| At the start of the current
Synod of Catholic bishops in Rome, in what was hailed as an historic move,
John Paul II proclaimed three female saints – St. Brigid of Sweden, St
Catherine of Sienna, and St Edith Stein – as co-patrons of Europe, joining
their male colleagues Saints Benedict, Cyril and Methodius. ‘I wished
to include the same number of female saints,’ the Pontiff pointed
out, in order to show that the church ‘has always acknowledged the full
spiritual dignity of women.’ Celestial equality is all very well,
but how does this latest proclamation alter the fact that women have little
or no decision-making power in the Catholic Church? Is it yet another
empty sop to the growing army of Catholic women angry at their second-class
status? Or, to add insult to injury, does it imply, that, for the
Holy See, the only good woman is a dead woman?
John Paul II has certainly
made a number of attempts in the past to convince women that they have
a vital role to play in the church. He devoted an encyclical letter
– Mulieris Dignitatem – to the subject and even addressed a grovelling
apology to the women of the world at the time of the UN Women’s
Conference in Beijing.
He often talks of ‘the feminine genius’, his term for the unique contribution,
never quite specified, that only women can give to the life of the church
and humanity. Yet these high-flown phrases have been seen as suspect,
and not only by women. At a Synod on the religious life in 1994,
Archbishop Couture of Quebec, in a speech censored by the Vatican Press
Office, suggested that the Vatican’s extravagant praise of women’s ‘dignity’
was ‘an elegant way…of excluding women from the roles in the Church traditionally
reserved for men.’ He added that ‘the anthropological approach underlying
these more or less official texts appears to be that women are so different
from men that they don’t even have a share in human nature itself.’
Yet John Paul II’s tributes
to women cannot all be dismissed empty rhetoric. Some of his best friends
and closest confidantes are women. And it is these, the flesh and
blood Women of Rome, rather than the Brigids, Ediths and Catherines,
that give a real insight into the Pontiff’s true views. He has personally
appointed them to various Curial bodies charged with such subjects as the
family, the laity, culture, ecumenism, the sciences and interfaith dialogue.
He has also included a substantial number of women, including lay and married
women, in his personal nominees to the Synods of bishops. So
who are they, and what are they doing to advance the cause of women in
the church?
The sad fact is that, the
Women of Rome are enthusiastic proponents of Vatican policies which are
most repressive to their gender. Indeed, many of their views verge
on the bizarre. Mrs Mercedes Arzu Wilson, for instance, a consultant
to the Pontifical Council for the Family, condemns family planning as ‘the
cancer of today’s world’. She has tirelessly promoted this view as
a member of the Vatican delegation to a number of UN conferences. When
not representing the Vatican, she has made sure her voice has been heard
by having herself co-opted to the Nicaraguan delegation. Not hard,
as she is the sister of Nicaragua’s President.
Wilson’s colleague on the
Council for the Family, Countess Christine de Vollmer, who holds a number
of important consultancy positions in the Vatican, believes that ‘The work
of women in the home is the basis for the happiness of the whole human
race.’ A member of the secretive right-wing organisation Opus Dei,
Vollmer is one of only three women on the 20-strong permanent delegation
of the Holy See to the UN, whose policies on abortion and birth control
have been a special target for her wrath. ‘How can we work for a world
of peace when UN agencies themselves are encouraging mothers to kill their
own children?’ she has demanded, while she has condemned sex education
programmes produced by the UNFPA as ‘public pornography’ .
The Women of Rome take a
dim view of feminists, often describing themselves as ‘new feminists’.
Shortly before the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing, at which she led the
Vatican delegation, Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, gave her own
weird take on the birth of feminism in the US in the
Seventies. According
to Glendon’s theory, women outnumbered men in the baby-boomer generation
of the late Sixties. They were therefore forced to seek partners
among older men and turned to the husbands of the ‘[Bella] Abzug-[Betty]
Friedan’ generation. As a result, these women [Abzug, Friedan
et al] were ‘dead set against
men and at the same time made liberal use of beauty products.’
Perhaps the most powerful
woman in the Catholic Church today is Chiara Lubich, the 79 year-old Italian
founder of the Focolare Movement, the largest single organisation in the
Catholic Church. As a woman, she enjoys a unique position as President
for life of an institution which includes 15,000 priests, 60,000 nuns and
monks, and – in a branch personally approved by John Paul II in 1996 –
750 bishops. Yet she certainly does not see herself as in any sense
blazing a trail. In a TV interview in the eighties, she declared
‘I have never thought of myself as a woman’. And her opposition
to women’s ordination is implacable. While receiving an honorary
degree in Argentina last year, Lubich warned that ‘[the ordination
of women] would be a grave error…Woman has her own specific nature that
allows her to have a very important role without imitating men. She
is “her” not “him”.’
Not surprisingly, La Lubich
has equally firm and reactionary views on sexual matters. On large
families she points out that St Catherine of Sienna was her mother’s 23rd
child: ‘If ever there was a woman who could have said, “Enough!”
it was certainly the mother of the virgin of Sienna. But what a loss
to the Church and to Italy!’ Her eccentric notion of sex education
consists of advising adolescents to ‘throw themselves in the snow’ when
visited by temptations of the flesh.
When asked by Vatican Radio
for her views on the Pope’s proclamation of three female saints as co-patrons
of Europe, Lubich opined that it was ‘an act of justice’. Surely justice
will only be done when Rome gives women full equality not in heaven but
on earth. As matters stand, the Women of Rome, far from being a beacon
of hope for their sisters, are part of the problem.
Gordon Urquhart |
