Man and Woman

There is an direct conflict between the Roman Catholic version of Christianity and issues of the feminine and of woman. Women, for being women, do not have full citizenship within Christian community. This is an unjust situation which has no reason for being. Christianity, to the contrary, could make three arguments of a deep internal nature, strictly theological, which could turn it into one of the greatest champions of the dignity and excellence of women, instead of remaining the bastion of patriarchy.

The first argument is found in the first page of the Bible, when in Genesis it is written: "Let's make humanity in our image and likeness; let's make it man and woman" (Genesis 1, 27). Consequently, there is in God something feminine and masculine, that is reflected in man and woman. We will only have a global experience of God if we include both, the man and the woman, in our journey towards the Source where all being began. If we exclude the woman, we will only have a partial image of God.

The second argument says: God personally came to visit and dwelled among us. When Christians think of the Nativity, that celebrates the incarnation of the Son of God, they generally think of Jesus of Nazareth. However, the Son was not the first to come. The Holy Spirit came before, sent to a woman. The Gospel of Luke is clear: "The Spirit will come over you and the virtue of the Highest will build a tent over you and the Holy One thus created will be called Son of God," (Luke 1,35). "Virtue of the Highest" is another name for Spirit. He will build His tent over the woman, Mary. The Greek term used, episkiasei, is like the one used by St. John to talk of the incarnation of the Son, eskenosen, (John 1,9). The two expressions contain the word tent, skene, to mean permanent dwelling, permanent abode. The meaning is the following: "The Spirit will come over you and will dwell definitively in you." That dwelling by the Spirit is so intimate that it elevates the woman, Mary, to the heights of the divine. This is why, consequently, the text continues: "What will be conceived by you will be the Son of God." Only God or one who has been elevated to the heights of God can conceive a Son of God. To visit humanity, then, God chose to dwell, in the first place, in the woman. She carries in her womb the Son of the Father, now made flesh by the power of the Spirit. In a moment of history, the center of all is occupied by a woman. She is the carrier of the Spirit and simultaneously of the eternal Son. She, and only she, is the Temple where all the Divinity dwells: the Spirit and the Son, sent by the Father, are in the womb of that humble Jewish woman.

The third argument says: the decisive fact of Christianity, and perhaps of the whole human history, consists in the definitive victory of life over death, witnessed for the first time by a woman, Mary of Magdala. For Christians, life does not end with death, but with resurrection. Resurrection is much more that the reviving of a corpse; it is the full realization of all the potentials of the human being. It is the human being transported to the end of the process of evolution. And, for Christians, that is what happened with the resurrection of Jesus. The first witness of that was a woman, Magdalene. According to Saint Bernard, she was apostle to the apostles because she communicated to the followers of Jesus the good news of the blessed event. It has been always taught that without faith in the resurrection there would be neither Christianity, nor the Church. If that is so, why not give their rightful place to women, they who never betrayed Jesus, and who were the first witnesses of his resurrection?

There are, as we can see, very good reasons to highly value women. Together with the man, the woman keeps the Sacred as an ever lit candle. Only a Christianity that has forgotten its original greatness and has fallen victim of Western patriarchal culture can push aside women and deprive humanity of their invaluable contribution, which can enrich the Christian community and humanity as a whole.