Femininism—getting there. How so? Cardinal Ratzinger, Cardinal Prefect with full Papal authority issued a Letter to the Bishops telling them what was what about feminism. And mostly why it was bad news. It provides a crisp picture for our enquiries of how, while addressing the topics that feminism has brought out into the open, the Roman Christianism's commitment to dominion remains as entrenched as ever.

The smooth, skilfully honed eloquence of the Letter hides what, in a psychotherapy relationship, would stand out sharp and clear as massive denial.

Cardinal Ratzinger, Cardinal Prefect invokes papal authority to tell us that...

The Church, expert in humanity...

... is called today to address certain currents of thought which are often at variance with the authentic advancement of women.

this document will offer reflections – inspired by the doctrinal elements of the biblical vision of the human person

This he argues includes:

a common commitment to the development of ever more authentic relationships.

But this notion of authenticity, as we'll see, translates as compliance with revealed biblical truth.

Cardinal Ratzinger tends to see feminists as trouble-makers.

2. Recent years have seen a tendency to emphasize strongly conditions of subordination in order to give rise to antagonism: women, in order to be themselves, must make themselves the adversaries of men. Faced with the abuse of power, the answer for women is to seek power.

In getting out from under male misogeny and discrimination, the anger and despair of some women sometimes does implode into enemy-making, but in choosing as a target this very narrow perspective on feminism, Ratzinger's Letter sets up a straw person to attack. Focusing on a local and transient aspect of the feminist critique looks to be a strategy through which the main thrust of feminist critique, power-sharing, can be side-lined and ignored.  

In order to avoid the domination of one sex or the other, their differences tend to be denied, viewed as mere effects of historical and cultural conditioning. In this perspective, physical difference, termed sex, is minimized, while the purely cultural element, termed gender, is emphasized to the maximum and held to be primary.

This theory of the human person, intended to promote prospects for equality of women through liberation from biological determinism, has in reality inspired ideologies which, for example, call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality.

Feminism does indeed call into question historically unexamined assumptions about how our definitions of gender have installed and maintained the subjugation of women and not uncommonly, other peoples.

the immediate roots of this second tendency are found in the context of reflection on women's roles, its deeper motivation must be sought in the human attempt to be freed from one's biological conditioning. According to this perspective, human nature in itself does not possess characteristics in an absolute manner: all persons can and ought to constitute themselves as they like, since they are free from every predetermination linked to their essential constitution.

Here indeed is the sharp end of the feminist wedge that levers apart the settled, male dominant world of Roman Christianism.

This perspective has many consequences. Above all it strengthens the idea that the liberation of women entails criticism of Sacred Scripture, which would be seen as handing on a patriarchal conception of God nourished by an essentially male-dominated culture.

Having accurately fielded the core of the feminist critique of Roman Christianism, Ratzinger, as with other politically entrenched elites, has a story to tell that justifies and rationalizes these patriarchal male/female power relations. And it is a Big Story.

Second, this tendency would consider as lacking in importance and relevance the fact [my emphasis] that the Son of God assumed human nature in its male form.

The elite story that Roman Christianism tells is one that defines human nature as all such stories tend to do. After reminding us that Jesus was a man, it moves on to elevate this belief to the status of fact, putting men at the head of all queues.

Alongside this, Ratzinger, no slouch at making appetising associations, wheels out 'collaboration' as the proper relation between man and woman (since denial of the biological fact of homosexuality is part of the Christianism, there are only two actors on this stage)

the Church, enlightened by faith in Jesus Christ, speaks instead of active collaboration between the sexes precisely in the recognition of the difference between man and woman.

In support of this, Ratzinger casts what, in the course of this enquiry, I have come to see as a trance induction. The Letter invites the reader to:

“enter into the setting of the biblical ‘beginning'. In it the revealed truth concerning the human person as ‘the image and likeness' of God constitutes the immutable basis of all Christian anthropology’.[my emphasis]4

i.e. to set aside any talent for independent discrimination that may have developed and listen to his story. He continues:

(Gn 2:4-25) confirms in a definitive way the importance of sexual difference. Formed by God and placed in the garden which he was to cultivate, the man, who is still referred to with the generic expression Adam, experienced a loneliness which the presence of the animals is not able to overcome. He needs a helpmate who will be his partner. The term here does not refer to an inferior, but to a vital helper. This is so that Adam's life does not sink into a sterile and, in the end, baneful encounter with himself. It is necessary that he enter into relationship with another being on his own level. Only the woman, created from the same “flesh’ and cloaked in the same mystery, can give a future to the life of the man.

Ratzinger's take on the Adam and Eve story is a form of biblical confectionary that simultaneously entrances while openly declaring the deep thread of domination and subjugation that he seeks rationalize. Strip away the trance and what do we have - Adam feels lonely and in danger of sinking into a sterile and baneful encounter with himself - so he is rescued by his father who sorts him out by bringing on a helpmate - essential because 'only the woman', 'can give a future to the life of a man'.

I feel like stopping here, my task of pointing out the crazy making quality of this story done. This text and all texts like it are engines of subjugation, spells cast to keep in place what is already in place. The vast majority of people who hear the story as it cascades down from Bishops to clergy aren't likely to have the wherewithall to get out from under this kind of trance.

But I'll continue... if we were in any doubt about the the intrinsic value Ratzinger puts on dominion, he dispells it with a re-iteration in passing of the biblical notion of 'subduing the earth':

Is it only a question here of a ‘helper' in activity, in ‘subduing the earth' (cf. Gn 1:28)? Certainly it is a matter of a life's companion with whom, as a wife, the man can unite himself, becoming with her ‘one flesh' and for this reason leaving ‘his father and his mother'(cf. Gn
2:24)’

No sense of irony, or awareness here, or elsewhere, that this is written and felt from a male perspective. If only women do what they should... men will be able to unite themselves and get out from under their parents.

The text moves on to reinforce this notion of women being there for men.

.6“And the man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame’ (Gn 2:25). In this way, the human body, marked with the sign of masculinity or femininity, “includes right from the beginning the nuptial attribute, that is, the capacity of expressing love, that love in which the person becomes a gift and – by means of this gift – fulfils the meaning of his being and his existence’.

Again the writer is up to his elbows in his own trance. No realization that shame might be a historical construction, part of the Christianism toobox. Or that the gift of the capacity to express love, fulfills the meaning of his being and his existence (my emphasis).

Having cast the net of his trance, Ratzinger now pulls in the catch, the notion of 'spousal'. The story of human nature and human relations he has been telling turns round the notion of marriage.

Through this same spousal perspective, the ancient Genesis narrative allows us to understand how woman, in her deepest and original being, exists “for the other’

Hmm. If you have wondered what I mean about trance, here it is. 'Genesis contains the truth about human nature'. But the trance is always in danger of fading, and to thicken the recipe for his version of human nature, Ratzinger introduces original sin.

7. Original sin changes the way in which the man and the woman receive and live the Word of God as well as their relationship with the Creator. Immediately after having given them the gift of the garden, God gives them a positive command (cf. Gn 2:16), followed by a negative one (cf. Gn 2:17), in which the essential difference between God and humanity is implicitly expressed. Following enticement by the serpent, the man and the woman deny this difference. As a consequence, the way in which they live their sexual difference is also upset. In this way, the Genesis account establishes a relationship of cause and effect between the two differences: when humanity considers God its enemy, the relationship between man and woman becomes distorted. When this relationship is damaged, their access to the face of God risks being compromised in turn.