"The Catholic man crisis":
I think there has been a great confusion with regard to the specific vocation of men in marriage and of men in general in the Church during the past 50 years or so. It’s due to a number of factors, but the radical feminism which has assaulted the Church and society since the 1960s has left men very marginalized.
Unfortunately, the radical feminist movement strongly influenced the Church, leading the Church to constantly address women’s issues at the expense of addressing critical issues important to men; the importance of the father, whether in the union of marriage or not; the importance of a father to children; the importance of fatherhood for priests; the critical impact of a manly character; the emphasis on the particular gifts that God gives to men for the good of the whole society.
The goodness and importance of men became very obscured, and for all practical purposes, were not emphasized at all....
Now, check out this all-new headline from "Pope Francis":
Listen to women more, don't be macho, Pope tells men:
MANILA (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Sunday men should listen to women's ideas more and not be male chauvinists.
The Argentine pope made impromptu remarks during a youth rally at a co-ed Catholic university in the Philippine capital, Manila, after he noted that four of the five people who addressed him on stage were male.
"There is only a small representation of females here, too little," he said, bringing laughter from the crowd.
"Women have much to tell us in today's society. At times we men are too 'machista'," he said, using the Spanish term for male chauvinists.
"(We) don't allow room for women but women are capable of seeing things with a different angle from us, with a different eye. Women are able to pose questions that we men are not able to understand," he said to more applause.
He noted that it was a 12-year-old girl, not any of the four men, who had posed the toughest question, asking why God allowed children to be abandoned..
He ended that part of his impromptu remarks with a joke: "So, when the next pope comes to Manila, let's please have more women among you."
Francis has said that, while the Roman Catholic Church's ban on women priests is definitive, he wants to appoint more nuns and other women to senior positions in the Vatican.
Well, Pope Alexander VI was quite the ladies man, so perhaps he represents the golden mean :-)
ReplyDeleteRome doesn't need a "golden mean". They have "both-and" theology. They can be both supportive of men and hostile to men. They can allow too much influence of feminism, while having "too little representation" of women. It is a place where men can be "too 'machista'", their voices too "over-represented" and yet "assaulted and marginalized by radical feminism". They can do both at the same time. That's what "Catholic" means. Big tent. It happily encompasses every contradiction.
Delete