It is fifty years since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, the four year-long meeting of bishops, which brought the Catholic Church into the modern world. Among the signs of the times to which the Council sought to respond was the aspiration for equality on many fronts: among colonial peoples, the poor, minority races, and religious groups.
In identifying the inequalities needing remedy, the Council focused especially on the condition of women. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) declared, “the basic equality of all must receive increasingly greater recognition. . . . [E]very type of discrimination, whether based on sex, race, color, social condition, language or religion, is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God’s intent” (29). It is worth noting that in this highest form of church teaching, sex discrimination is listed as the first sort of inequality to be remedied.
Speaking of fundamental injustices, the Council explained, “Such is the case of a woman who is denied the right and freedom to choose a husband, to embrace a state of life, or to acquire an education or cultural benefits equal to those recognized for men” (29).
According to The Catechism of the Catholic Church, women lead the list of disadvantaged groups who suffer from unemployment and “the profound negative consequences that [unemployment] creates in a personality, and they run the risk of being marginalized within the society, of becoming victims of social inclusion” (2436). “It often happens that work conditions,” the Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine observes, “. . . especially in developing countries are so inhumane, that they are an offense to their dignity and compromise their health” (301).
While Catholic social teaching upholds the equal dignity of women, their right to personal development, equality in the workplace, in education, and in public, its agenda does not always coincide with the development agenda of liberal feminism. Abortion, rather than an expression of freedom, is regarded as a denial of the equal right to life on the part of the unborn, and family is regarded as essential to human ecology and to the overall well-being of society.
With the Special Synod on the Family last year, Pope Francis has opened an opportunity for the whole church, including the faithful, to explore how contemporary social conditions impact the Catholic view of the family and women’s lives. He has also indicated a need to find increased roles for women in church leadership and decision-making.
We can expect to see some pastoral accommodations, like his meetings with transgender persons and marrying couples who had lived out of wedlock. The synod will probably produce some pastoral adaptations attuned to women’s aspirations and needs, but it may take years yet for a fuller theology of women and social development to emerge. That outcome would be eased were there to be places for women in a new synod structure, not to mention a council.
