“WOMEN’S CULTURES: EQUALITY AND DIFFERENCE,” the conference sponsored by the “Pontifical Council for Culture” and taking place this week in Rome, is more Vassar than Vatican. The outline document is filled with deliberate ambiguities, attempting to appeal to both feminists and non-feminists. It’s a stunning piece of non-Catholic, junk writing. Some of it is unreadable.

An excerpt:

Today, generally speaking, women seek to reconcile professional life and family commitments. They can renounce maternity but those who do have children cannot avoid raising, educating and protecting them. In any case, women who are not married or have no children, welcome, include, and mediate; they are much more capable of tenderness and forgiveness than men. Beyond the different ways of being parents, there is a difference between the feminine and the masculine in techniques of problem-solving, in the perception of the environment, in models of representation and cycles of rest, to mention just a few categories. Cancelling such differences impoverishes personal experience. In this sense it is right not to accept an imposed neutrality but to value difference.

Though women arguably dominate the liturgical life of the Novus Ordo Church, the conference “looks at the spaces proposed to women in the life of the Church, and if women are made to feel welcome in light of specific and changed cultural and social sensibilities. The pastors will ask themselves whether the way women participate in the life of the Church functions today.

— Comments —

James P. writes:

Whoever thinks women are “much more capable of tenderness and forgiveness than men” has never met any of my ex-girlfriends. Even my mom will drag up my ancient misdeeds – long-forgotten by me! – whenever she wishes to impose a guilt-trip on me.

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