Strictly speaking, there are no such things as “women’s concerns,” either inside the Church or out. Abortion, contraception, and divorce (to single out the sexual topics addressed in the first draft of “Partners in the Mystery of Redemption”) all involve men and children either as participants or victims. They also have a devastating impact on the political community both on the social level (elimination of the future generation, the erosion of sexual mores, and the weakening of family ties) and on a moral one. Yet access to abortion, contraception, and easy divorce has become a woman’s right as established by the sexual revolution. Furthermore, it is a right which is understood to override familial, social, and religious obligations. The right to control one’s body is now supreme, but only for women. Not surprisingly, women in the Church are finding the pressure to succumb to this doctrine increasingly difficult to resist; moral corruption is most persuasive when it is presented in the garments of righteousness.
But Catholic women must not swallow feminism’s poison to the bitter dregs. Feminist demands do more than violate the integrity of Catholic teaching. They deny the constitution of human nature, which provides the only genuine basis for human society. There is unity to human nature which finds its expression in man’s dual sexuality; Eve was made from the same substance as Adam, but she was other than Adam. Without unity there can be no communion; without duality there can be no love. Anyone who defines the interests of women in isolation takes women, in effect, out of the social community, the family, and the Church. Feminists have already cast women adrift from society and the family; they are now attempting to amputate us from the Body of Christ.
Feminists in the Church, however, have created the very alienation they lament in their letter by ignoring women’s inextricable to men. Only from an abysmal ignorance of the psychological facts of marriage and family life could anyone recommend that, “The alienation of boys and men must stress respect for the personal integrity of women and impress on males the sinfulness of violence and every form of sexual exploitation”; the author of this statement has a very low opinion of men. But because feminists respect neither women nor society they can only try to alter their surroundings. Frustration permeates the first draft of “Partners in the Mystery of Redemption.” (The draft’s subtitle is “A Pastoral Response to Women’s Concerns for Church and Society”—a more accurate one would be “A Pastoral Response to Women’s Demands on the Church and Society.”)
If Catholic feminists don’t really know what women are like, I suspect it is because many of them lead a regimented lifestyle providing little or no contact with men and emphasizing “meaningful activism” rather than contemplative prayer. Perhaps that is why the first draft of “Partners” is both alarming and monotonous; alarming because it shows us the inroads feminism has made among Catholics, monotonous because any discussion of women which tacitly assumes that femininity and masculinity are incidental to human nature has nothing to reveal.
Feminism is an ambitious ideology. Its goal is to refashion men and women, using political and religious institutions as its vehicles, into a new, androgynous creature: the “person.” And though political feminism has toned down its rhetoric (admitting motherhood as a “viable option” for women), Catholic feminism has not. And make no mistake, “Partners in the Mystery of Redemption” is, for all its conciliatory paragraphs, stridently feminist. It is feminist in conception, initiated as a response to pressure from women’s groups within the Church; it is feminist in its method, using a “grassroots outreach” approach which gives prominence to dissident voices, and it is feminist in its message, concluding that “sexism is a sin” (even though sexism is nowhere clearly defined) and that women have heretofore been denied their rights by their husbands, society, and the Church. This is “Catholic teaching” today?
The drafting committee sent out questionnaires to which 75,000 women responded both “positively” and “negatively” (quoted selections were labeled respectively “Voices of Affirmation” and “Voices of Alienation”). There is a false air of fairness to the document. But how does a non-feminist answer a question like, “In what ways do you feel oppressed/discriminated against in the Church? In society?” (“When did you stop beating your wife?”)
In one instance, the bishops’ response to a “voice of alienation” uses compassion to mask what appears to be moral pluralism: “Lesbian women deserve special understanding and support from the Christian community to enable them to live a chaste and loving celibate life.” Fine, but there’s more: “At the same time, we must be ready to hear, with pastoral solicitude and concern, what these women have to say about the particular ways in which their dignity as persons is belittled and demeaned by sexism abetted by cultural prejudice.” Prejudice against sin? There is vagueness here. Shouldn’t we have taboos against homosexuality? And why should we, or the bishops, “be ready to hear” complaints from lesbians? The lesbians should be listening to bishops, not the other way around.
John Paul II has observed that the creation of women, an effect of the original unity of man and woman, enabled man to reflect the nature of God: “Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion.” Man rejoiced for the first time when he saw woman, and it was at the sight of woman that he saw his own nature reflected and could, in union with her, reflect the Divine. When God made man and woman he didn’t make two interchangeable units with optional reproductive parts; our sexual nature will be with us at the resurrection of the body. Otherness is an obvious precondition of love. So, too, family, society, and Church are all knit together by the unity of human nature.
If someone asked me what my concerns are, as a woman, distinct from the concerns of my family, I would have difficulty answering. (That the loudest complaints came from women separated from spouses by divorce or from the Church by disobedience is not a coincidence.) Even though everyone in the family has a different role to play, our concerns are common. When I turn away from the commonality of the family, the political community, or the Church I turn back into myself, into the abyss of self-love.
A community depends on the complementarity of its members. The Church, a supernatural community, offers its members salvation (not rights) through membership in the Mystical Body of Christ. And salvation comes in as many different packages as there are Christians. By categorizing a litany of modern evils as “women’s concerns” the pastoral letter ignores the basic unity of human nature, without which no community can exist, and the duality which makes that unity possible.