Vatican City — The Vatican assailed radical feminism for what it views as efforts to erase differences between men and women, warning in a document released Saturday that the movement threatens the traditional family based on a mother and a father.
Such a push for equality, the Vatican said, makes “homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality.”
The warning came in a 37-page document addressed to bishops on the role of women in the church, the latest effort in a Vatican campaign to protect what it calls the Christian family. It has previously denounced same-sex marriages and called on politicians of all religions to block their legal recognition.
Drawn up by the Vatican's orthodoxy chief Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and approved by the Pope, the document reiterates the Roman Catholic Church's prohibition on women becoming priests but said this in no way hampers a woman's access “to the heart of Christian life.”
Reflecting the Pope's positions during his 25-year papacy, the document said women should not be stigmatized or penalized financially for wanting to be housewives. “Indeed, a just valuing of the work of women within the family is required.”
But it also said that women who choose to work should be granted an appropriate work schedule and “not have to choose between relinquishing their family life or enduring continual stress.”
The document reserved its toughest language for what it called recent “new approaches to women's issues,” saying an emerging tendency is 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.”
“The obscuring of the difference or duality of the sexes has enormous consequences on a variety of levels,” the document said, asserting it has inspired ideologies that “call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father.”
It also warned of challenges to fundamentals of church teaching, saying the blurring of differences “would consider as lacking in importance and relevance the fact that the Son of God assumed human nature in its male form.”
The document — “On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church in the World” — addressed what it said were “certain currents of thought which are often at variance with the authentic advancement of women.”
Instead, what the church seeks is “active collaboration between the sexes precisely in the recognition of the difference between man and woman.”
In stressing that men and women are different, the document said, “From the first moment of their creation, man and woman are different, and will remain so for eternity.”
But it said the “temporal and earthly expression of sexuality is transient,” and cited Scripture suggesting that a married couple's existence in heaven would be celibate.
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