The gender agenda

THE TABLET

The gender agenda

08 September 2016 | by Mary Anne Case | Comments: 0 Pope Francis told Polish bishops in July of his concern about the contemporary preoccupation with ‘gender theory’. Others argue that the rival notion of complementarity is of greater concern, having been largely invented by recent popes
In November 2014, just a month after concluding the Extraordinary Synod on the Family, Pope Francis welcomed an international who’s who of self-described proponents of traditional marriage and opponents of same-sex marriage from diverse faith traditions and continents to the Vatican for an International Colloquium on the Complementarity between Man and Woman (the Humanum Conference), sponsored by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

For the Vatican, complementarity entails that “man and woman” have “equal dignity as persons” but that this equal dignity is premised on and manifest in essential and complementary differences. These differences include most of what secular law would characterise as “sex stereotypes”, a term that many activist proponents of complementarity embrace rather than repudiate.

Over the course of the last half-century, the Vatican embraced sexual complementarity as the foundation of its theological anthropology. It used it to try to influence secular law in settings as diverse as the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing and the Manif Pour Tous, the protest movement that brought thousands of French citizens out to demonstrate against the inclusion of same-sex couples in a law extending “Marriage Pour Tous” (Marriage for Everyone) in 2013.

The Vatican sees an “ideology of gender” as linking feminism and gay rights in a worldwide effort to redefine not only secular laws governing the sexes, sexuality, reproduction and the family, but human nature itself. As a result, it has opposed not only these changes in secular law but the very use of the word “gender” itself, whether in scholarly work or in legal documents.

Yet, far from being long-standing Catholic   orthodoxy, complementarity is a mid-twentieth-century innovation, imported into Catholicism through converts such as the married former Protestant, Dietrich von Hildebrand. The writings of Pius XI and XII show evidence of complimentarity thinking. But the move from the invention of complementarity to the anathematisation of gender is largely a tale of three popes: Paul VI, who, in response to what he saw as dangerous trends, promulgated documents newly entrenching Catholic opposition to contraception (Humanae Vitae, 1968), homosexuality (Persona Humana, 1975) and women’s ordination (Inter Insigniores, 1976); John Paul II, who brought the philosophical work he had done as Carol Wojtyla to his Theology of the Body and Mulieris Dignitatem (1988); and Benedict XVI, who combined concerns about feminism, new reproductive technologies and LGBT rights, which he had voiced as a connected whole as early as The Ratzinger Report (1985), into his notion of a human ecology at risk of destruction by all he saw as encompassed by the term “gender”.

Elsewhere, English-speaking scholars of women’s studies and scientific researchers into sex differences were using “gender” to distinguish cultural or attitudinal characteristics associated with the sexes from biological characteristics (i.e. to distinguish masculine and feminine from male and female). Simultaneously, the US sex equality activist Ruth Bader Ginsburg used the term “gender” interchangeably with “sex” in legal documents, to avoid associations of “sex” with what happens in porn theatres; her use of “gender” rapidly spread to other writers of legal documents written in English.

These two uses of the term “gender” – the academic and the legal – may seem antithetical, with the first stressing the distinction between sex and gender, the second using the terms interchangeably and synonymously. But, from the Vatican’s perspective, there was the same reason to be concerned about both usages: each is associated with what Ratzinger condemned as “the obscuring of the difference or duality of the sexes” in the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Man and Woman in the Church and in the World that he issued as head of the CDF in 2004.

The spread of the Vatican anathematisation of gender began with concerns of Catholic activists at the UN Rio, Cairo and Beijing conferences in the first half of the 1990s. It  continued through the proclamations of the Vatican ambassador to the Beijing conference, Mary Ann Glendon, the polemics of figures like French Lacanian psychoanalyst priest Tony Anatrella, and documents such as the Pontifical Council on the Family’s Lexicon of Ambiguous and Debatable Terms Regarding Family Life and Ethical Questions to influence debates about secular law reform at the UN, the EU, and the French National Assembly.

It is nigh on impossible to find any trace of the term “complementarity” before the twentieth century. Sister Prudence Allen, recently named by Pope Francis to the International Theological Commission, has published nearly 1,200 pages in her two-volume history of The Concept of Woman from 750 BC to AD 1500; the word “complementarity” appears in none of the cited sources. Previously, those who asserted essential differences between the sexes also asserted the superiority of men. The closest Sr Allen comes to early traces of what later became complementarity is in the work of the twelfth-century abbess Hildegard von Bingen. It is no accident that one of Benedict XVI’s last major acts, before his resignation in 2013, was to declare Hildegard a Doctor of the Church.

I can find no trace of sexual complementarity in the Gospels. Even the Virgin Mary, model of “the woman” for complementarians like John Paul II, displays few stereotypically feminine traits – and a fair degree of feistiness. As for sex role differentiation, far from endorsing it, Jesus explicitly repudiates it, sending women out to preach and rebuking Martha for demanding that her sister Mary be forced to join her in household tasks.

When Paul speaks of difference between the sexes, he also speaks of subordination (“Wives, be subject to your husbands …Husbands, love your wives …” Colossians 3:18, 19). When he speaks of equality, it is equality in non-differentiation. (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”. Galatians 3:28).

Joseph Ratzinger said in 2004 that: “The Apostle Paul does not say that the distinction between man and woman, which in other places is referred to the plan of God, has been erased. He means rather that in Christ the rivalry, enmity and violence which disfigured the relationship between men and women can be overcome and have been overcome. In this sense, the distinction between man and woman is reaffirmed more than ever.”

His argument relies on the work of only one pope, the then reigning John Paul II, which built on the work of  von Hildebrand and Edith Stein.

Several things are significant about Hildebrand and Stein’s writings in this regard. Hildebrand is a convert from Protestantism and Stein a convert from Orthodox Judaism. 
Complementarity sits much better with those faith traditions.

In Protestantism, everybody should be married; in Orthodox Judaism, role differentiation goes all the way down. Just as for Jews one is born rather than becoming a woman, one is born rather than becoming a priest; it is not a vocation but an inheritance, genetically determined. However well complementarity may work for married life, the ideal for all Jews and all Protestants, it is a poor fit with the current structure of the Catholic Church, run by a celibate male hierarchy from which women are excluded.

The more different women and men essentially are, the more humanity is only a complete whole when the two of them are collaborating equally using their complementary attributes, and thus the more essential it becomes to include women in decision-making and teaching authority. This is an argument the Vatican has pressed with respect to the collaboration of men and women in the world, but it has not applied that argument to their collaboration in the Church. A series of speeches to women’s organisations made by popes from Pius XII to Paul VI acknowledge a woman’s role is expanding; they do not condemn her greater participation in public life but stress nevertheless her special responsibilities for the family. In 1945 Pius XII wrote that a woman’s sensibility and delicacy “which are characterisitic of the woman may perhaps bias her judgement in the direction of her impressions”.

One should not underestimate Ratzinger’s contribution to the shifting of emphasis from influencing the behaviour of the faithful to an insistence on shaping secular law. At the time of the interviews that became The Ratzinger Report, he had put all the pieces together – radical feminism, gay rights, abortion, reproductive rights, new family forms, even transsexuality – without yet having the word “gender” to attach them to. He said it was “necessary to get to the bottom of the demand that radical feminism draws from the widespread modern culture, namely the ‘trivialisation’ of sexual specificity that makes every role interchangeable between man and woman”.

Twenty years later, he blamed “gender” for these grave consequences, which he saw as proceeding in the first instance from feminism. Since then, the interventions against “gender” undertaken by the Church have been almost entirely to influence secular law and policy in line with the Vatican vision. When the Vatican does speak for a faith community in promoting complementarity and opposing the gender agenda, as at the Humanum Conference, it does so together with members of other faith communities, many of which are much less committed than it is to egalitarianism between the sexes.

Just as its alliance with the Organisation of the Islamic Conference at the UN in the 1990s is disturbing, given many of that organisation’s member states’ views on women, so it is disturbing that the Humanum Conference was sponsored by the CDF, the Church’s guarantor of doctrinal orthodoxy, and that at the time of the Colloquium the CDF was investigating the US Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) for alleged heresies including “radical feminism” and “tak[ing] a position not in agreement with the Church’s teaching on human sexuality” (CDF, 2012).

The Vatican sees, and assumes its opponents also see, a tight connection between and among all the components it incorporates under the “gender agenda”, such as the dismantling of sex roles, the acceptance of homosexuality, the recognition of a diversity of family forms and of sexual and gender expression, and access to the new reproductive technologies, condoms, other contraceptives,  and abortion – in short, most of what goes  under such headings as women’s sexual and reproductive rights, SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity), family law reform and the elimination of sex stereotyping.

How much, if any, of this vision does Pope  Francis share with his predecessor? How committed is he to promoting a vision of complementarity? From the moment of his election, Vatican watchers have been watching to see to what extent Francis shares his predecessors’ conservative views, particularly on those related to gender and sexuality. By now there seems little doubt that the emphasis will be elsewhere than on opposing the gender agenda, and that, when he does turn to gender, it will, by and large, be in a kindler, gentler manner than that of his predecessors.

Advocates for the LGBT community, for example, have taken heart from his private meetings with a Spanish trans-man and from his oft-quoted question, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” But, as with his approach to the divorced and remarried and to women who have had abortions, it is important to note that Francis’ approach is less of acceptance, rather that of “accompaniment with mercy”. As he is the first to tell us, this signals no change in fundamental doctrine, only in pastoral approach.
His opening remarks to the Humanum Conference might awaken hope for change, since he took as his model for complementarity the non-sex specific notion in 1 Cor. 12 that “the Spirit has endowed each of us with different gifts” and went on to stress: “When we speak of complementarity between man and woman in this context, let us not confuse that term with the simplistic idea that all the roles and relations of the two sexes are fixed in a single, static pattern. Complementarity will take many forms as each man and woman brings his or her distinctive contributions to their marriage and to the formation of their children – his or her personal richness, personal charisma.”

But he went on to speak, like Benedict XVI, of “the crisis in the family having produced a crisis of human ecology, for social environments, like natural environments, need protection”. Like Benedict, Francis sees the threat posed by what both call “gender theory” in apocalyptic terms, comparing it to nuclear war, Nazism and one of the “Herods that destroy, that plot designs of death, that disfigure the face of man and woman, destroying creation”. His view of the threat is less abstract than his predecessor’s: he draws on concrete experience with what he calls “ideological colonisation” by, for example, those who tie grants for the education of the poor to the condition that “gender theory [be] taught’’.

But, when asked by journalists in interviews about concrete ways of giving women such recognised authority, Francis described the idea of women cardinals as a bad joke. He suggested that he saw no need to appoint women to head Vatican departments because “priests often end up under the sway of their housekeepers”. His more serious responses to questions of female authority are no more comforting to those who see complementarity as an unnecessary limit on the equality of the sexes in public life. “We have not yet understood in depth what the feminine genius can give us,” he said in 2015. “What woman can give to society and also to us. Maybe women see things in a way that complements the thoughts of men. It is a path to follow with greater creativity and courage.”

Perhaps, however, the true risk of a step backwards lies not in being open to the removal of difference but in resolutely insisting that there is such a thing as “the feminine genius”. If there is indeed a path to follow through complementarity to the equality of the sexes, Pope Francis, like his predecessors, has yet to show us what it might be, let alone lead the way along such a path.

This is an edited version of an article published in the 2016 Fall issue (First view March 2016) of Religion and Gender, DOI: 10.18352/rg.10124

Mary Anne Case is the Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School and a Fernand Braudel Fellow in Law at the European University Institute.