Often, we Catholics think we belong to a Church that doesn’t change—at least not when it comes to the really important fundamentals like faith and morals. We tend to think that “the truth” is something the Church has always been in possession of since the beginning. For this reason, we sometimes think that to be Catholic means to keep doing and thinking what has always been done and thought. The past is something to be defended against the future. In this view, “change,” is something that seems both and impossible and very bad—more like corruption and degeneration than development. However, in reality, the truth is more complicated than that. The church not only has changed, but also sometimes it must change not only because we must apply timeless truths to a changing historical reality, but also because we are a pilgrim people in the fullest sense. The truth is something we are always seeking but never fully in possession of. As even Thomas Aquinas recognized, only God and the angels “have the entire knowledge of a thing at once and perfectly.” Human beings must instead submit themselves to “the process” of knowledge, which is completed only eschatologically. For this reason, Aquinas insists the investigation of natural law necessarily “proceeds…[not just] over a long time” but also “with the admixture of many errors.”
When we look at the history of the Church’s teaching on women, we will see an example both of the reality of change and of its necessity. In this post, I will be looking at one aspect of the Church’s understanding of marriage.
For most of the tradition, the Church taught that the subjection of woman to man in marriage was divinely ordained and therefore unchangeable. Now, in a remarkable reversal of traditional teaching, the church teaches that marriage is a union of equals. What for hundreds of years the Church thought was a divinely commanded part of the natural law, it now rejects as an untruth, incompatible with human dignity.
In his work “Soliloquys,” Augustine argues that inequality is proper to marriage: while “he [the man] rules by wisdom, she [the woman] is ruled by man for Christ is the head of the man, and the man is the head of the woman.” It is for this reason, rather than because of an innate longing for female companionship (as Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI would insist), that “it is not good that man is alone.”
Augustine considers subjection to be more essential to the relationship between man and woman than even sexual intercourse since “there could have been in both sexes, even without [sexual] intercourse, a kind of friendly and genuine union of the one ruling and the other obeying.” That sexual intercourse and heterosexual desire are not essential to masculinity or femininity for Augustine is affirmed by his belief that in the resurrection women’s bodies will “be free of the necessity of intercourse and childbirth” and they “will not excite the lust of the beholder.” It is important to note that Augustine’s definition of lust is much broader than contemporary understandings—for Augustine, lust included not just sexual desire that objectifies the other, but also sexual desire itself.
While for Augustine maleness and femaleness are bodily, unlike JPII, he does not believe heterosexuality to be the ultimate or even essential meaning of this bodily difference since he argues “if [men with children] could be shown a way of having children without sexual intercourse, wouldn’t they embrace such a blessing with unspeakable joy?” (One can only assume that Augustine would rejoice in the invention of artificial insemination!) This is radically different from the teaching of John Paul II, who argues “the body, in as much as it is sexual, expresses the vocation of man and woman to reciprocity which is to love and to the mutual gift of self.”
Aquinas affirms Augustine’s teaching on the necessity of the subjection of woman to man in marriage when he writes, “because in man the discretion of reason naturally predominates…woman is naturally subject to man.” To violate the subjection is to violate the good order of creation. Again, for Aquinas as for Augustine, the man is more reasonable than the woman and therefore, just as the reason should govern the unreasonable passions, so too should man govern woman. To go against this natural order is to go against the good, as this hierarchy is humankind’s only bulwark against “individual evil.” For Aquinas, God’s creating woman out of man’s rib is a highly significant detail of the creation story. That “woman should not use authority over man…she was not made from his head;” that woman should not “be subject to man’s contempt as his slave…she was not made from his feet.” This differs profoundly from recent magisterial teaching on the meaning of the creation accounts, which sees sexual difference not through the lens of subjection but of complementarity.
The natural superiority of man to woman extends even to Aquinas’ understanding of the imago dei. Aquinas identifies two senses of the image of God. The “principle signification” of the image of God is humankind’s intellectual nature, which resides both in man and in woman (although clearly, the man has a greater capacity for the exercise of natural reason). However, a second sense of the imago dei belongs only to man: “God is the beginning and end of every creature” just as “man is the beginning and end of woman” since woman was “made out of man” and the purpose of woman is to give birth to men and women who will give birth to men.
Moreover, Aquinas interprets Genesis’ description of the woman as a helper to the man in a narrow fashion: woman is not a helpmate in the sense that she helps man in “other works,” since, due to his natural superiority, man “can be helped more efficiently by another man in other works.” Therefore, woman is a helper only in the sense that she is essential to the process of generation. In other words, man needs woman only to create new people—woman is not socially or politically necessary. Woman also does not seem to be in any way necessary to man’s affective or relational life. Outside of generation, man is an entirely self-sufficient entity. In her role as producer of people, woman is “not misbegotten;” however, “as regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten” because she is the “result of a defect in the active force…of the male seed.” Aquinas sums this argument up neatly elsewhere when he labels women “misbegotten males.” This interpretation is radically different from that offered by both John Paul II, who teaches, “it is only through the duality of the masculine and feminine that the human finds full realization,” and Benedict XVI, who argues, “only in communion with the opposite sex can [man] become ‘complete.’”
The Church of the 20th Century
Pope Pius XI
Writing seven centuries after Aquinas, Pope Pius XI re-affirms the church’s heretofore unbroken teaching on the subjection of woman to men, reminding a rapidly changing world that, “the order of love includes both the primacy of the husband with regard to the wife and children and the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience.” Pius insists that, while the “degree and manner” of the subjection of wife to husband may vary throughout time and space, this subjection itself, which he includes as part of the “structure and fundamental law of the family” is “established and confirmed by God” and therefore “must always and everywhere be maintained intact.”
Pius XI labels those who assert, “The rights of husband and wife are equal,” to be “false prophets” since in so doing they threaten the traditional view of marriage, which is essential to the common good. Pius XI defines the “emancipation of women” (presumably a buzz word at the time) to be all of the following: the idea that women should allowed to exempt herself from the so-called “burdensome duties…of wife and mother;” the idea that women should be able to “follow their own bent and devote herself to business and even public affairs;” and the idea that women should be “at liberty to administer and conduct her own affairs…without knowledge or consent of her husband”. Underlying this argument is the assumption that autonomy and social participation are incompatible with marriage and motherhood. Implicitly, this argument also reveals that, for Pius XI, a single woman—that is, one who does not belong to husband, father, or mother superior—is unthinkable. For Pius XI, women’s pursuit of social and political independence is necessarily an act of disordered selfishness as involvement in social affairs is labeled as “neglect” of children while the desire to escape motherhood is described as a type of self-interested ‘pleasure.’
John XXIII: The Beginning of the End for Traditional Marriage
John XXIII begins the modern trend of upending the traditional definition of marriage as a union of unequal persons: in fact, he is probably the first papal enemy of the traditional marriage. John XXIII for the first time in church history refers to the “equality of rights” between the sexes as “justly-proclaimed” and insists that they must “extend to all the claims of personal and human dignity”. The magnitude of this proclamation cannot be overestimated—this is a truly remarkable moment in human history. However, John XXIII does not admit the existence of full equality between the sexes, arguing that women and men do not possess an “equality of functions”. John XXIII is not clear about the nature of this inequality but insists that in her “natural attributes, tendencies, and instincts” it is true either that these are “strictly hers” or that “she possesses [them] to a different degree than man”.
The context and purpose of this argument are crucial to understanding why it is structured the way it is. This statement was issued more than one hundred years after the start of the women’s movement, by the pope who opened the windows of the church to the modern world. It is not unreasonable to assume that John XXIII’s heart and mind were on the side of women’s equality; however, it is equally reasonable to assume that, as with Vatican II, John XXIII was careful not to open these windows too widely. Thus, his argument for sexual inequality sounds radically unlike any previous ones: this inequality of function is the consequence not of woman’s inequality to man, but of her difference from him.
John Paul II and the Radical Reversal of Church Teaching
Like his predecessors Paul VI and John XXIII but unlike every other pope before him, John Paul II proclaims the equality of women to men. With John Paul II’s papacy, the sanctity of traditional marriage is completely destroyed. In a reversal of centuries of church teaching, woman’s bodily difference is now interpreted as a moral advantage rather than disadvantage. While Augustine argues that women are the image of God, he admits, “on the physical side [women’s] sexual characteristics may suggest…that man alone is said to be in the image and glory of God”. Aquinas also identifies the female body as the reason for her inequality, arguing that since “the father is the principle in a more excellent way than the mother [due to the embodied activity of insemination] while the mother is a passive and material principle [due to the embodied passivity of pregnancy]…the father is to be loved more [than the mother].” Similarly, the inferiority of the female body, which Aquinas describes as the impossibility of the “female sex to signify eminence of degree,” is what makes her incapable of receiving “the sacrament of Order.” For John Paul II, however, women’s reproductive organs make them “more capable than men of paying attention to another person.” Women possess this greater moral capacity since “the man—even with all his sharing in parenthood—always remains “outside” the process of pregnancy.” While John Paul’s interpretation of the meaning of women’s bodies differs in many ways from that provided by Augustine and Aquinas, it resembles them in one key way: women’s personhood is understood through the lens of her anatomical capacity to become pregnant and not the other way around.
In the 20th century, the Catholic Church began to redefine traditional marriage and to overturn its thinking about whether or not woman’s inequality to man within marriage was both natural and divinely-ordained. The Church’s reversal of its teaching on the necessity of woman’s subjection to man in marriage is so extensive that John Paul II, going against the ‘plain sense’ of Scripture, interprets Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians to be calling not for the subjection of wives to husbands but a “mutual” subjection between spouses. Interestingly, while John Paul II maintains church teaching that husband “is called the ‘head’ of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church,” he concludes that only in the case of the Church’s subjection to Christ is spousal subjection one-sided. Why this is so he does not explain.
Undoubtedly, many insist that the Church’s teaching on marriage has not changed, since it has always taught that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Indeed, in this respect, church teaching on marriage has not changed. However, modern people may not realize that for centuries male headship was considered to be just as sacred and unquestionable part of marriage as some consider heterosexuality to be today (for civil marriage). Since sexual equality is today a largely uncontroversial issue, it is difficult to understand just how radical and fundamental a shift sexual equality within marriage was. For most of church history, the suggestion that women are equal to their husbands in marriage would have been just as unthinkable and unholy as the contemporary suggestion that marriage could be open to people of the same-sex is to some today. My intent here is not to argue that these two issues are identical, but only to underscore by comparison just how radically church teaching on marriage has changed.
 Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. I.85.5  Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. I.1.1  Augustine, “Soliloquys,” #17  Ibid, #17  On the Good of Marriage 1.1  Augustine, City of God. Chapter XXII, 17.  Augustine, “Literal Meaning of Genesis.” Chapter 22.  Sermon 51, #23  ibid, #24  Summa Theologiae I, 92.1  Ibid, 92.1  Ibid, 92.3  Ibid, 93.4  Ibid, 93.4  Ibid, 92.2  Ibid, 92.1  Ibid, 92.1  Ibid, 99.2  JP II, “Letter to Women.” Paragraph 7.  Benedict. Deus Caritas Est. Paragraph 11.  Casti Connubi, 26  Casti Connubi, 28  Casti Connubi, 74  Casti Connubi, 74  6 September 1961, 7  6 September 1961, 7  6 September 1961, 7  The Confessions, Ch 22 #34  Summa Theologiae II-II, 26.10  Summa Theologiae: Supplement, 39.1  Mulieris Dignitatem, #18  Mulieris Dignitatem, 24  Mulieris Dignitatem, 24