Reciprocity: this is the key word

The role of women in the Church debate suffers from the same epistemological error that marks contemporary reflection on the issue of gender. This mistake is the viewing of male and female as separate and opposing elements. This “binary” framework leads only to polarization, claims, and conflict, both inside and outside the Church.

This dualistic perspective stems from two sources: one that is essentialist and metaphysical, which was later challenged in a reactive manner by a modern, technicist, and digital viewpoint, which is also problematic.  Only by recognizing the limitations of both perspectives can we humanely address the issue in society and in the Church, because everything is interconnected.

According to the first perspective, man and woman should have “by nature” opposing characteristics, translatable into dichotomies such as reason/emotion, private/public, care/work. The woman has been made for the home and care, while the man for work and public life. This narrative has historically justified paternalism, oppression, and exploitation. At best, it has produced the ideal of “complementarity” i.e. women should be valued for the contributions they can make. There is nothing wrong with that, one might say. In reality, it is a trap that reinforces a division of roles and functions, where each does “their own”, often without even coming into contact with the other side. And “her own” of the woman is always subordinate and residual.

The second perspective is influenced by a technical and mechanical way of thinking (machines are defined by their function, and so are women), which is then calculative and shaped by the binary schema of devices (on/off) or by the binary code of digital language (0/1). The schema is either/or, with no intermediate gradations. This leads to a reaction toward the “non-binary”. This hyper-technological version of gender differences is a rejection of the classical view and reflects an increasingly abstract, instrumental, and computational rationality. Many authors, from Paul Valéry to Bernard Stiegler, have spoken of “symbolic poverty” in relation to this impoverishment. The reaction to a reductive framework suffers from the same limitations because it does not escape the same framework, i.e., it simply adopts it to overturn it. The denial of an error is not necessarily a truth. Therefore, it will not be the “non-binary identities,” which implicitly assume the same mechanical, abstract, oppositional language, which will free us from the cage of binarism. Moreover, the counterproposal is “fluidity,” the undifferentiated, in the name of an unlimited freedom: to be everything is to be nothing. To avoid being a slave to biology, I erase it. We are caught between two extremes; on one side, only biology counts, and everything is already written; on the other, biology counts for nothing, and everything can be written at will. Conservatives on one side, progressives on the other. A sterile struggle.

Even the other categories evoked in the debate, such as equality, rebellion, and competition, tend to fall into a presumed equivalence indifferent to differences or into a reaction that merely seeks to invert the terms of the issue.

In the Church, it is not about claiming more space within an organization based on an essentialist and dualist anthropology, but rather about questioning this approach.

A different way of thinking is needed. The key word is reciprocity, meaning mutual implication and the ability to transform one another, rather than opposing, competing, or claiming. In the process of becoming oneself, the other is fundamental, not as a threat or antagonist, but as a dialogue partner and co-creator. Every individuation is always a co-individuation, which is shorthand for becoming oneself with others, shaping a relationship, the environment, and the community. Never without the other, as Michel de Certeau would say.

For contemporary “non-binary” culture, differences are a result of self-affirmation, according to the dictates of hyper-individualism. In a generative anthropological view, differences are rooted and flourish in relationships.

For Christians, the most beautiful image of this relationality constituting differences comes from the wisdom of the Scriptures, which can inspire a liberating anthropology to rethink the relationship between male and female, including the role of women in the Church.

In Genesis, God creates human beings in His image, male and female. Adam, “made of dust,” perceives himself as a man only upon seeing Ishà, the woman.

It is always in the relationship with the other that we understand who we are, that we grasp our uniqueness. The undifferentiated comes first, and the fullness of human realization is a differentiation in relation.

A differentiation in reciprocity and not in opposition, in a transformative dynamism open to the myriad shades of uniqueness and not in the staticity of standard identities defined “by nature,” or in the rejection of any identity.

The duality is a dynamic process where being and becoming coexist; it is not a confrontation between fixed and predetermined identities, each with its own role.

The reflection on women within the Church is also afflicted by dualism. On one hand, there are essentialist ideas about what a woman is and what her characteristics are (receptivity, care, feminine genius) and therefore her tasks, which are ancillary, service-oriented, at most with some “gender quotas”. It is not that there are no qualifying aspects of femininity, but they are always in tension with others and are never exclusive. For example, the dimensions of care, listening, and building proximity are equally masculine and feminine, even if they are expressed differently according to the uniqueness of each individual.

The essentialist conception, which effectively relegates women “by nature” to a position of marginality concerning the processes of the Church, is many steps backward compared to what the Scriptures present to us, where the theme of femininity is inextricably intertwined with the history of salvation in a rich and articulated manner.  After all, it is through a woman that the miracle and mystery of the incarnation occurs, and from this woman’s initiative (also honored in the Quran) comes the breaking of many social conventions in the name of a higher design. Let us recall that it is to women that the body of the dead Jesus is entrusted, but also the announcement of the resurrection; and it is the women who follow Jesus, alongside the apostles, contributing to the transformation of how to live the discipleship—Susanna is just one name among many.

The Church, who is a divine and human institution, has made choices linked to a cultural and historical time that has now changed, and these choices can and must be questioned today, without touching on dogmas or generating schisms. It is not derived from the Scriptures that the formation of priests must be confined to spaces separate from the world and closed off, where women can only access subordinate positions. Pope Francis has stated that the shepherd must have the smell of the sheep! Environments consisting solely of men, separated from the world, can become theaters of distortions and perversions, as history sadly teaches us. Failing to learn from mistakes would be a grave sin of omission.

Based on a profound regeneration of the relationship between men and women in the Church, inspired by the richness of the Scriptures, new ways of female presence can be envisioned that are not reduced to merely claiming space within a map that maintains the same coordinates. The challenge, not only for the Church but also for a culture that equates techno-economic hegemony with individual freedom, is how to give flesh and form to the anthropological truth of reciprocity.

Cultural processes are not changed by cutting off heads or overturning power relations, but by exercising the highest form of freedom. This is not about choosing from what already exists, but about bringing into existence what does not yet exist. I call this generative freedom, which is never generated alone. A change in perspective is needed to orient processes and foster transformations. It is not by moving from an “excess of semantics” (everything is already said and written) to a semantic deficit (we can rewrite everything as we please) that we will achieve liberation and create the conditions for a livable world.

The Church, like contemporary culture, has often betrayed a fundamental truth that even science has strongly reaffirmed in recent decades, i.e. everything is related; and, everything is connected to everything else. To separate and abstraction is a distortion that goes against the law of life (and revelation). This includes separating, not to mention opposing, man and woman, male and female. To rethink this relationship according to a relational anthropology can contribute not only to the regeneration of a struggling Church but also to a society where distress (even among the younger generation) is a growing and concerning reality.

The rethinking within the Church cannot therefore be, at least at first, a question of roles.

The challenge is to establish a new reciprocity in all the phases of Church life, from the formation of priests to the mutual support between priests and families.

Above all, we must reclaim a meaning, which that has too often been forgotten.

The prevalence of function over meaning emerges, for example, from the fact that priests are burdened with bureaucracy and do not have time for closeness, or from the fact that modern churches are ugly. After all, it is not enough to have a place to celebrate Mass (function); instead, is should be a place that must communicate beauty, unity, and openness to transcendence (meaning). It is not enough to celebrate Mass (function). An ill-prepared celebration contradicts what it intends to make present (meaning). We must abandon the illusion that practices and procedures ensure the transmission of faith and instead reclaim the symbolic dimension. In revelation, everything is symbol. In a “diabolical” world (from dia-ballo, meaning divide), where even the male/female opposition responds to this logic of fragmentation, we need more symbol (from sun-ballo: I bring together, I recompose into unity).

As a form of the matrix of life, the Trinity itself is a symbol of constitutive relationality, of a unity in difference that is a condition for communion; of a reciprocity in paternity/filiality— in generativity— which is a condition for every vital dynamism.

Recomposing without erasing differences, but valuing them. The male and female are not opposites but two facets of the symbol of humanity. Gender identity is not an individual choice, but a relational dimension that blossoms through relationships with those who came before us and with those who help us understand who we are. Radical individualism, which views gender solely as an individual choice, is violent and destructive, even within the Church.

Christian culture should not revert to a questionable essentialism; insead, it should recognize the symbolic value of the masculine and the feminine. This is a unity made up of differences that are related to one another. The “symbolic misery” of our time also affects the Church. We should not start from the claim of roles for women but from a Copernican revolution: the human being, male and female, at the center of the world (to cultivate and safeguard it, not to exploit it!). Without this awareness, there will only be clashes and schisms.

From a renewed anthropology can begin an authentic process of transformation, founded on that truth presented to us by the Gospel. This is a plurality in which women always have a role without needing to be assigned one officially because they take it, being capable of authoritative initiatives, attention, patience, hope, trust, and foresight. In a world where the only source of liberation seems to be the transhumanist delirium, where bodies are merely what can be done with them, and where, as individuals separated from all, we ultimately remain victims of a techno-economic system that uses us as guinea pigs for its own development. As it uses our data and our social exchanges to feed an Artificial Intelligence that is increasingly capable of controlling and manipulating us, the Christian tradition has a message of freedom that also stems from a renewed relationship between the masculine and the feminine, within a regenerated tradition. If we want to be free, let us return to the beneficial alley of relationship and give a consequential form to our being in the world. Only through this path, I believe, will we not destroy the earth. Only through this path will the Church not only avoid destroying herself but will also be able to continue healing the wounds of the world.

by Chiara Giaccardi