Contemporary Catholicism on Femininity: An Appreciation

Joanna Bogle is one of my "heroines". She writes in a hopeful & joyful way about our Catholic faith & church. Here is a snippet from FAITH Magazine which might be helpful for us all to read & maybe discuss. My personal view of the Catholic Church is that it extols women & femininity & indeed it's great to be a Catholic woman!

Contemporary Catholicism on Femininity: An Appreciation

Joanna Bogle FAITH Magazine May – June 2011

In a frank reflection Joanna Bogle, writer and journalist, helpfully offers a short case study concerning the necessary interaction of Catholic tradition and contemporary culture.
The arrival in the Church of new groups of Anglicans, whose journey to Rome was begun by the decision of the Church of England to ordain women, has thrown a new spotlight on the whole topic of the Church and women. "They think we're all misogynists" sighed one of the group heading for the Ordinariate, who had had spiteful - there is no other word for it - letters and messages from those opposed to his decision.

Easy to brush it off, or to say it doesn't matter. But it does. There are a good many people who, without really thinking about it, are convinced that the Catholic Church is "against women", that it oppresses women and that intelligent RC females somehow manage to steel themselves against this and cope by denying a reality all too evident to everyone else.

For some years now, I've been grappling with this. At first, the issues seemed simple - hard-line feminists eager to promote abortion as "a woman's right to choose" who saw the Catholic Church as the Number One Enemy, and then, alongside, tiresome women within the Church who offered spurious, and often downright silly, tirades on the priesthood, or invented self-pitying quasi-liturgical rituals to demonstrate women's empowerment in the face of male oppression. It was fairly easy - and rather fun - to ridicule these last, and I had a very enjoyable time in the 1990s when a group called the "Catholic Women's Network" fell for a spoof which I wrote about a group of well-to-do ladies sitting round a swimming pool with wine and salads bemoaning their lot and denouncing the Church's teachings on marriage and sexual morality.

Ctd here