Papal Upbringing Colors Church Policy on Women

Some American Catholic women have been shocked by what they take to be Pope John Paul’s attitude toward them. During his recent trip he has excluded, yet again, women from ordination, according to the traditional understanding of church history. And he also seemed unenthusiastic, to put it mildly, about women in ministry.

To be fair, John Paul II treats lay men and lay women in much the same way. They have a strictly subordinate place in the church, and cannot aspire to leadership roles. But women are doubly handicapped: they are both women and of the laity.

True, the Pope asserted in Los Angeles the “personal dignity of women--a dignity equal to men’s dignity.” But this equality remains inoperative. Nothing follows from it. For women are said to be “equal but different.”

It is tempting to trace these attitudes to the personal experience of John Paul in Poland. There is a strong sense of sexual differentiation in his native country. Male and female roles are distributed in the traditional manner.

Communism has not changed that. The main difference is that women now do two jobs instead of one--remaining homemakers while being forced to go out to work in factories. John Paul’s contention that work is not necessarily a liberation for women is true enough in the Polish context. It is also true that there is a tradition of educated women in Poland. His own Jagiellonian University of Krakow was founded by Queen Jadwiga, a woman infinitely more cultivated than her brutish husband.

The Znak (sign) Catholic Club in Krakow with which he worked has always had a number of women theologians and writers. The Pope has a special regard for one of them, Halina Bortnowska. He made her a consultor of the Vatican ecumenical office. So he is not against women playing a role in the church--provided that they remember their place.

John Paul took his values, like anyone else, from his family. But the oddity of the Wojtyla family was that it was without women. His mother died when he was 9. She had told him of a sister, who died six years before his birth. His older brother, a doctor, caught an infection from one of his patients and died, thus removing any hopes of nephews and nieces. His father died when he was 20. Since then he has been alone.

So when John Paul talks of family life he is speaking of something that he did not really experience. In a rare confidence he revealed that his mother “wanted two sons--one a doctor and one a priest, and in spite of everything I have become a priest.”

Did the lack of any feminine presence in the household lead to the idealization of Mary, the mother of Jesus? One cannot put the Pope on a psychiatrist’s couch to find out. But certainly he always claims that Mary is the only truly liberated woman--she said a total yes to God--and the model of womanhood.

I conclude that differences between the Pope and many American women owe more to culture than to theology. That does not make them any less painful, but at least it locates the real problem.