Looking ahead in hope

 

The Faith Movement was exploring this matter of male and female, and the significance of the two sexes, before it was fashionable to do so in theological circles. It is not just a matter of denouncing feminism. An emphasis on women’s dignity has always been central to the Christian message from the time that Christ walked this earth and people “marvelled that he was talking to a woman”. Christ deliberately chose women as the first witnesses of his Resurrection, at a time when in law the testimony of a woman witness was given no credence. And down all the centuries of Christian witness, there have been women saints and martyrs and mystics and missionaries, women in public life and women in families and women in politics and in teaching and in religious enclosure who have been central in the life of the Church.

 

“Man and woman are both with one and the same dignity ‘in the image of God.’ In their “being-man” and “being-woman”, they reflect the Creator’s wisdom and goodness.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church).(1)

 

But – without going into great detail about the history and causes of 20th-century feminism – any genuine Christian aspects of the feminist movement were swamped and crushed by other forces.

 

 

Boys have suffered considerably from tax-funded Department of Education policies in recent decades. Always over-represented in remedial reading classes (boys learn to talk later than girls, and are less “verbal” throughout their childhood), their problems got larger as all books and reading materials became steadily more unattractive to them by being “sex neutral”. Endless pictures of talkative girls in dungarees having adventures sent out a message that boys were, at best, a very optional extra in life. School, always a place where girl-style project-work and working chattily around a table were rewarded, became increasingly a place where boy-style things such as competitive activities, or noisily running about in open spaces, were seen as being a nuisance, even at playtime.

 

 

The denigration of marriage, and the emphasis on claiming “empowerment” by divorcing sexual communion from marriage and family and even from lifelong attachment, brought loneliness. Deprived of fathers, and even of father-figures depicted with clear masculine identity in the mass media or in general culture, boys lost out, in some cases with almost irrecoverable results.

 

The Church endured problems too. There was a feminisation of liturgy in the 1970s and 80s, and too much hand-holding, and touchy-feely hymns pitched too high for men to sing, made Sunday Mass tiresome for many a male.

 

We now live with the after-effects of this. In the Church, it is now easy to get a laugh among young males in any audience by references to “elderly nuns in crimplene playing guitars” as a sort of general way of sneering at the 1970s-style liturgy. But deeper issues connected to, for example, achieving good male/female relationships and above all loving and fruitful lifelong marriages, are harder to explore.

 

 

But God doesn’t leave his Church to struggle alone. He is always there, and bringing the solutions. John Paul II, presenting his “Theology of the Body” complemented what had begun many years earlier with a renewed understanding of the spiritual realities of the importance of humanity created male and female, expressed in particular by the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and developed by Joseph Ratzinger.

 

And, thank God, the sometimes slow-moving relevant dicasteries of Rome are beginning to tackle this issue. The Congregation for Catholic Education produced Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a path of dialogue on the question of gender theory in education (2) which set out clearly the need to counter the “disorientation regarding anthropology which is a widespread feature of our cultural landscape” with its “tendency to cancel out the differences between men and women, presenting them instead as merely the product of historical and cultural conditioning.” (1) The document – a useful read for all Catholics, and a must-read for parish priests and Catholic teachers – points out that a person’s sex is a fundamental component of our personhood, and “plays an integral part in the development of our personality” (4). It notes that “Philosophical analysis also demonstrates that sexual difference between male and female is constitutive of human identity”(26) and goes on to emphasise the right of children to grow up in a family with a mother and a father and to “recognise the value and the beauty of the differences between the two sexes”.

 

 

It’s time now to go back to the beginning of things, to Genesis. No, this doesn’t mean a debate about whether the world was created six thousand years ago. The Book of Genesis is explaining about who we are in God’s plan: it’s not a geology textbook. And in God’s plan we are created male and female. “Here we find the heart of God’s original plan and the deepest truth about man and woman as willed and created by him. Although God’s original plan for man and woman will later be upset and darkened by sin, it can never be abrogated.” (Letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on the collaboration of men and women in the Church and in the world, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 2004).

 

Marriage between a man and a woman is God’s original plan, and is, as the beautiful statement in the Nuptial Mass reminds us “the one blessing not destroyed by Original Sin, or washed away in the flood”. Pope John Paul expanded on all of this in his Theology of the Body. The Church celebrates every wedding with great enthusiasm and joy. “The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator...their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator’s eyes...” (Catechism of the Catholic Church). (3)

 

In the next years, as today’s young men and women take up their responsibilities and seek to make sense of the world, it will not be adequate if Catholics who are worried – as we all ought to be – about the sexual mayhem that has been created in recent years, simply denounce the evils of extreme feminism or even of the contraceptive anti-life culture with which it has been associated. What is needed is a coherent and attractive vision for the co-operation of man and woman in the always exciting task of building a life together and fostering a civilisation. This is, at heart, a theological matter: it concerns our understanding of God and his loving care of us all.

 

 

In this third decade of the new Millennium, a topic of pastoral concern in the Church must be the specific needs of young men. It will be important for pastors and catechists to teach about the heroes of the Church: missionaries and martyrs, statesmen, explorers, writers, musicians. Heroes like Damien of Molokai, Poland’s Jerzy Popieluszko and the monks of Tibhirine....these are men to inspire new generations and to be genuine real-life role models fostering the heroic values needed for this century.

 

And it will also be crucial to emphasise the fundamental unity that should exist between man and woman, male and female, the centrality of marriage not as a mere socially useful arrangement that might finally one day come into its own again, but as part of God’s original plan “from the beginning”, the great fact that the whole story of our redemption is a marriage story centred on Christ the Bridegroom and the Church the Bride.

 

 

God loved us so much that he came, conceived as a human male under the beating heart of a human mother, right into our world. In his life, death, and resurrection, in his Church, he has given us all sorts of rich and coherent teachings with which we can be guided in our own life journeys. Being a man or a woman is “very good” and life is meant to be a joyful adventure, finally celebrated in the great Wedding Feast of the Lamb in which all our earthly explorations and ponderings of these profound issues will reach their utter fulfilment.