D as DONNA (WOMAN)

It is not all about knowing a few grammatical rules, but what happens when even the alphabets disappear? Out of metaphor: it is not always easy to love each other in the family, but what happens if man and woman disappear, if it is no longer clear what male and female are, if the idea that male and female are just ‘socio-cultural constructions’ passes?

The disappearance of women

Experts are worried. An avalanche of books with disturbing titles are coming out: ‘the disappearance of women’, ‘the absence of fathers’, ‘the defeat of the genders’. The end of patriarchal civilisation has coincided with the advent of a ‘matrifocal’ culture, which replaces the exasperation of the authority of fathers with the exasperation of the protective role of mothers. Hard to say which is worse. What would you choose: rules without a heart or affection without rules? The alternative is paralysing.

The price of some necessary emancipatory achievements seems high: for women as well as men. Meanwhile the female body continues to be violated, commodified, medicalised. But what is most worrying is that women, instead of gaining in femininity, have become masculinized. Yes, because as Hadjadj says, after all, ‘feminism is not feminine’. For their part, men, guilty and weakened by a culture that devalues all that is vertical, linear and affirming in favour of what is horizontal, circular and expressive, feel lost. The problem is serious, because recessive males and aggressive women ultimately do not like each other, and although they want to love each other, they cannot: the relationship between the sexes, at first friendly and carefree, soon becomes problematic and conflictual.

For a culture of reciprocity

There is no doubt: machismo and feminism demoralise the human. To respond to male chauvinist despotism with the simple self-determination of women is to make a mistake in the opposite direction. The uncoupling of femininity from motherhood due to the advent of contraceptive practices does not play into the woman's hands, but rather into the man's. ‘The womb is mine and I run it’ is no longer just a dreadful 1960s slogan, but has become mainstream mentality and casual practice in large sections of the female population. But the reality is that a bride's body is a donated body, and that a mother's womb is a space for gestation, not management!

In any case, machismo and feminism forget what is essential, namely that man and woman are made for each other: they only understand each other in mutual respect, love and service. And the minimum of mutual respect is to recognise with humble admiration the distinctive aspects of male and female which is not easy today. It is almost three centuries that secular culture speaks of man as ‘subject’ and that Catholic culture insists on the idea of ‘person’, thus playing into the hands of individualism, which interprets freedom as ‘autonomy’ and forgets all the concrete determinations in which it is constituted and matures: the limits of the body, the difference of the sexes, family history, civil heritage, religious affiliation. Thus we have the contradiction of a society that is both eroticised and asexual! Which means: many stimuli but little capacity to process them, intense affections and unstable bonds, spontaneity without responsibility, conjugality dissociated from parenthood. The truth is that there are no male or female subjects: what exists are men and women!

It is a matter of understanding, outside of any rigid division, that man and woman respectively represent the active and receptive dimensions of the one love. Indeed - we did not need Aristotle to realise this - man generates from himself, while woman generates from another. This is why, within the one love, which always distinguishes and unites, the masculine is predominantly distinctive (i.e. more outwardly and action-oriented, more attentive to understanding, measuring, defining, designing, transforming...), while the feminine is predominantly connective (i.e. more inwardly and relation-oriented, more attentive to understanding, uniting, accompanying, maturing...). And this is why the man rather emphasises the strength of love, while the woman emphasises the tenderness of the same love: thanks to the man, the woman can also be strong, thanks to the woman the man can also be tender. We are not in the realm of possession, but in the realm of mutual self-giving!

The feminine genius

We cannot dwell on this, but rediscovering the woman is certainly a priority, because, as Evdokimov, one of the greatest Orthodox theologians, used to say, ‘a civilisation is only as good as its women’. And this is because, as brilliantly explained by Costanza Miriano, whose books we recommend for enjoyable reading, the so-called feminine ‘submission’ (Eph 5) is nothing other than the marvellous capacity of women to carry, support and bear, to care for and take charge with ‘passionate’ love of all that is human. John Paul II, in his wonderful Encyclical on the dignity of woman, truthfully states that ‘to woman God entrusts man in a very special way’, every man, the whole man. Woman is therefore essentially care and tenderness, because she is the custodian of the human.

And she is, as the Church is not tired of repeating, as the virgin, bride and mother. In a society that is less and less sensitive to the profound connections of femininity and virginity, of femininity and motherhood, and where we ultimately marry less and less, it is beautiful to be able to bear witness with words and life to the fundamental and constitutive ways of being a woman: ‘virgin’, i.e. capable of inner unity and integrity of relationships (think of the passion and resoluteness of St. Catherine); ‘bride’, i.e. capable of sincere self-giving and acceptance of the other (St. Bridget's wholeness bride comes to mind); ‘mother’, as feminine maturity and fullness beyond natural fertility (Mother Teresa's fertility without borders).

Roberto Carelli, SDB

(Source: Roberto Carelli - Family Alphabet)