Children, kitchen, church: No thanks!

The Vatican has sharply criticized feminist demands. The policy paper recently published in Rome caused an international sensation. Critical considerations by Ulrike Mast-Kirschning.

The role of women in the Catholic Church

It’s like in real life: While women – over 80 percent of the workforce – in Catholic hospitals, old people’s homes and kindergartens do their sometimes difficult work on a voluntary or poorly paid basis and practice the principle of Christian charity, world politics is discussed in men’s groups. Cardinals and other leading advisors to the Pope have in these days identified a particular threat from which they want to save the world: feminism!

Conservative struggle

The theoretical substructure, which breathed new life into the women’s rights movements in the USA and Europe in the 1970s, has long been a shadowy existence in university circles. While gender discrimination is an experience for millions of women around the world

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

– everyday reality is. The 40-page paper, which was signed by the German Cardinal Ratzinger (photo) and has already been praised by the German Bishop Lehmann as almost visionary, therefore seems out of touch with the world.

What, one wonders, has led prominent church dignitaries to make feminism so prominent? At the latest when it comes to the role of women, who – according to the biblical model – have to live their supposedly biologically conditioned empathy in humility and motherhood, it becomes clear that conservative circles want to position themselves in the global social struggle in which the areas of tension between Freedom and oppression lie between enlightenment and fundamentalism.

Incredible equality

Gisela Forster and Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger protest against the threatened excommunication by the Vatican in 2002. The two women were ordained priestesses by the Argentine bishop Romulo Braschi.

Even if the rights of women occur, the authors of the paper were apparently poorly advised: the fact that women continue to be denied the priesthood makes any statement on equality between men and women unreliable. Even more serious, however, is that the biblically based role of women in gender relations in the third millennium can hardly be distinguished from the descriptions of Islamic fundamentalists on the subject.

Women’s rights are human rights – this is the core of the UN agreement on the rights of women, which is primarily being fought by the Islamic countries – but also by the incumbent American government at many levels. The Vatican has placed itself here with its position paper. The church men here have certainly not documented a pioneering orientation for the life of women in the Catholic Church.

Adviser: Hildegard von Bingen

The illustration shows Hildegard von Bingen at a writing desk. The German saint acted as abbess of the monasteries Rupertsberg and Eibingen founded by her.

The women stick better to the life motives of a historically famous church sister, Abbess Hildegard von Bingen. She took note of the limits set and then implemented her own ideas. Hildegard von Bingen was asked as a counselor for kings, princes and pope, because they were always well advised with her.

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WWW Links

vatican.va

An online version of the controversial Vatican document

date 03/08/2004
Writer / Author Ulrike Mast-Kirschning
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Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/5O7c

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