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I. THE QUESTION
2.
Recent years have seen new approaches to women's issues. A first tendency is to
emphasize strongly conditions of subordination in order to give rise to
antagonism: women, in order to be themselves, must make themselves the
adversaries of men. Faced with the abuse of power, the answer for women is to
seek power. This process leads to opposition between men and women, in which
the identity and role of one are emphasized to the disadvantage of the other,
leading to harmful confusion regarding the human person, which has its most
immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family.
A second tendency
emerges in the wake of the first. In order to avoid the domination of one sex
or the other, their differences tend to be denied, viewed as mere effects of
historical and cultural conditioning. In this perspective, physical difference,
termed sex, is minimized, while the purely cultural element, termed
gender, is emphasized to the maximum and held to be primary. The obscuring
of the difference or duality of the sexes has enormous consequences on a
variety of levels. This theory of the human person, intended to promote
prospects for equality of women through liberation from biological determinism,
has in reality inspired ideologies which, for example, call into question the
family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality
and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous
sexuality.
3.
While the immediate roots of this second tendency are found in the context of
reflection on women's roles, its deeper motivation must be sought in the human
attempt to be freed from one's biological conditioning. 2
According to this perspective, human nature in itself does not possess
characteristics in an absolute manner: all persons can and ought to constitute
themselves as they like, since they are free from every predetermination linked
to their essential constitution.
This perspective has
many consequences. Above all it strengthens the idea that the liberation of
women entails criticism of Sacred Scripture, which would be seen as handing on
a patriarchal conception of God nourished by an essentially male-dominated
culture. Second, this tendency would consider as lacking in importance and
relevance the fact that the Son of God assumed human nature in its male form.
4. In
the face of these currents of thought, the Church, enlightened by faith in
Jesus Christ, speaks instead of active collaboration between the sexes
precisely in the recognition of the difference between man and woman.
To understand better the
basis, meaning and consequences of this response it is helpful to turn briefly
to the Sacred Scriptures, rich also in human wisdom, in which this response is
progressively manifested thanks to God's intervention on behalf of humanity.
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