This paper was given at the conference in Rome Women in the Church: Prospects for Dialogue and Reflection, April 2015.

Today, the question of women is more important than ever, both in society and in the Church. Many inequalities still exist in the family, at work, and in politics.

As believers, this issue affects us because many forms of inequality between men and women have had, and still have, even outside of Christianity, a “religious” basis: certainly specious, but one that weighs very heavily on women’s daily lives. Understanding the how and why of this requires us to reinterpret the past and the present, allowing us to better discern and act.

Models of the past

In Old Testament tradition, the subjectification of women is consistent with a hagiographic culture. Nevertheless, there are some intruders from a different way of thinking. Men and women are protagonists in a story of salvation – human love even becomes a symbol of God’s covenant with God's people. Note that this story, especially with regard to the relationship of men and women, projects the potential for the divine onto men and the limitations of creation onto women, thus establishing a relationship that is unequal and imbalanced, socially and morally, as well as religiously.

But the community that lived with Jesus seems to have been different. His disciples were both male and female disciples. And rather often, the female disciples had a special relationship with him, free of all religious, political, and moral submission. In fact, this partnership with disciples is mediated by the authors of the scripture, who inevitably overlaid it with their own anthropological/religious vision.

This process is made very clear to us through the Pauline writers. In the oldest parts of these, the Christian innovation of doing away with all discrimination is evident (see Gal 3:28). 

Women play an active part in the community, sharing with men the tasks of evangelization, management of the community, and prophetic guidance and discernment (see Romans 12). 

At the heart of the “domestic Church” they exercise a unique role in the growth of the early Christian movement. But as early as the Prison Epistles, we are presented with the “family codes”, in which Christianity appears to be connected with the current social/cultural/religious reality, practically relinquishing its innovative thrust. This becomes even clearer in the Pastoral Epistles. During this period, the patriarchal family was the norm. The Church was therefore assimilated into the family already endorsed by paternal and marital authorities and the bishop was transposed into the cultural role of pater familias.

And yet Christianity produced an innovation in the relationship between the sexes. Indeed, we undergo the same rituals when we become Christians. Being part of the community requires no discrimination - there is no solely male initiation as there is in Judaism. Christian initiation is identical for men and women. The seal is now baptism. Nor are the gifts of the Holy Spirit or participation in the blood and body of Jesus, differentiated by sex.

But this “equality in the order of grace” does not lead to similar equality socially or legally. Women remain “submissive in the order of history” and thus excluded from all active religious, political, or moral subjectivity.

The “submission-equality” dichotomy, characteristic of the thought of the Church Fathers, remains indicative of the inequality between males and females up to the modern era. (The great political-social mutations between the end of the 18th century and the entire 19th century did not affect women even marginally.)  And it must reach into the 20th century, because the seeds of the last decades of the 19th century created a demand for equal rights that were largely political in nature, but also religious.

In the face of a burgeoning feminism, the Church in the 20th century had only one concern: to protect and preserve female distinctiveness, concretising the abstract cultural roles that had been defined up to that point. Women’s access to the workplace and their demand for civil rights – especially the right to vote – were seen as alienating and dangerous. 

This all-out defense of the female stereotype, of the family and private sphere as being specific to women, nonetheless led to the need for adjustments according to the formula “from inequality to unequal equality”. In the face of the cultural unsustainability of the disparity between men and women, and the determined defense of marital and paternal authority, the locution “unequal equality” began to take shape. But this did not undermine the authority of the father or the husband – the ultimate criteria of a well-ordered society.

Meanwhile, however, women’s awareness had begun to change. Their level of education had increased. The two world wars were a proving ground for their capacity to compensate for the absence of men in terms of production. In particular, the struggle for the right to vote was underway, which in the space of fifty years would see women in Europe, and elsewhere around the world, becoming both electors and the elected. Women Religious also participated in this emancipatory process, engaging in self-governance according to a female line of authority.

The turning point of Vatican II: The rediscovery of baptismal subjectivity

The most significant event in the history of Catholic women was the Second Vatican Council, the result of the prophecy of John XXIII who, in his encyclical Pacem in Terris, took women’s access to public life as a “sign of the times”.

The council did not open up a specific discussion on the question of women, but related statements to the faithful all sketched out a Church capable of overcoming centuries of discrimination against women.

Vatican II does explicitly condemn sexism, however (see LG 32; GE 1; GS 29, 60). And no less important is the recognition, often present in Gaudium et Spes (GS), of the importance of women in economic and social life (see nos. 9, 31, 34, 60).

And finally, there is significant recognition of women’s contribution to culture and its development (see GE 1, 8; GS 55, 60).

[Conversely, the Council’s Address to Women is a disappointment, full of stereotypes and absolutely inadequate to the demands that the advanced sectors of Catholic feminism had submitted to Council fathers.

Nor can it be forgotten that women took part in the Council as auditors and actively participated in periods III and IV. But the auditors were part of a social and religious élite, and as such, lacked the sensitivity to the question of women that some of them acquired in later years.]

After Vatican II: The difficult reception

For women, the post-council period signalled access to the study, research, and teaching of theology. The acquisition of these tools only sharpened their demand for a more equal and meaningful presence in the Church.

The greatest point of contention had to do with the question of ministry – the exclusion of women from any “liturgical” ministry simply for the fact that they are women. Discrimination in the Ministry of Lector and Acolyte was solemnly reasserted with regard to ordained ministry. Inter Insigniores, the document published in 1976, had a devastating effect, especially since, in the meantime, all Christian churches, except for Orthodox churches, had gradually opened up to another solution to the problem.

(The acme of this distance was in the failure of the Commission on the Role of Women in Modern Society and the Church, instituted concomitantly with the 1975 UN International Women’s Year. The commission was split on the question of the ministry. Inter Insigniores, then, along with the principle of traditio perpetuo serbata, established the so-called iconic principle, which stated that only males could ensure representation of Christ in the ministry. Females, on the contrary, could only represent the Church – obviously forgetting that the Church is actually made up of men and women.)

More than a decade later, Pope John Paul II again addressed the question of women, and then the question of ministry.

Mulieris Dignitatem forcefully asserts the equal dignity of the human couple, singling out its relationship as a sign of intratrinitarian relatedness: in sum, man and woman in the image of God. This image is especially evident in the communio personarum, an explicit sign of the communio personarum in divinis in which the human being is a dual expression of the event.

However, Mulieris Dignitatem simply reiterates the topics of Inter Insigniores. Moreover, the admission of women to the ministry of the Anglican Church provoked another document, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994) which confirmed the exclusion of women from ordained ministry, changing its theological status from a “disputed” matter to one that was “closed”.

A new question began to attract attention: that of gender. In use since the 1970s, gender is a classifying concept intended to reveal the ambiguity of the expression of “natural” roles, which are in fact more than just nature, but culturally received from nature itself.

Its radicalisation has led to the supposed irrelevance of all sexual characteristics and to the theorisation of a sort of indifference or nomadism of gender, leading up to the queer theories of the American philosopher, Judith Butler.

Pushing against the denial of the value of sexual differentiation, in 2004 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith produced a document, On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World, which stigmatised the theory of gender, bringing back more traditional anthropological theories of the sexes.

In truth, perhaps, what we need today is a balancing point, and above all, dialogue with the other sciences. We cannot develop a theological anthropology without an attitude of sincere attention and dialogue with all the human sciences, particularly the neurosciences.

Enclosing “cultural” elements within the stereotype of sexual differentiation and considering them definitive and absolute (“natural”) does not lead to a true understanding of the sexes and their relations.

The challenge of today: Mutual recognition

What many people are asking of the Church today is an attitude that is less dogmatic, more aware of the challenges that face us. A balanced, non-ideological interpretation of the relationship between the sexes is important for the future of our communities.

This requires recognition of the prophetic dignity of women, who have never been excluded from the gift of prophecy. On the contrary, this can be seen in both the Old and New Testaments. But prophecy means discernment, critical capacity and interpretation of the present in order to orient the future – all things that women can and must do for the growth of the Christian community.

Baptism makes everyone – men and women – into kings, priests, and prophets. Authority is therefore not something which characterises masculinity, but human beings, because we are made in the image of God. Royalty, freedom, and creativity come from the God and belong to everyone, male and female. Recognising female authority – its forms, its particular models, and its necessity – is something that can be delayed no longer.

In sum, women are the Church, in the fullness of baptismal, Chrismal and Eucharistic law, which emanate from the sacraments of initiation. Limiting women to an inferior, marginal role is unthinkable. On the contrary, we must make space – much space – for their right and duty to participate.

We know that the body of the Church grows with the contribution of all its members. Women also receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and must be helped to discern them, and above all, put them to use for the common good.

An Ongoing Balance

Much has been done, but there is still much to do. As with other questions, Christianity has been ambiguous and tentative on the question of women. Today we must, with parresia*, understand the direction to be taken – not for the benefit of women, but for the effective growth of the Church. A discriminating community does not have the right to present itself as a witness of God who represents the defeat of all discrimination and inaugurated a new humanity.

Our expectations for the future – so many and so urgent – must however cause us to give thanks for what has already been achieved, and lead us to better achievements.

Women have moved, including in the Church, “from silence to speech”. This is perhaps the greatest revolution, the largest reversal of the trend. For centuries, women were excluded from reflective speech, impeded from providing words of comfort, accompaniment, guidance, or direction. Unlike in the past, today we have full rights to participate through speech, to understand it, delve into it, proclaim it, and develop it. From this angle, the most incisive new development is the theology of women. We are very far from having accepted it, but it is an undeniable novelty whose fruits we have just begun to taste.

For centuries, women have been circumscribed to the private sphere. (Tight in the grip aut murus aut maritus, with both cases, cloister or matrimony, representing a gravestone.) Today women have torn away (the stone that closed them up into the private sphere. They have torn down) the masculine pretense of ensuring fidelity through segregation. In this way, they have moved “from invisibility to presence.” We find them active in all the ministries of the word, in charge of liturgical prayer, exercising authority. Certainly these are “informal” exercises. But what it really means is that they are there and they are visible. The long wave of this visibility will produce its fruits.

And finally, women have moved “from submission to co-responsibility” – they have abandoned the model of presumed natural submission in order to fully access ecclesiastic co-responsibility. We find them holding significant roles, and in growing numbers. But above all, we see them and know them as partners, true companions, who are absolutely necessary for the growth of Church communities.

The journey has been long, and is far from complete. But the goal is now illuminated by the new awareness that God’s design is an inclusive one. (God does not discriminate by sex, but has marked our flesh by sex so that we can remember and witness that God's is a mystery of interrelation.) To stand face-to-face with one another, to experience reciprocity, generosity, mutual caretaking: this is the feeling of being in the world, in the concreteness of flesh that is marked and “redeemed”, waiting to be transfigured.

*To freely and bravely speak the truth for the sake of the common good.

Bettina Militello is Professor of Ecclesiology and Mariology at the Marianum and Teresianum Universities. 

Conference Paper translated by Chiara D. Brown.