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[Response to Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994) and
statements by Cardinal Ratzinger (1995)
that discussion on the ordination of women is closed.]
by Melanie McDonagh, journalist on the Evening
Standard in London.
From The Tablet, 26 August 1995, pp. 841 - 843.
Reprinted on the Internet with permission from
The Tablet. Address: 1 King Street
Cloisters, Clifton Walk, London W6 0QZ UK. Tel: 44-20-8748 8484; fax:
44-20-8748 1550; email: thetablet@the tablet.co.uk.
In a
way, one should feel flattered. There is an entire United Nations world
conference being devoted to the subject of Women and the Pope has addressed a
letter to the sex applauding its merits. No doubt there is much to be said for
both these things. The subjects being addressed in Beijing will not just be
modishly feminist but will include such matters as the wide disparity between
the value placed on the labour of men and women in the Third World. No doubt
also the conference will point out the wrongness of female infanticide for the
benefit of the host nation, where the practice is prevalent. As for the
Pope’s letter, it included a guarded apology for the Church’s part in
the subjugation of women: “if objective blame has belonged to not just a
few members of the Church, for this I am truly sorry”. In addition, of
late, in his Angelus addresses, the Pope has addressed the subject of women
repeatedly, in preparation for the conference.
There
remains a kind of unease about all this. Perhaps the objection is to the
essential premise underlying both the conference and the Pope’s response
to it, which is that it is possible to talk about the entire sex in this way.
Of
course there are very obvious differences between the sexes. I spend much of my
time writing about them. And of course women generalise about men, in a
colloquial, dismissive sort of way. But it is simply inconceivable that the UN
could be organising a conference about Men. It is impossible to imagine the
Pope talking about the genius of Men, thanking them for their special role in
the world. The reason is that the position of men is taken for granted, assumed
to be the norm. You can generalise about women because, somehow, they depart
from the norm. They are more emotional, more intuitive, more nurturing than
men, or so the stereotype goes. You cannot address men, or write about them, or
hold conferences about them, because you end up talking about the human
condition - I mean, just take the way the Pope addressed women: “Thank
you, women who are mothers....You become God’s own smile upon the newborn
child....Thank you, women who are wives....Thank you, women who are daughters
and women who are sisters....Thank you, women who work.” If he were to
address his own sex in this way men would not know what to make of it. It does
not make sense to thank men who work, because until very lately it was men who
did the work. And to talk, as he does, about women’s vocation to
motherhood, is to define the sex, in the nicest possible way, as being
essentially orientated towards reproduction. Perhaps we are, but men too share
the parental function. Nobody, however, tries to define men by virtue of their
being fathers, no matter how devoted they are to their children.
As a
matter of fact, I enjoy the small courtesies that enliven relations between the
sexes: the deference that men, in some circumstances, pay to women is a source
of pleasure and an expression of civility. And these customs are based, I
suppose, on general social assumptions about the sexes. But I find it worrying
that women can put themselves in a ghetto in this way, by indulging the
gigantic generalisation on which the Beijing conference is based. And the
generalisation is that what unites women is greater than what divides them, in
terms of nationality, religion, temperament, profession. One does not assume an
instinctive solidarity between men by virtue of their sex.
There
are certain issues to do with the status of men that would warrant discussion.
One is that they do not live as long as women. If the reverse were the case,
longevity would be a feminist issue. Another is that in parts of Western
Europe, unemployment is a specifically male problem because they are less
willing and able to take on the lower-paid, temporary and part-time positions
that women fill. But we are unlikely ever to patronise men by holding UN
conferences about them. Until lately, men did not even have their own
magazines. There were journals for men as sportsmen, as politicians, as pigeon
fanciers, as theologians. But it was women who had magazines simply for their
own sex; chiefly to do with cooking, beauty, babies and health. Men, you see,
did not define themselves just as men.
It is
bad enough to have minority status if, by race, religion or whatever, you are
actually in a minority. But to pretend to minority status when you are the
tougher, healthier part of the population, the part that reads more, goes to
prison less and to church more...that is bizarre. And women’s conferences
have precisely that effect.
Melanie McDonagh
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