19th April 2013
Women of Faith, Teachers of Peace
The following is a guest blog by Simona Prete, Head of Communications.
“Working for the British Embassy to the Holy See, I am privileged to meet and engage with remarkable women at the Vatican and in the Catholic network. Our Ambassador Nigel Baker noted on International Women’s Day: “the vital role played by women religious in almost every aspect of Church life on the ground and across the world, be it in education, development work, health care, managing parishes, supporting Papal nuncios, or spreading the word about the faith”.
The title of my guest blog flows from the message for the World Day of Peace in 1995, in which Pope John Paul II wrote: “May they [women] be witnesses, messengers and teachers of peace in relations between individuals and generations, in the family, in the cultural, social and political life of nations, and in particularly in situations of conflict and war”. This is as true today as 18 years ago. But women’s work is too often behind the scenes, they are not represented enough in public sphere, they are still being discriminated against and under the threat of violence. And yet a strong thread running through the FCO’s report on human rights and democracy for 2012 is the vital role women themselves can, do and must play in defending human rights throughout the world.
This week, I attended a conference at the Pontifical Urbaniana University on the theme “Women and Public Engagement”, seen from the perspective of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Catholic women. The debate focussed on the role of women with faith, and raised the question whether their role was defined by religion or by the culture which has grown up around the religion over the years. These women told of their own experiences, how they shaped their faiths, how they overcame obstacles – each one on individual journey, describing tolerance, education, family, justice, teaching, and empowerment.
Pope Francis recently underlined the fundamental role of women in the Church. He said that women of faith can teach values in a culture of tolerance and respect, and they can bring these words into life, in the family as well as in our society. With that sort of backing, perhaps women need to stand up a little more for ourselves and our views?”
To my very best, there are hidden treasures in women if they are well used.
Thank you Ambassador for providing space for a guest blog, and thank you Ms Simona Prete for your contribution.
Catholic women today cannot but compare and confront their experiences in civil society as opposed to their experience in ecclesial society. While most women, at least in the Western hemisphere today, have been born and raised into an environment of equality in relation to men where opportunities to participate vocally and actively in their societies in such conditions of equality are generally available, analogous opportunities simply do not exist, cannot exist, in the ecclesial sphere under current Church structure.
Women, for instance, cannot teach in the Church. It is useless to pretend otherwise. In the Catholic Church women can be, at the utmost, mouthpieces of male teachers, and any feminine activity is necessarily subordinated to the all-male clergy. Thus, in silencing and subordinating women, the personality of women as women is cancelled. Is it surprising then that the Church looses members at a rate of 8000 per day (emphasis on “per day”) to Evangelical and Pentecostal denominations in Latin America alone, and that Europe is secularized (pretty wording for saying they’ve lost count)?
Pythagoras does not lie. The model of Church organization based on the Pauline metaphor of the “Body of Christ” of masculine head and feminine body has proved its failure in the ecclesial sphere no less than the neo-liberal model proved its functional bankruptcy in the social-economic sphere in the 2008 global financial crisis.
Other Church models are available. Benedict, and now Francis have been made aware of those models. Were they to be implemented, I feel sure many women who have chosen to distance themselves from a Church that treats them as second class citizens would probably return.
If VCIII is necessary for that purpose then that’s what should be done.