THERE was a time when progressive Catholic women badgered the Church to integrate women into priesthood and fire homosexual priests, apparently because of the dwindling number of manly men entering the seminaries.
The Pope at that time, Benedict XVI, answered with a cryptic reminder: “My real program of governance is not to do my own will, not to pursue my own ideas, but to listen, together with the whole Church.”
What did he mean? That it’s not his but God’s will that women refrain from priesthood?
And that God prefers “half-women” or homosexuals to he-men?
With that question in mind, I once asked the opinion of Dr. Michael Tan – Anthropology professor at the UP-Diliman – who was our lecturer in a seminar on misogyny in Antipolo City.
He answered jokingly: “Fire the homosexuals? Then there would only be half of the priests left.”
Dr. Tan wondered why the Church seemed tolerant of the gays in the clergy but prejudicial against women. Then he proceeded to blame seven “early church fathers” for misogyny, handing down to succeeding generations their sexist treatment of women. I would like to summarize from my notes what he said.
Tan cited Tertulian (150-225 AD), a North African theologian, for calling woman “the devil’s gateway who still bears the curse of God on Eve.”
St. Ambrose (339-397 AD), as Bishop of Milan, imputed second-class status on woman because “she was only a rib taken out of Adam’s body.”
St. John Chrysostom (347-407 AD), Bishop of Constantinople, called woman “an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil for the man.” He urged men not to marry.
St. Augustine (354-450 AD) blamed Eve for the “original sin.” Adam could not have eaten of the forbidden fruit had Eve, the only one who succumbed to the serpent’s deception, not transgressed first. Thus, Augustine hyped his conversion to Christianity as “a vocation of celibacy.”
St. Albertus Magus (1200-1280), Dominican theologian, openly despised women in a sermon: “When a woman has relation with a man, she would like, as much as possible, to be lying with another man at the same time. Woman knows nothing about fidelity.”
To St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), “women symbolize decay, deformity and the weakness of the age.”
Pope Gregory I, who reigned from 590 to 604 AD, is badly remembered for his idea that the woman was fit only for either harlotry or maternity. Despite that, he was later canonized as St. Gregory the Great.}
If the aforementioned pillars of the Catholic faith were to resurface today and repeat what they said in their time, today’s women would probably stone them to death.
Another speaker in the same forum, Fr. Percy Bacani begged to disagree as far as he was concerned. He revealed that he had fallen in love with a luscious young woman who showed signs of reciprocity.
However, when we asked him to go on with specific details, he whispered. “Secret….” (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
