VATICAN, August 3, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – On Saturday, the Vatican released a document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith entitled “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.” Dated May 31, 2004, the date on which is commemorated the visit of Mary and her Son (in the womb) to her cousin Elizabeth, the Letter was published in several languages and approved and ordered published by Pope John Paul II. The document recalls that God created man and woman equal and in harmony, but due to the entrance of sin into the world that harmonious relationship was distorted. Far from its original complementary perfection where men and women were created for each other, “It will be a relationship in which love will frequently be debased into pure self-seeking, in a relationship which ignores and kills love and replaces it with the yoke of domination of one sex over the other,” says the document.
The situation is rectified – the harmonious relationship restored – says the document, by a conversion to a faithful imitation of Christ. “In Christ the rivalry, enmity and violence which disfigured the relationship between men and women can be overcome and have been overcome,” says the 37-page letter. The document notes two problematic roots of feminism which have served to fuel rather than quell the ‘battle of the sexes’. One such catalyst is the tendency “to emphasize strongly conditions of subordination in order to give rise to antagonism: women, in order to be themselves, must make themselves the adversaries of men.” The other is to deny the differences between men and women, viewing everything beyond physical differences “as mere effects of historical and cultural conditioning.”
The Church warns that both these measures attack the family. The latter, says the documents, has spawned harmful ideologies “which, for example, call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality.” One conspicuously anti-woman outcropping of feminist ideology has been the near-necessity of women to work outside the home, even when they would prefer to remain at home to rear their children. The one policy area, directly addressed by the Vatican in the letter stresses, “a just valuing of the work of women within the family is required.” It explains “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.” To see the full Vatican letter online: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040731_collaboration_en.html jhw