Women in the Catholic Church

The 2015 Global Gender Gap Index of the World Economic Forum shows that the Philippines is the seventh among the top ten countries in which the gap between women and men is narrowest specifically in terms of economic opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.  In the Asia-Pacific region, the Philippines ranks first, followed by New Zealand and Australia.

Although the Philippines is one of the better places in the world to be a woman, especially to be a college-educated and wealthy woman, there are many poor Filipinas whose opportunities are very limited in our predominantly Roman Catholic country.  Discrimination and violence against poor women persist, partly because of age-old cultural practices and prejudices that institutional religions have somewhat ignored or reinforced.

According to a local proverb, “A mirror and a woman are fragile valuables.”  Another proverb goes further, “once broken, a woman, like a mirror, can never be put together again.”  In 2008, the DaKaTeo (Catholic Theological Society of the Philippines) organized a Conference on sexual violence against women.  That Conference pondered on the persistence of sexual violence, and how families and communities, Church and theology, help or hinder in the healing of survivors and in holding accountable perpetrators like, among others, predators in clerical clothing.

Thru the centuries and in our times, how has Church and theology promoted, neglected, or rejected the belief that women and men are equally valuable and equally fragile?  How has Church and theology helped or hindered in the healing of women and men who have been broken, if not shattered, by sexism and patriarchy?  Or using words from the DaKaTeo vision statement, have Church practices and pronouncements been fair to women and inclusive of them, and what can be done to bridge persistent gaps between women and men in terms of opportunities to share gifts for the good of the Church and its mission? 

For a specific example, how should we interpret those portions in Amoris Laetitia, the latest apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis, in which he speaks of the necessity of the “feminine genius” and “feminine abilities” of the mother and the “clear and serene masculine identity” of the father in order to create “the environment best suited to the growth of the child” (A.L. 173-175)?

 

While the papal document admits “a certain flexibility of roles and responsibilities” between the mother and the father, should we welcome the suggestion that there is some immutable essence to gender identity in the Christian household, which is the ecclesia domestica, the Church in the home, and if so, what are the implications for the mission and identity of the laity, the majority faithful?  These are among the many questions about which pastors, theologians, and leaders among the majority and minority faithful have to engage in sustained dialogue.

Faith, Idealism and Ideology

To teach and preach Christian love, without taking into account the prevailing social structures, is to make this love blindly idealist and quite susceptible to ideological manipulation.  For Jose Miguez Bonino, idealist hermeneutics facilitate the formation of absolute ideas about God, and debase human corporeality and historicity.  In this way, the faithful God of the covenant could be turned into the immutable God whose heavenly cry beckons us away from radical political activity.  The faithful Son could be turned into the absolutely obedient victim and the substitute prey for a vengeful God.

The idealist tendency is strong in Christianity not only owing to the early infusion of Platonic concepts but also because of the belief in the irreducible power of the Godhead.  For Miguez, Platonic concepts can be expunged from Christianity, but divine omnipotence may not be denied.

A major challenge for pastors and theologians is to affirm divine omnipotence primarily in relation to the concrete empowerment of the oppressed and marginalized groups in these times.  An idealist perversion of the belief in divine omnipotence comes easily when this belief is proclaimed “in the abstract,” especially when the proclamation does not take into account the contemporary needs and struggles of the lower classes (“Christian Political Ethics”).

Abstract affirmations of divine omnipotence promote an idealist view of history, as the historical agency of the poor and the lowly get easily obscured.  One ends up viewing the passage of history as, e.g., the predestined long pull from an immutable God.  In such a scheme, one of the real partners in the divine-human covenant gets smothered, and history becomes only the action and will of God.  From here, it is but a small step toward fatalism and its noxious ideological forms.

It is a necessary task of pastors and theologians to de-ideologize church practices and teachings that have contributed to the dehumanization of people.  In the case of Juan Luis Segundo, he did not aim for the total elimination of ideology from theology and pastoral work, as he believed that faith without ideology is “dead.”  Faith that is not accompanied by ideology will have insignificant effect on a particular social context.  Faith will end up fruitless and lifeless if it only floats on the clouds of timeless principles and does not get incarnated or enacted in a social system.

 

To de-ideologize theology implies not only the elimination of noxious ideologies but also the assimilation of beneficial ones in order to make theology relevant and well-grounded.  Examples of harmful ideologies are fascism, Stalinism, and androcentrism.  Beneficial ones might be egalitarianism and feminism.

An ideology is any social theory with historic effects whether harmful or helpful, dehumanizing or humanizing, oppressive or liberating.  A social theory attempts to explain the reproduction and change of social practices across time and space.