How has the pope dealt with womens demands for reform?
He issued a lot of documents decreeing that the church was not going to ordain women. That, he said, was part of God’s plan. But the pope is very devoted to the blessed Virgin. The Virgin Mary Czestochowa of Poland is a kind of national icon. That kind of Marian piety tends to exalt Mary as Virgin Mother and puts women on a pedestal as wives and mothers. That tradition is very deep in Polish Catholicism and in this pope’s spirituality. His view is that men and women are complementary rather than equal — the role of women is to be a wife and mother, to be the nurturer. It’s been hard for the pope to deal with European feminists who have wanted to legalize abortion throughout the European Union. This is beyond his ken. The Vatican has tried to offer a notion of “Christian feminism.” For a while they were dismissive of feminism as a movement. But then they began to talk about Christian feminism, meaning that all other feminists were somehow beyond the pale. What’s Christian feminism? The
