Woman in the Transformation of Culture

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - August 24, 2007

Last week, we focused on how the action or inaction of Catholic adults in our country over the next couple of years will likely greatly determine the path of American society for decades to come.

As we have discovered with abortion nationally and same-sex pseudo-matrimony locally, once an evil genie is let out of a bottle it is very hard to get the genie back in. In the very near future, monumental decisions will be made nationally and locally about the meaning and dignity of marriage as well as the ethics of the creation and destruction human life through human cloning and the destruction of human embryos to obtain stem cells. If Catholics live up to their vocation to be salt, light and leaven within American culture, great harm can be avoided. If Catholics in large part, however, permit their salt to become insipid, their light eclipsed, and their leaven corrupted, possibly irreversible damage is on the way.

In the fulfillment of Christ's commission to evangelize and transform our culture, all Catholics — clergy, religious and laity, young and old — have an important role to play. But in this battle for the future of our culture, the front lines have been, and will continue to be, occupied by women.

In the beginning of time, as we read in the poetic language of the Book of Genesis, the devil brought down the human race by getting woman to distrust God, to believe a lie, and act on it together with man. God responded by getting another woman to have faith in God, to let his word take her flesh, and to keep that word together with the new Adam.

We can look at much of the cultural transformation of the past forty years according to that ancient paradigm. At the time of the sexual revolution, the serpent tempted women to distrust in God's revelation, accept a lie about the meaning, purpose and beauty of their feminine sexuality, and offer their own forbidden fruit to man, who readily went along even faster than in Eden. The evil one got women to distrust in the fundamental goodness of their femininity — especially the maternal meaning of their existence — bestowed upon them by God. What distinguished woman from man was not seen as a blessing and source of innate dignity, but as a curse. Radical feminists saw women's liberation coming not from universal respect for their feminine distinctiveness but from its suppression. And they promoted new values — such as sex without marriage, contraception, and abortion —that degraded rather than respected their feminine and maternal dignity.

In response to this modern Fall, God wishes to raise up other women, women of faith, who can help to renew society according to an authentic femininity. Last week, a group of such women got started on this urgent task in a new and timely way. They launched a website, dignityofwomen.com, in the hope to lead the Catholic Church in America on a year-long reflection to celebrate the 20th anniversary of John Paul II's ground-breaking apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem ("On the Dignity of Women"), published August 15, 1988.

These women state clearly on the homepage of their website that "the timeliness of this observance cannot be overestimated. With debates raging over the nature of marriage, the sanctity of human life, the needs of children, and how the gifts of women are best promoted, what better way to form ourselves than by returning to the foundational questions of who women are and why the divine plan hinges on their cooperation." They also assert that John Paul II in his apostolic letter laid out compelling answers to those foundational questions.

John Paul does so by a profound theological analysis of the creation of Eve and of the life of Mary, the "new Eve." He shows that woman and man are both equally made in the image and likeness of God, and called always to be a gift "for" the other in a loving communion of persons.

He then turns to how the effects of original sin drive man to seek to "rule over woman" (Gen 3:16). He describes for women today the right way and the wrong way to overcome this sinful desire for domination: "In the name of liberation from male domination," he states, "women must not appropriate to themselves male characteristics contrary to their own feminine 'originality.' There is a well-founded fear that if they take this path, women will not 'reach fulfillment,' but instead will deform and lose what constitutes their essential richness."

John Paul II then gives an extended treatment of how Jesus emphasized that essential feminine richness. "It is universally admitted--even by people with a critical attitude towards the Christian message--that in the eyes of his contemporaries Christ became a promoter of women's true dignity and of the vocation corresponding to this dignity." With numerous examples, the pope shows how Christ exalted women way above cultural morés. John Paul likewise praises women for their courageous fidelity to the Lord and essential role in his mission.

He concludes by stressing that "our time in particular awaits the manifestation of that 'genius' that belongs to woman." That genius is the capacity to love, a spousal and maternal gift of self to others through feminine receptivity, "which can ensure sensitivity for human beings in every circumstance" The dignity and moral and spiritual strength of woman is "measured by the order of love," he says, and is "joined to her awareness that God entrusts to the human being to her in a special way."

It is from the genius of her interior culture of love, expressed both in marriage as well as in virginity for the kingdom, that the interior culture of man and of children will be transformed. That is the path toward the transformation of culture as a whole.

That transformation can begin with a visit to dignityofwomen.com and a re-reading and deeper assimilation of John Paul II's own inspired genius.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.