So the Catholic Church doesn't like feminism. Well, blow me down, who would have thought it! Cardinal Ratzinger, in his letter at the weekend to bishops on Collaboration between Men and Women, goes further than the Pope himself in his hostility to feminism.
In 1995, John Paul II identified some of the demands of feminists for the liberation of women as "legitimate". But not any more, it would appear.
Joseph Ratzinger has long been the most powerful cardinal in the Vatican. Head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Inquisition division), his pronouncements in this case carry the full authority of the Catholic Church.
"The Church is called today to address certain currents of thought which are often at variance with the authentic advancement of women," he proclaims and proceeds to identify feminism as this evil which is holding women back. His message is clear: for women, feminism bad, Catholic Church good. The document identifies recent trends in relation to women as entirely negative: emphasis on subordination in order to create antagonism to men; lethal effect on families; denial of differences between the sexes; equivalence of hetero and homosexuality.
All this, it says, "strengthens the idea that the liberation of women entails criticism of Sacred Scripture, which would be seen as handing on a patriarchal conception of God nourished by an essentially male-dominated culture. Second, this tendency would consider as lacking in importance and relevance the fact that the Son of God assumed human nature in its male form." And this is the key to the document: feminism is dangerous because it leads to baseless criticism of the Catholic Church as a patriarchal and male-dominated institution.
According to Ratzinger, women are infinitely better ("listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting") than those feminists who make "demands for ourselves", and deny the difference between the sexes.
So let's look at this business of women being different to men. It is not a concept that the Vatican or the Church Fathers have ever had any difficulty with. In fact, throughout the centuries, they have made it very clear that the main difference is that women are inferior.
The eminent German theologian Ute Ranke-Heinemann, in her wonderful book, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, details with erudition exactly what the Church has thought about women since its earliest days. She has been condemned by the Vatican, which revoked her licence to teach theology in 1987. Quoting from a wide variety of Popes and Church Fathers, the founding theologians of Catholic moral thought, she puts together a profoundly shocking picture of pathological misogyny.
According to Church Fathers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, women had "less strength of mind", were "intended for procreation", and needed greater care "because of their ready inclination to sin". Aquinas believed that women, as "nature's second intention" were a sort of defective version of the male.
Man has "more perfect reason" and "stronger virtue" than woman, whose "defect in her reasoning ability", which is "also evident in children and mentally ill persons", made her unsuitable to give evidence in canon law trials.
One of the most extreme of this band of clearly disturbed individuals was St Albert the Great, honoured by the current Pope some years ago on the anniversary of his birth. Albert didn't hold back: women are "inconstant", have "a faulty and defective nature", know "nothing of fidelity", engage in "lying and diabolical deceptions". According to this highly influential saint, who continues to be honoured in the Church today, "her feelings drive women towards every evil, just as reason impels man towards good".
All very interesting, you might well say, but is it relevant in today's culture? The answer is a resounding yes. Much of Cardinal Ratzinger's document is a theological analysis of the Book of Genesis, original sin, concupiscence, and virginity - concerns which were precisely those of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Albert.
The Church Fathers perceived women as either virgin or harlot. While the harlot bit has now receded somewhat, the Ratzinger document continues to perceive the idealisation of women through the prism of Mary, as virgin before, during and after the birth of Jesus.
While Cardinal Ratzinger does put a different spin on some of these aspects, there is no repudiation of what has gone before, no denial of the kind of quotes above. The language may have changed and become less strident, but similar themes of the useful passivity of women remain. Any woman who is not passive (i.e. the feminists) is a "lethal" threat to the family.
To be fair, Cardinal Ratzinger does speak of women's valid place in the workforce and in leadership roles in society, and this is certainly to be welcomed. However, the overall thrust of his document is undoubtedly an attack on anyone who argues that women are as capable as men of performing all tasks up to and including the priesthood, which remains reserved, as Ratzinger states, "solely to men".