Saturday, June 02, 2012

The Vatican Gives A Voice To Women!


In a newspaper:

The Vatican's official newspaper is for the first time in its 150-year history publishing an all-colour women's supplement "to give voice to the value that women bring to the church".
Women, Church, World will be edited by women and published with L'Osservatore Romano, the newspaper founded in 1861 and published by the Holy See on the last Thursday of every month.
The new section will promote a keener understanding of the "under-appreciated treasure" of women in the church, according to editor Giovanni Maria Vian.


....




The pullout will compete with L'Osservatore Romano's stories explaining the Vatican's approach to women, from its views on abortion to condemnation of female ordination.

This comes right at the heels of the Vatican  War Against Uppity Nuns and from a church which has declared female ordination a very grave sin.  All of which would be utterly delicious to an alien from outer space.

But the story can also be autopsied to get wider understanding of how the world in general has responded to feminism:  Give women a supplement of their own so that they will leave the rest of the culture be in peace!  Thus, we get the women's pages in newspapers and the Women's Studies in universities.

Wait a few decades, and what happens?  Men's Rights Activists yell and scream about the preferential treatment women get!  There are no men's pages in newspapers!  There are no Male Studies at universities!

Women get both what men get and then all that extra.  That, say,  the Vatican official newspaper might be a Boys' Own Paper goes unnoticed.

I would have preferred a true integration of the so-called women's concerns to the separate-but-equal-although-a-supplement approach.  For those reasons and for also the reason that women are half the humanity.  And half of the Catholic Church.

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Meanwhile, read Digby on what the Catholic Church otherwise thinks about women.  Trigger warning for rape applies.