Religion News Service, was, I thought, a news organization pretty sympathetic to faith, but you couldn’t prove it from its article on Wednesday, “Lost in translation? 7 reasons why women wince when Pope Francis starts talking.”
What it shows is what people on this website already know, but many faitheists and even atheists don’t realize: the Pope really does embody all the retrograde doctrine of the Catholic church, and his reputation for being a “new Pope” comes from his few offhand statements that made people think he’s leading the Vatican into a new age of tolerance and modernity.
Well, not when it comes to women. As author David Gibson reports:
But when he speaks about women, Francis can sound a lot like the (almost) 78-year-old Argentine churchman that he is, using analogies that sound alternately condescending and impolitic, even if well-intentioned.
Indeed, Francis has spoken repeatedly of the “feminine genius” and the need for a church to develop “a deeper theology of women,” and of his determination to promote women to senior positions in Rome. He also points out that some of his remarks are meant as jokes, the fruit of a sense of humor that is part of his appeal.
Still, not everyone is amused.
“I am at a loss to see how this could be other than insulting to women who’ve already given up having families of their own to serve God,” The Washington Post’s Melinda Henneberger wrote after a speech in which the pope warned nuns not to become spiritual “old maids.”
And in a Los Angeles Times column this week, New Testament scholar Candida Moss of Notre Dame and Yale Bible professor Joel Baden blasted Francis’ granny comments to the European Parliament as “nothing other than crass chauvinism.”
For all his positive comments and reforms, they said, the pope “reveals a highly patriarchal view” of the value and traditional role of women.
The Pope seems to have an obsession with fostering reproduction (of course, that’s traditional in the Church), but along with that goes his general criticism of what he calls “old maids” and “spinsters”. It’s simply insulting to childless women. Here are a few of the seven quotes that Gibson uses to instantiate Francis’s backwardness on women’s issues:
“Be a mother and not an old maid!”
“Please, let it be a fruitful chastity, a chastity that generates sons and daughters in the church. The consecrated woman is a mother, must be a mother and not an old maid (or “spinster”). … Forgive me for speaking this way, but the motherhood of consecrated life, its fertility, is important.”
— Address to nuns from around the world, May 8, 2013
and
“Europe is a ‘grandmother’, no longer fertile and vibrant.”
“In many quarters we encounter a general impression of weariness and aging, of a Europe which is now a ‘grandmother,’ no longer fertile and vibrant. As a result, the great ideas which once inspired Europe seem to have lost their attraction … “
— Address to the European Parliament, Nov. 25, 2014
and, finally (the article has four others):
“A church that seems more like a spinster than a mother.”
“When the church does not (evangelize), then the church stops herself, is closed in on herself, even if she is well-organized, has a perfect organizational chart, everything’s fine, everything’s tidy — but she lacks joy, she lacks peace, and so she becomes a disheartened church, anxious, sad, a church that seems more like a spinster than a mother, and this church doesn’t work, it is a church in a museum. The joy of the Church is to give birth … “
— Homily at morning Mass, Dec. 9, 2014
Even if two of these are metaphorical, it’s still insensitive. But of course what does the Pope know about women?
h/t: Bruce
