Ulla Gudmundson reports on the Assembly on Women's Cultures

Ulla Gudmundson is the former Swedish Ambassador to the Holy See and she has been a staunch supporter of promoting the role of women in the Church. She agreed to write for our blog about the Pontifical Council for Culture's Assembly on Women's Cultures, in which she was invited to participate as one of the speakers.

Ulla Gudmundson with Pope Francis

Dear friends,

Tina Beattie has asked me to write something for Catholic Women Speak about the Pontifical Council for Culture’s recent plenary on ”women’s cultures”, where I was one of the speakers.

That Cardinal Ravasi and his team had taken a big step out of the comfort zone was obvious already from the controversy before the meeting – around the promotional video #lifeofwomen featuring a blonde Italian actress and the Instrumentum Laboris (which did indeed contain some pretty sweeping statements, such as differences between women and men dating from ”the dawn of time”). Cardinal Ravasi made it clear that the document was primarily intended to fuel discussion.

I was asked to speak under the heading ”Uguaglianza e diferenza – alla ricerca di un equilibrio”. Language is tricky. It is easy (as was done in the English version of the programme) to translate the first word as ”equality”. But that only conveys the sense of equal worth of men and women, a notion that is perfectly compatible with keeping women in separate enclosures (”separate but equal”). A better translation in this context would have been ”likeness” or ”sameness” (according to my dictionary, this is part of the meaning of the Italian word). For this is, it seems to me, where the heart of the controversy lies. Are women and men more alike than different? What do we share as human beings?

Anyone familiar with the Vatican will agree that there you often hear talk about women, but hardly ever any female voices. Here, the speakers were all women, and the audience were 95 percent men. (There are about half a dozen highly qualified women among the PCC’s consultors).

That women are not an amorphous mass (and still less an abstraction, Woman) must have become very clear to all participants. Cultural differences between Northern Europeans and Mediterraneans became obvious, with some warning against ”uguaglianza” going too far, making us all neuters and others (me included) arguing that  if women and men have the freedom to develop their full human potential, we will still be women and men, but in new ways, and have empiric evidence as to what extent we are alike or different.

But there was consensus among all speakers that the Church must begin a march towards full and equal participation of women at all levels, also as decision makers. One moment of truth will be the family synod in October. Lucetta Scaraffia, historian and editor of L’Osservatore Romano’s monthly insert donna chiesa mondo, reminded the audience that Catherine of Siena could speak at a synod in the 14th century – ”so why can’t we, today?”.

What were the reactions? I found the discussion surprisingly open. There was preparedness to listen and debate, even if it was clear that the notion of an ”ontological difference” between women and men remains strong. But I think the Pontifical Council for Culture deserves credit for having made a small breach in the Leonine Wall. In his speech to the participants, Pope Francis did not once use the word ”complementarity”.

Ulla Gudmundson

For the Pontifical Council for Culture's report on the event, please go to this link.