Christian social vision means interdependence between men and women

Giordani told of a man in the ancient world who ‘having travelled far away for reasons of trade, wrote home to his wife about to give birth: “If it’s a boy, keep him; if it’s a girl, put her her out to die.” That person, Giordani said, ‘expressed, quite simply, how pagan idolatry saw woman: a mammal for exploitation and for pleasure, considered immensely inferior to the male and, in all cases, in all legal systems, kept in subjection to men: from girlhood under the care and control of her father, as a wife under the care and control of her husband, and as a widow under the care and control of her sons and relatives. Never free to choose for herself.

‘Christianity changed this state of affairs by establishing the spiritual equality women with men, giving them equal rights and duties and taking mothers away from the caprice of fathers through the indissoluability of marriage, with which they were assured a stable position in the home. In Christ, Paul the apostle taught, ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female’ (Gal. 3:28), but all are spirits, all children of God and so equally brothers and sisters.

‘Christian social vision brought about interdependence between men and women: ‘Neither women without dependency upon men, nor men without dependency upon women, in the Lord.’ A man belongs to his woman and a woman to her man: ‘Just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God.’ (1 Cor.11:12) …

‘It is true, however, that in society the influence of women is less than a third: an influence absolutely inferior to their sacrifices and number. And this causes enormous social damage, because the lack of the action of feminine virtues, which are specifically devotion, grace, love of peace and order, means that there prevail in society the masculine virtues of strength, conquest, adventure, which, like all the virtues, if they are not tempered and harmonized by others, easily overflow into the vices closest to them.

‘But it is a fact: if women are degraded, men follow in degradation…. For the perverted woman passes her perversion on to her children, just as the upright, heroic woman passes on uprightness and heroism to her children. In the end, to undo a society, a sure way is the corruption of women. To substitute society with a hive, make human beings into cyphers, it is necessary also to undo its reverence for chaste and faithful women and disrupt their relationships into sexual licence so that the sacrament is replaced by an utterly different element.

 ‘Having degraded women, men are ready to give up everything. The dishumanization of humanity, necessary to reduce it to automatons, begins with woman: as in Eden. Hedonistic, materialistic philosophies, championed in the last generations and reaching our times with their first vast practical experiences, bring about the end of motherhood: and motherhood is the principle of life.’

La Società Cristiana (Città Nuova: Rome, 2010 (first pub. in 1942)), pp. 54-8.