inequalities between them.
Refocusing reflection on the constitutive structure of the human
person and the methods for properly understanding it also means being
able to cross all the cultures that exist side by side in today's
pluralistic societies and in the different social contexts of the world.
In any case, if Catholic women recognize the Apostolic Letter
Mulieris Dignitatem as their Magna Carta, both this Document and the
later Letter to Women have attracted interest everywhere. The
Letter to Women in particular is considered a practical programme
for their true and proper "empowerment", a term coined at the World
Conference for Women organized by the United Nations at Peking in 1995.3
In the Letter to Women, while he prophetically asks on their
behalf for "the recognition of everything that is part of the rights and
duties of citizens in a democratic State" (n. 4), Pope John Paul II
realistically observed: "This is a matter of justice, but also of
necessity. Women will increasingly play a part in the solution of the
serious problems of the future: leisure time, the quality of life,
migration, social services, euthanasia, drugs, health care, the ecology,
etc". And these problems are gradually proving to be more and more
serious. It suffices to
think of the conflicts and violence that are spreading today throughout
the world.
In today's difficult times, whereas this Document also recognizes the
difference of women as a resource in the social dimension and considers
it one of the fundamental forms of expression and realization, it
effectively asks for an ever more complete and aware alliance of women
with men as an answer to the original "unity of the two" (n. 6).
Indeed, for the survival today of the human race, we must contend
with the radical nature of the problems that call human rights into
question. This radicalness brings to the fore the radical questions
posed by what it means to be a man rather than a woman.
Appropriately, therefore, the Document of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith brings out the full essence, implications and
consequences of this question.
The value of difference
The use of the concept of difference that avoids circumlocution, and
of what this difference presupposes and proposes, is of central
importance in the Document. The development of the category of
difference on which women have reflected can even be considered one of
the principal and most original contributions they have offered to
modern culture in an innovative way, going to the heart of the
fundamental feminine problem and the problem of the relationship between
man and woman.
In his day, Paul VI did not hesitate to use the word feminism,
evangelizing the language to indicate "a just feminist conception": "It
is necessary... to formulate with greater breadth and energy such
principles of an authentic feminism," the promotion of which is the
prime duty of women themselves; "it depends on them to promote a 'new
feminism'", as John Paul II subsequently wrote in the Encyclical
Evangelium Vitae (n. 99).
In this perspective, the category of difference is the key to the
interpretation, at different levels, of the entire Document.
In Part III, the Document points out the practical implications of
this difference at both the existential and social levels. It shows how
the difference is structurally important for an understanding of the
identity of gender, which is articulated with ever new meaning in
relations, reciprocity and interpersonal communication, in the family
and in society.
Reflection on the different, constitutive structure of the human
person, who is not considered as a neuter abstract but with his or her
biological, sexual being, must also lead to a reinterpretation of what
has been historically acquired in terms of rights and obligations, which
are therefore not neuter either, and a realistic assessment of the
situation of women in the world.
In fact, since these rights and obligations are founded on the human
person, they must be marked by the same gender difference whose
historical content, expressed in society and culture, makes them part of
the individual.
Consequently, at the more strictly social level, even the substantial
enjoyment of fundamentally affirmed rights and duties cannot fail to
consider the gender difference: it is this, in fact, that determines the
essential and effective exercise of these rights as well as the full
expression of the "feminine genius". And it establishes the
justification of so-called positive actions, seen as temporary
interventions of positive discrimination with the hope of achieving not
equality but parity.
Such interventions, therefore, are measures of support and
assistance. They are designed to overcome the disparities but not
the difference between women and men that indeed is subsequently
said to be a fundamental human resource.
The typical elements of a new paradigm applicable to all forms of
disparity and social discrimination can thus be outlined.
Indeed, the relationship between equality and difference means
something more than the relationship between equality and inequality,
founded on formal logic. In the latter relationship, difference in point
of fact indicates something original which, since it is neither
homologous nor irreducible, constitutes a resource.
On the one hand, if all this causes a break with the clear and
distinct structures of thought established by formal logic, on the other
hand it gives access at different levels to acceptance and to the
appreciation of difference in its various forms by assigning them full
"citizenship": cultures, religions, races, ethnicities and handicaps.
Thus, the centrality of the person with all his or her differing
facets and dimensions is brought to the fore. Moreover, it is made clear
that the person as such is not a neuter abstract, but contains in
himself or herself, in the "unity of the two", the riches of two
irreducible, different subjects, in the context of a "human condition"
that is "one and indivisible" (n. 14).
Nonetheless, it also becomes apparent that the original difference,
comprised of an equally original equality of value and dignity "in the
human community", excludes all access to the flattening out of a
homologizing egalitarianism and any form of interchangeable equivalence.
Reconciling family and more
Part III of the Document also examines an aspect that is not only
central in the life of women today but especially in interpersonal
male/female relationships, hence, in family life itself as well as in
society. It addresses the reconciliation of family, professional and
civil responsibilities.
Actually, this reconciliation was traditionally conceived for women.
With a cultural turning point that marks a radical break with the recent
past, today it also applies to men.
In any event, the question we should ask ourselves is: what might the
word reconciliation mean for the one rather than the other, and
how and to what point do the differences and specific features of women
and of men come into play, as well as the diversity of cultures and
social contexts in the world in which they actually live?
Our question opens up new fronts in the problems that arise today in
the relationships of couples and in their mutual expectations. This is
especially the case with regard to how the practical ways in which man
and woman express their being for each other can enable both to
rediscover constantly and to reinforce the integral sense of their own
humanity.
In a true historical perspective, women in the West, whose
involvement in life, its processes and demands, its daily nature (care,
affectivity, etc.), is direct and radical, ask to be relieved of its
most wearing aspects, finding it hard to give up their prerogative of
centrality in the family, their pivotal position as it were in all the
personal, interpersonal and family relations on which they exert a
crucial influence, especially with regard to children.
What in practice do women lose and what do they gain in their
relationship with family and work today?
Extensive research shows that young women are asking themselves
questions such as these much more frequently, although with different
practical results. This is partly because, particularly for men, both
the questions and their respective replies touch deep inner drives, such
as the image, vision and perception of self, even influencing such
decisively fundamental decisions as whether or not to have a child.
The problem of reconciliation in personal, interpersonal, family and
social relations is far more important today than one might at first
think, to the point that it constitutes the premise and testing ground
for every issue inherent in the effective achievement of parity, equal
opportunity policies and the degree of effectiveness of these social
policies.4
In this problematic context, the family becomes the central focus,
not only at the microsocial level, since it is "home" to interpersonal
relations but, as the "first and vital cell of society" (Familiaris
Consortio, n. 42), also at the macrosocial level, for it involves
the entire society, public institutions themselves and their respective
political decisions.
This is obviously a complex problem whose various causes and
consequences we must examine if we wish to have a realistic grasp of the
relations between man and woman and of married and family life.
This will enable young people especially to understand the authentic
and lofty vision, at the anthropological, ontological and theological
levels of its meaning, of the importance and beauty of the original,
radical covenant between man and woman, with their equality and their
difference, which forms the basis of their profound, total and
definitive communion of life in marriage, their relations in the family
as a couple and their reciprocal responsibilities.
Conclusions
We are undoubtedly living in a situation of continual social,
cultural, economic and institutional changes. This process of change
develops contextually on at least two levels: the more strictly cultural
level, at which the mechanisms of constant differentiation and
fragmentation scar identities, producing ever new personal and social
differences; and the level of the mechanisms of transformation that
condition the lives of individuals and groups.
Only think, for example, of the ambivalent aspects of the new
technologies and of the globalization process. Globalization, apart from
providing new opportunities to become world citizens, gives rise in
particular to an increasingly powerful marginalizing force, accentuated
by international economic and financial dynamics and ever weaker
demonstrations of solidarity. Examples of this marginalizing dynamic can
be found in a big way in the massive, dramatic migrations of entire
populations that juxtapose cultures, religions and races in a way that
is ever more far-reaching and unheard of.
Even without mentioning the many bloody wars that are devastating our
planet, the new forms of terrorism and widespread protests
—
they coexist contextually in our society, secularized and dominated by
the mass media, with the most depressing and destructive trivialization
of practical materialism and cultural indifference
—
we are undeniably immersed in uncertainty and risk, both as individuals
and as groups.5
At least two essential aspects stand out in this situation: we need
criteria for guidance rather than assertions, and itineraries rather
than static destinations.
An inevitable ethical and thus valuable question arises. At the same
time, we perceive the central need to be in touch with every context.
So it is that the reference to that "radical covenant" between man
and woman in the context of creation itself acquires ever new meaning.
This is particularly the case in the family community that precedes
every other form of social organization.
We feel the need, therefore, to rediscover the founding principles,
the order engraved in created nature, that is, "the distribution which
allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place"6, and
engenders relations of justice and peace between men and women from the
start.
In this perspective, the Document of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith offers essential elements for reflection and
guidance. It also encourages us to discern "in the complex mixture of
pluralistic values and ideological contradictions",7
consistent procedures for actualizing these principles with the dynamism
that runs through history.
We feel the need to rediscover that connection in the processes of
mediation and translation from the level of ontology and theology to
that of history, and among the founding principles that govern human
relations in an original way, in this sense outside time, and make them
historically concrete in space and time.
This is a radical cultural challenge. It calls into question those
fundamental human values
—
based .on anthropology, hence, pre-sociological and common to all, men
and women alike, in all cultures
—
beginning precisely with the constitutive values of being a man rather
than a woman, on which is founded their living relationship of human and
transcendent significance that also mysteriously invests their ultimate
destiny.
NOTES
1 Cf. Gaudium et Spes, n. 29; Raimondo Spiazzi, O.P.,
"La promozione della donna secondo la Chiesa". In: Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, Dall' "Inter Insigniores" all' "Ordinatio
Sacerdotalis", Documenti e Studi, Libreria Editrice Vaticana,
Vatican City, 1996, p. 93.
2 Paul VI, Message to the 17th National Congress of the
Italian Women's Centre, 6 December 1976: "The whole community is waiting
for a clear and lively testimony of the presence of Christian women".
In: L'Osservatore Romano English edition, 16 December 1976, p. 5.
3 Such empowerment of women is considered the third
objective
— and at the same time, condition
—
of human development, by means of the elimination of "gender inequality"
in instruction at different levels, to the highest level. Cf. UNDP
—
Human Development Report (2003), Development Policy and the
Elimination of Poverty.
4 Cf. Alba Dini Martino, La problematica complessa
della conciliazione fra responsabilità
familiari, professionali e di cittadinanza. Quesiti e problemi aperti.
In: Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI) - Officio Nazionale per i Problemi
Sociali e il Lavoro, Notiziario, 2004 (8).
5 Cf. Ulrich Beck, La società
del rischio, Carocci, Florence, 2001; Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid
Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000.
6 Augustine, City of God, XIX, 13.
7 Hervé
Carrier, Dizionario della Cultura, Libreria Editrice Vaticana,
Vatican City, 1997, p. 159.
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