[Marxism] Latest news from the Vatican

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

(...) 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.

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfai
th_doc_20040731_collaboration_en.html



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