The ThinkND Podcast
The ThinkND Podcast
True Genius: The Mission of Women in Church and Culture, Part 1: The Church's Vision for Women
Episode Topic: The Church's Vision for Women
Thirty years ago, in both Evangelium Vitae and his Letter to Women, Pope John Paul II issued a clear call for the genius of women to be “more fully expressed in the life of society as a whole, as well as in the life of the Church” (Letter to Women 10). Throughout his papacy, in fact, he emphasized women’s “prophetic character,” calling on them to be “witnesses” and “sentinels” — guardians of the sacred gift of life and the order of love (Mulieris Dignitatem 29; Homily at Lourdes 2004). “The Church’s Vision for Women,” presented by Angela Franks, took place at the McGrath Institute for Church Life conference True Genius: The Mission of Women in Church and Culture at the University of Notre Dame in March 2025, developed by Abigail Favale, Ph.D., Professor of the Practice, Theology & Literature, at the McGrath Institute for Church Life.
Featured Speakers:
- Abigail Favale, professor, University of Notre Dame
- Angela Franks, St. John's Seminary, Boston
Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/f9588d.
This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled True Genius: The Mission of Women in Church and Culture.
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Thank you so much, Abigail. I'm really honored to be here. This is a great crowd. to the men, I affirm you in your masculine genius. We're glad you're here. I affirm the babies as well. I've taught whole classes and given talks holding babies, so it's like comforting white noise when I hear babies. so my task is to, is a small one to lay out the church's vision for women. And I wanna start with, let me make sure I'm actually forwarding. Yay. I wanna start with the question that, I want us to think about that I'm gonna come back to at the end why women, I almost named this talk the gratuity of women, but it made, it sounded like we were tips or something. So like that I, how to make that work. But, but this is question, right? Why women. So I'm gonna start with scripture, and I'm just gonna go over some passages very briefly and we'll circle back to them at the end. So the most important one to start with is from Genesis one, which is extremely important. Genesis 1 27 in particular. So God created humankind in his image. In the image of God or the Imago De, he created them. Male and female, he created them. So there you have maleness and femaleness being part of our imago nature, but you also have the fact that God gives the first couple dominion over the earth, which means they get to share in God's creative power over the earth in Genesis two, in the second creation account. We have this, interesting moment where God says it is not good that the man should be alone. So John Paul two calls this original solitude and he, and so God continues, I will make him a helper. So my translation said as his partner, other translations say, suitable for him, which is rendering the Hebrew term Zer. And then when the woman is created, the man says this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. And then that last verse there is quoted more than once in the New Testament. Therefore, a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife and they become one flesh. one of the things to note right away is that. Ezra Conecto does not mean a helper in, in a primarily menial way. It doesn't mean the man needed somebody to organize his sock drawer and clean his dishes right. Though maybe he needs that too. But the real point here, the one of the, one of the key ways that Ezra is used in the Hebrew scriptures is to talk about the God of Israel as Israel's help, right? So it means something in a more profound kind of way. We'll come back to that also. When we turn to Jesus, what we see are his words and actions. And so John Paul two and Mure as a whole chapter on Jesus' interactions with women. So I'm just singling out one thing here, which is his interaction with the woman at the well in John four. So he has this really, this theological disputation with him, with her, where there's this back and forth between them. And when the apostles came, they were astonished that he was speaking with a woman. Which is a typical way in which people respond to how Jesus treats women. It's with, they're astonished because he's so free of the cultural, baggage that might be there. and Mau in speaking about how Jesus, interacts with women, he calls it a gospel of Jesus' words and deeds, and that it is a consistent protest against whatever offends the dignity of women. So like John, I'm gonna accent there a little bit. So when I have JP two up on the slide, the italics are his, he loves italics, they're everywhere. the bold is my emphasis. Okay. so Jesus is consistently protesting against, actions and words and ideas that offend women's dignity. So let's go quickly to Paul. Galatians 3 28 is one of the most significant verses in this regard, where Paul writes, there is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer male or female for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. So it's quite clear from even just the context of Galatians that Paul, it does not mean literally that there's no more maleness or femaleness. But that what he's referring to is that Jesus's work of salvation has a kind of democratic reality to it. So in the ninth century, the Council of Kei is going to affirm that Jesus died for all people past, present, and future, right? And so that's what Paul here is underlining. And then one of the most important texts that we'll come back to as well is Ephesians five. All right, so it begins with verse 21 where he says, be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. That's a really important context that underlies what he says Next, wives, be subject to your husbands for the husband is the head of the wife. If so, his exer to the women's fairly short. He has a pretty lengthy exhortation to the men. Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Continuing in the same way husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. For he who loves his wife, loves himself, for no one ever hates his own body. So John Paul, two points out how counter-cultural this is in the context of Roman matrimony and family. And so Paul's continuing in this way talking about marriage, talking about it related to Christ in the church, but then he says something surprising. This is a great mystery and I am applying it to Christ in the church. you're reading it, you're pretty sure he is talking about marriage, but he says there's a great mystery here that applies to Christ in the church. So we'll look at that. Okay? What I wanna do now is hopefully give a brief history of the church's vision for women. And there's two principles that I want us to keep in mind. one of those is that doctrine develop. Okay? And the Newman is the classic source for understanding this, but it's like a flower, right? the flower is the seed, it is the seedling, it is the flower, right? So doc doctrinal development does not mean that doctrine changes. The church does not say the opposite of what she said in previous centuries, but it does mean that there's a deeper understanding that grows precisely because of the pressure of questions, the pressure of heresies. So similar but really not quite the same is the IS practices. So if doctrine develops, practices, adapt. This can mean that you have a more significant about faith. So one example of this that I won't have time to talk more about is that, after the Council of Trent, a little bit after the church began, or Catholic dioceses began to incorporate into the marriage vows, a vow of obedience for the woman. So it wasn't just an exhortation, but she was owing to say love, cherish and obey your husband. why? in part because the Protestant churches had done it first, the Protestant denominations. and so likely this was like responding to like more Protestantized environment. when you get to around the time of the second Vatican counsel, the church reverses that. Removes that vow for obedience. And I think it might still be there as an exhortation. I can't remember. But that's an example of practices just changing, right? Something is added then it's taken away and it's done usually because of circumstances inside and outside of the church. Okay, so then let's go to a bit of a history. I don't really, I'm not really gonna talk about Platonism. Let's just quickly talk about Aristotelian and I'm making it an ism and not, Aristotle himself. because this is a large school that has, impact in the history of the church. So Aristo emphasizes the body, soul unity, which is also called polymorphism. Because the body is important for Aristotelian bodily sex differences are significant. They're more significant than, they are in Platonism, for example. the way, however that this was explained tends to what Sister Prudence Allen calls sex polarity, which means essentially an understanding of inequality where the man has the fuller, exercise of human nature and the human powers compared to the woman. you also have in his politics, the, an understanding of you. You might know the natural slave. but there's two other categories that he talks about of people that are naturally ruled. So he talks about the natural slave, the woman and the child. So he doesn't say that the woman is simply a natural slave. She has like a higher kind of, intellectual ability than that. But she's in a sim, she's in the genus, if not the species of natural slave. How does, how does early Christianity develop within this context? You first of all have the examples of the female martyrs who are giving this example of what people sometimes call like manly courage in, in the face of persecution. You also have female monasteries or even more informal groupings of female celibates. And in those contexts, they were frequently taught to read because they had to read the Bible. And so you have the beginning of female education. very counter culturally. Celibacy becomes the highest calling for both men and women. so a celibacy meaning being unmarried. And sister Prudence notes in her history that in, as you look at Christian thinkers, the more that they had acquaintance with educated women, the more likely they were to believe that women could think at a level as men could. They mostly believed men. Women could think, but that the idea that they could think at the level that men could was, was a little more difficult to find universally. So we have this interesting statement. This is actually a Christian apologist who's de, I think, describing what people are saying about Christians, that there's this promiscuous brotherhood and sisterhood, a kind of religious lust, whatever that is. and, but I think what's being observed by people outside of Christianity is an unusual degree of closeness and interaction between men and women where their worlds were less segregated than in the pagan worlds. by the time you get to the Middle Ages, Aristotelian, which has not necessarily been the dominant, philosophical framework, by the high Middle Ages, Aristotelian returns in particular for our topic, is the importance of the Aristotelian biology. And so what gets translated into Latin is the understanding of the woman as ma o. Which is translated into English. Sometimes misbegotten a misbegotten male. Some people prefer the translation accidentally caused male. I'm not gonna get into that debate'cause it's not my area, but, but you can see that there's a, an overarching framework that presents the woman as, as somehow deficient compared to the man. This occasions a lot of, satires literary satires against women that, say pretty awful things about women. one person who responds to that is Christine De Pison, who lived, is writing primarily in the 15th century. She's probably the first woman that we know of to support herself by writing because she was a widow, she needed to. She really used Aristotle against himself. She knew Aristotle well because she had translated Thomas's commentary into the vernacular French, his commentary on Aristotle's metaphysics. And what she emphasized is that superiority is not found in a bio, in, in how you reproduce or in a biological framework, but that superiority, a human superiority is through virtue. A superior human is more virtuous, and she believed that women were as capable of virtue and of all of the virtues as men. One thing I wanna call your attention to that I haven't really figured out how it plays into this question, but maybe somebody's done research on this. in 1537, Pope Paul II issued the Bull MOUs de, which was responding to the discovery of the new world and the discovery of people in the new world and what, what is their status. Are they Aristotelian natural slaves? Do they have to be forced into baptism or can they freely accept the faith? And so he ruled that they had the natures and faculties to accept the faith and that whoever is thus endowed should be capable of receiving that same faith. And so therefore, they're truly men, truly human beings. So my sense is that this is part of the development of doctrine that leads, that the church begins to apply this idea to women as well. In a more official way, though, like I don't really have proof for this. But it's interesting in Muir Asig ham that John Pauli using Galatians 3 28, compares the development of abolishing slavery in some way to the abolishment, hopefully of the subjection of women. But he doesn't really connect the dots, but, but it's my sense that this is part of the development of doctrine that's happening within the church. The major event in modernity, early modernity for the churches, of course the Protestant Reformation, and then the Council of Trent. and there's a couple things to note here. for one, Trent mandates enclosure or cloistered, life for women religious and the catechism for the Council of Trent, which frequently gets quoted online by. This is not the pronouncements of the council. It's just the catechism. And it states that unless compelled by necessity to go abroad, women should willingly keep themselves at home and should never venture to leave home without the permission of their husbands. So what yeah. It's how would that work exactly? what is that, that there's a similar framework being applied to both women religious and to married women. there's a kind of framework of enclosure being applied. Already around the time of Trent, and definitely after this framework was not working very well for women religious because you had the Sisters of Loretto, you had the Daughters of Charity who are in the picture there. You had what we would call more active forms of religious life that were struggling to be accepted by the church. this acceptance happens in a formal way in 1900 by Pope Leo the 13th, who issues a bull that allows for. Active forms of female consecrated life. And so again, this I think is a development, somewhat of doctrine, but probably more development of practice that I think what's happening for female religious should also, and probably is also happening for married women. Where we're the understanding becomes that enclosure is not required for the female situation. A hilarious example of this is Theresa Avila. This is the Pap nuncio writing about her. She leaves her cloister against the decrees of the Council of Trent. She teaches theology as though she were a doctor of the church. This did not age well, this quote. So in when, in 1970, Paul, the six named her a doctor of the church? Probably not because of Felipe Sega, but, John Paul too said it was a sign of the time. And so that's again, doctrinal development language, but also an example of, practices changing. when I was doing this slide, I was like, I have to find a picture of St. Teresa looking ticked off. It was not hard either. All right. What happened more recently? in the history of the church, when you really wanna talk about doctrine, about teaching about women, you really have to look at the recent magisterium. By which, really the last a hundred years, you could extend it maybe to the last 150 years. why has there been so much doctrinal development that really was not happening in the early years? The most important thing I, in the wider society to point to is the impact of the industrial Relu revolution. And, this, I'm drawing from Erica Baki, who's here. There, I see her. so you can ask her lots of questions about this. it's really the industrial revolution that causes movements for women's rights or for feminism. It, that's the social, and so to understand this is simplifying quite a bit, but if you just think about non aristocrats, basically everybody is working at home. sometimes people will be like, the traditional way, like of how, you know we should order work and family and stuff is that the men leave the house to work and the women stay home with the family. That's an industrial post-industrial revolution way of looking at it, because it's was not the case prior to the industrial revolution that women did not work. They just didn't leave their house to work, but the men didn't very often either, right? everybody is, you basically, you have an economic system of cottage industries, like literally, like in your cottage, you're making, you're weaving cloth, for example, that you might sell. With the industrial Revolution. Now, if you're going to work outside of the. And this is no longer a family friendly environment because first of all, now you can't make money by selling the cloth you weave because the mills are doing it a lot more cheaply than you are. So that's taken away from you. But you also can't bring your baby who could otherwise toddle around under your loom. You can't bring your baby to the factory floor, right? And so now you start to have this public private divide that's enforced where if you're going to work, you have to leave. So this is really hard on the families. and the other thing that's happening simultaneously is that the rise of kind of theoretical and practical socialism, is conveying against marriage in the family. And so there, the church recognizes that now she has to like, defend and explore marriage and therefore the meaning of women better. All right, so let's turn to the recent magisterium. I'm gonna focus on John Paul, the two, the second. one reason, people are like, you just talk about JP two all the time'cause you like him and I do. But, it's true, but really like you can't really talk about the churches teaching on women unless, this is the magisterial development. So if you're not talking about John Pauli, you're not talking about the church's real teaching on women. the, it isn't begins with Vatican two, so it doesn't initiate with his papacy. we have the closing, address to women that Paul the Six gives where he says that the church is proud to have glorified and liberated women to have brought into relief her basic equality with man, and evokes an hour coming, which is language that, JP two will draw on. What in the recent magistarium are three principles. Not necessarily these words, but these ideas. So the first is essential equality. And essential there means it's not just a vague adjective, it means equality in our human essence or nature, that we have the same nature and therefore men and women are equal in nature. the second is reproductive asymmetry, which I also get from, from Erica. This is more generally expressed as like sexual differentiation. In other words, male and female are bodily different. the, I like reproductive asymmetry because it, it emphasizes the, the generative differences in our bodies, which is why male and female are different. Male and maleness. And femaleness goes down to our bodily abilities to reproduce in one of two different ways. But it's asymmetrical because women, in generating bear more of the privileges, but also more of the burdens because it's only the man generates outside of himself. The woman carries a baby. breastfeeds a baby is like more emotionally involved with her baby, right? And so the, demands made on the woman in human generation are more significant. And then lastly, there's a symbolic differentiation, which I will talk more about, but it's gonna go back to Ephesians five in Christ in the church. I wanna start in talking about John Paul two by talking about his philosophy. I just published an essay in Church Life Journal on Person and act, and in line with the woman question. So if this interests you, you can check that out. love and responsibility, which is, I think it was a 19, late fifties. Am I remembering that right? I'm looking at Deborah. Okay. Some 61. Anyways, earlier it is earlier than person and Act. one of the things that he talks about there, he presents two aspects of the human person. He talks about sensuality and affectivity, which you can think of as roughly emotions. that these are the raw material for love. Everybody has them. But women are more likely in our sinful condition, are more likely to abuse and use others for affectivity, right? So a woman is more likely to sleep with a guy so that she'll, he'll say, I love you, right? It's like the affective stuff is more likely to be the end game. Whereas men are more likely to use and abuse others for sensuality and domination. So a man is more likely to say, I love you in order that he can get her to sleep with him. And so there's are, there's dual patterns of sinfulness, but they tend to fall into kind of sexual averages. And the goal of course is integration and wholeness. You're not stamping out any of these, but you're integrating them. In person in act, he talks about the personal structure of self-determination, and so that means that the person by his or her very structure is ordered to form himself in order to determine himself to be a certain kind of person. So in other words, through your thoughts and actions, you become a better person or a worse person. And only you can do that for yourself, right? Nobody can be virtuous for you. You have to be virtuous, right? And in being virtuous, that's you determine yourself in a certain way. so this structure is incommunicable to another. Meaning again, another person cannot do this for you. If you don't do it, you don't develop the way a human being should develop. And as part of this process, intellect and freedom are essential. This. This idea in the theology of the body becomes what he's gonna call original solitude. The idea that the human person just has this rational, free, creative structure that enables her to form herself as a virtuous or as vicious. Another thing that comes up in a person and act when he is talking about social relations is this idea of opposition, which for him is not negative. He says that people just contend with one another. Why? Because they are precisely because they're concerned about the common good. Obviously this can be negative, but we all have a concern, a rifle concern about the common good that makes us argue about how to achieve it, and he gives the example of parents. Parents contend with each other because they're concerned about how to best educate their children. We must deem such opposition, constructive cultures need that kind of opposition. So this is very interesting because there's a lot of current Catholic rhetoric that implies that opposition is, if it's coming from the woman, is just simply bad, right? That it's the man's job to rule and it's the woman's job to obey. And if she doesn't agree, she just, Has to deal with it. And it's considered a sign of pride to contend against your husband. And John pulls you saying, no, this is what healthy communities do and this is what parents do, they have to do this. So I think this is a really, helpful idea. Okay. In ging it sp, which is in the second Vatican Council, there's a few important ideas for our purposes. First of all, the male and female formed the original Communo person, which is Latin for communion of persons, the original unity of persons and number 24 emphasizes that all human communions of persons are based on the Trinity, which is a communion of persons. J two quote 24. All the time. He probably wrote. So he knows it pretty well. and the thing that he quotes all the time is that, middle, first middle bullet point there, man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of self. So the human person is fulfilled through self-gift. And this is what we do within communions of persons that we give and we receive gifts. And Malia said, men and women are called. Yes, to exist side by side or together, but they're also called to exist mutually, one for the other, and he provides an interesting reinterpretation of the zerto, the fact that the woman is the help to the man. He says The woman must help the man, and he in turn must help her. First of all, by the very fact of there being human persons. So the fact that both male and female fulfill themselves in self-gift means that they both need to be helpers to each other and giving of themselves to each other. all I wanna point out a place where JP two explicitly uses the phrase essentially equality. MD and on the slide refers to MA as digt. He says both men and women are human beings to an equal degree because they're both in the image of God. So this is the essential equality of man and woman, but he does believe in their sexual difference, which is rooted in the body. so the as how people reproduce. It's very interesting though, especially in theology of the body. He refers to sexual difference, not only as a brute biological fact, but also as a. That's really important. J two language that most people haven't paid attention to. more or less for John Pauli. Everything that before the fall is natural and easy. After the fall, it becomes a task. It's something that we have to work at doing. We need grace for doing, and this is especially true for whatever pertains to the communion of persons. So he writes, in TOB, the creator has assigned the body to man as a task. Our bodies are tasks the body in its masculinity and femininity and in masculinity and femininity. He assigned to him in some way his own humanity as a task. what would be easier than just being embodied, being human, being male or female. You'd think this, these are just brute facts. And they are, there's part of what we receive, but after the fall, they become tasks, right? We, just because we are a woman or human does not mean we're an excellent woman or an excellent human, right? And so these things all become tasks. Another move that he makes is to, which is not unprecedented, but he's very clear about this, that Genesis three 16, which are sometimes referred to as the curses of the punishments after the fall. He reframes those as predictions. This is where God is predicting to Adam Eve the consequences of what their life is going to be like now that they have fallen. And so the verse says, your desire shall be for your husband. God's talking to Eve, and he shall rule over you. So we see, especially in love and responsibility, not so much in his magisterial teaching how he thinks both man and women are fallen in their reciprocal relations. In his magisterial teaching, he really emphasizes what you see here. familiar asig that this threat is more serious for the woman. And he says it's more serious because she loses the stability. She can't rely upon the fact that they are of equal natures. That gets called into question in some way. So it is not just curses though, it's not just bad things after the fall. both men and women retain a masculine genius and a feminine genius. He really does not talk about the masculine genius very much. You did not miss it. It's really not there. But there's other places that you know, where this is being worked on, especially. Deborah Savage over here does good work on that. but he talks a lot about the feminine genius. So he says that. the rightful opposition of women to male domination. So he says, we women are obviously opposed for good reason to male domination, but it must not under any condition lead to the masculinization of women. The personal resources of femininity are no less than those of masculinity. They're just different. Okay, so the goal is not that we become men, but that we d drill down more deeply into the feminine genius. So what does that consist of? He says there's two dimensions that it manifests itself. The women's vocation manifests itself in motherhood and in virginity. But those are, in a sense, those can coexist, not the the way they do in Mary, obviously, where they literally coexist, but in every woman they can in some way coexist. So for JP two, virginity means the spousal gift of yourself to God. And motherhood means the nurturing of life, right? And so this can be a bodily as well as spiritual reality, but in a sense, for all women, this is also called to be a spiritual reality. And so he says it a little more clearly later that the feminine genius is that God entrusts the human being to her in a special way. And when we're just drilling down on progress, we can lose sight of the human being. We can get all caught up in numbers and algorithms and so forth. but that what we need, especially in our age, is to be focused on the human being. So in order for women to do this, they have to have certain rights. And so around the time of the UN Conference for Women, there was a press release where this was, spelled out really, clearly I don't think an Italian right to choose has the same resonance that it does in English. But, the English translationally says the A woman has the right to choose between having a profession, being simultaneously a mother, and carrying on a profession. And being a mother and dedicating all of her activity to the home. if you think about, I've actually done all three of these just not simultaneously, right? this is true of a lot of women. This is like roughly describes kind of their life cycle, if they get married, for example. So he is recognizing that these are should be options available to all women. And this comes out more, in a more verbose way in the letter to women, the passage that, John Cini alluded to where he thanks women. So thanks to women, to every woman for all they represent in the life of humanity. And you have the usual suspects. You've got consecrated women and mothers, but you also have women who work. You have sisters. it's an interesting, it's an interesting mix. so if you can read that passage if you're interested, but he's clearly trying to say that. All paths are open to women. The question is what is your call, right? Are you called to be a mother? Are you called to work? Are you called to be a consecrated religious? And that's the real question for him. What does he say about marriage? So marriage is built upon now. The sexual difference really comes to the forefront or the reproductive asymmetry in marriage. but it's still rooted in the essential equality between man and woman. I wanna call your attention to an interesting thing he says in love and responsibility. It's in, he has this, it's really actually funny, has this appendix dedicated to sexology. and in the translation into French, the French bishop said, you can translate it, but not the appendix. I was like, for France, really I dunno. But, one of the things that he says, it's really worth reading, it's really interesting. One of the things that he says there, is that he can use, I think the translation says sexual fity. he says In women, it is almost always traceable to a fear of pregnancy. And his advice is not, suck it up buttercup. have as many kids as you can, get over yourself. It's really interesting. What he says is the husband has to alleviate this fear, like the burden is on the husband because a woman will reasonably be afraid of pregnancy if she does not have the support to bear and raise a child. And so the husband is the one who has to give her the environment of. Psychological, financial, all kinds of support so that she can be relieved of this fear of pregnancy, which I think is a really JP two typical way of thinking. and so he says, this is in sources of renewal. Marriage is not just a partnership, but it is an ought to be a real communo persona. Communion of persons be because a is always an ethical reality. It doesn't just happen magic. You have to work at it. You have to be good human beings to create this communion of persons. And so marriage in this sense. oh yeah. So he talks about the passage in some detail from Paul. Ephesians 5 21 on mutual submission or mutual subjection. And in Matomy says, this is the gospel innovation verse 21. And so he notes that the, the exhortation to women to be subject to your husbands, he says is quote, profoundly rooted in the customs and religious tradition of the time, but to be understood and carried out in a new way. So there you see this practice element, right? Where in, in, conversation with the culture, some things are taken up, but they're baptized and transformed. And so he emphasizes, whereas in the relationship between Christ and the church, the subjection is only on the part of the church, right? We simply, as Christians, obey Christ. It's a one-way street. He says in the relationship between husband and wife, the subjection is not one-sided, but mutual. And so that's this idea of a communion of persons where you have parents contending with each other on the best way to raise your children. And this is also then spelled out in Paul, when he talks about the great mystery. And so this is where J two says, you get this symbolic de differentiation between man and woman. So what is it that the woman symbolizes? He says, all human beings, both women and men, are called through the church to be the bride of Christ in this way being the bride. And thus the feminine element becomes a symbol of all that is human. So the bride is, as we're gonna see, the one who receives love, right? And so for all human beings, we receive the love of Christ first and foremost. We receive the love of God for being created at all. And then we receive the grace of Christ to, be redeemed. And so women in their receptive capacity, symbolically image, all of humanity. And this is, expressed most beautifully in the Eucharist, where you have this, it's the sacrament of the bridegroom giving his body over for the life of the bride. And so in his understanding, the ministerial hierarchy, which he strongly affirms, is for men only. He said it is totally ordered to the holiness of all Christ's members or the hierarchy of holiness in which Mary is the preeminent one. So the ministerial priesthood is reserved to men, but the most important hierarchy is this hierarchy of holiness in which we have Mary as preeminent. And so in this picture, you see the church now as being Christ's e our Cano, the helper made suitable to him. So I'm gonna circle back to my original question of why woman. And the first answer I wanna propose to you, which other people are gonna talk about in this conference in more detail, is Mary, who, according to John Vol, two exhibits, active cooperation. Is not passive, right? She is asked and she exhibits active cooperation with God's grace and that leads her to become a fruitful mother. In the church's archeological tradition, so theological reflection on Mary, the word soia is often used to describe her, which is the Latin translation, I believe, in the Vulgate of the Zer Kdo. So Mary is companion that Mary is both mother and socia or companion. And JP two writes he who, so he's first quoting Augustine. He who created you without your help, will not save you without your cooperation. God assigned the principle creaturely role in this work of salvation to the mother of Christ, Alma Soya. Christie. So first of all, why do we have women, right? if you think about it, God could have made human beings to reproduce a sexually, right? Or he could have made us to reproduce with, there could have just been one sex and we double our partner pool, right? If we didn't reproduce sexually, right? So why would he have. Two sexes, right? that's the gratuity of it that I'm trying to get at. And so what Mary shows us is that God always wants, a companion, right? He always wants a creature. A creature who's giving active cooperation. and so the two sexes of man and woman symbolize this. He calls this, in Malig, also in theology of the body, AISM, which is his neologism prophet. So he says, what's the truth about the woman as bride? The bride broom is the one who loves. That's what's in Paul, right? That the man is exhorted to love. The bride is loved. It is she who receives love in order to love in return. So he's drawing on Paul. He's drawing to some degree on Genesis two, but Paul himself is probably drawing on the fact that biologically reproductively the woman generates by receiving, right? But that receiving is an act of receiving because she then actively generates and loves in return. And so this symbolic reality of being the one who receives love is, is a message for all human beings about how it is that we are supposed to interact with God and with Christ. So he continues the analogy of the bridegroom and the bride speaks of the love with which every human being, man and woman is loved by God in Christ. It is precisely the woman, the bride, who manifests this truth to everyone. So you'll sometimes get like online discourse, like why do we even need weapon? Like we could just, move a lot of heavy rocks and build stuff and what do women contribute anyway? and JP two would be like, yes, they, that, that's the point, right? we're not strong in the way that men are. It's not that like we have a clear cut utilitarian purpose to Still big buildings or something like that. what women prophesy in their very bodies and their very being is that we receive love in order to give love in return. And that's, by the way, what we should all be. Including the men who can move heavier rocks, which good for you because I can't, but Right. But but we can take like our, if it's really easy, if you're a man to double down on agency because you're really good at taking initiative and doing stuff. And what women symbolize is that's not the primary truth about the human being. So to conclude, in other words, God wants our active cooperation, right? This is he. He saves us not simply on his own, but in partnership with the church. He did not have to create a church. He could have saved us without sacraments, right? He could have given those graces another way. He always wants that companion, that creaturely active involvement. And so that is what the women, what women symbolizes, and that is therefore the true genius of women. So with that, I'll conclude. Thank you.