The secretary of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Angelo Amato, has said its document on women, approved by the Pope and published at the weekend, was a response to "erroneous ideas" which "have become quite strong in contemporary culture".
In an interview with Vatican Radio he identified these ideas as a tendency which "focuses on women's subordination and advances the idea that women, to be truly themselves, must make themselves the opponents of men. It posits a radical competition between the sexes in which the identity and role of one are emphasized to the disadvantage of the other".
A second erroneous idea was an approach that, in "seeking to avoid this kind of confrontation, tends instead to deny the differences between the sexes. Physical difference, termed 'sex', is minimized and held to be the mere effect of social and cultural conditioning. The purely cultural difference, on the other hand, termed 'gender', is given maximum importance.
"From this, the institution of the family is called into question, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and the equivalence of homosexuality and heterosexuality is asserted, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality."
The greater part of the 37-page document, titled Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World, is a meditation on creation passages from the Book of Genesis and other Old Testament texts, on which are based the Church's understanding of men and women. There is also a theological reflection on Mary, the mother of Jesus, and on letters of St Paul.
The document's introduction begins: "The Church, expert in humanity, has a perennial interest in whatever concerns men and women."
Where women in society are concerned "among the fundamental values linked to women's actual lives is what has been called a 'capacity for the other'. Although a certain type of feminist rhetoric makes demands 'for ourselves', women preserve the deep intuition of the goodness in their lives of those actions which elicit life, and contribute to the growth and protection of the other". This was why "women should be present in the world of work and in the organization of society" and "should have access to positions of responsibility which allow them to inspire the policies of nations..."
The "harmonization of the organization of work and laws governing work with the demands stemming from the mission of women within the family is a challenge".
"Indeed, a just valuing of the work of women within the family is required. In this way, women who freely desire will be able to devote the totality of their time to the work of the household without being stigmatized by society or penalized financially, while those who wish also to engage in other work may be able to do so with an appropriate work-schedule, and not have to choose between relinquishing their family life or enduring continual stress, with negative consequences for one's own equilibrium and the harmony of the family."
The "proper condition of the male-female relationship cannot be a kind of mistrustful and defensive opposition. Their relationship needs to be lived in peace and in the happiness of shared love. The defence and promotion of equal dignity and common personal values must be harmonized with attentive recognition of the difference and reciprocity between the sexes where this is relevant to the realisation of one's humanity, whether male or female."
An essential aspect of Christian life, it says, is "listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting". While these traits should be characteristic of every baptized person, "women in fact live them with particular intensity and naturalness. In this way, women play a role of maximum importance in the Church's life by recalling these dispositions to all..." It was "in this perspective one understands how the reservation of priestly ordination solely to men does not hamper in any way women's access to the heart of Christian life," it says.
