John Paul II prepared his apostolic letter, On the Dignity and Vocation of Women (Mulieris dignitatem), in response to the request of the 1987 World Synod of Bishops that the theological and anthropological bases of being a "woman" or a "man" needed further clarification by way of resolving current issues in the Church. The pope's text has the character of a meditation. He begins by citing the message of Vatican II addressed to women:

Near the end of his meditation, however, John Paul II has defined the dignity and vocation of women in such a way as to come to the conclusion that women are equal in human dignity but that they have distinct gifts and callings from those of men. What this means for the issue of the vocation of women within the Church finally becomes clear:

Thus, John Paul II reads the Gospels in such a way as to enforce the fact that Jesus himself endorsed a separate but equal vocation which God fundamentally assigned to men and women in the order of creation (Genesis).

John Paul II defines motherhood as the calling guaranteed to offer "fulfillment of the female personality" (MD: 17). At no point does John Paul II envision any woman as finding a fulfillment in her (divinely/humanly) calling to be an astronaut, lawyer, physicist, head-of-state, or peace-maker to a degree that might prompt her to delay or entirely set aside motherhood. Rather, based upon his reading of the theology of Genesis, motherhood and consecrated virginity (“spiritual motherhood”) remain the essential vocations of all women in all times and in all places.

The purpose of my own reflections is to examine for my daughters some of the soft spots within Mulieris dignitatem. I shall do this in three parts: (a) the vocation of every woman to be a mother; (b) how cultural transitions have altered how a man clings to his wife; (c) the implications for women of the fall in the Garden of Eden. My reflections shall cite some sources but, for the most part, they remain the meditations of a father (who happens to be a theologian) bent upon giving his daughters the best advice available on these matters—even when it necessarily rubs against and challenges the grandfatherly advice that the Holy Father would want to offer my daughters. As such, I dedicate these reflections to my daughters and to all those other daughters of Eve who will be gathering in Rome in order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's apostolic letter on the dignity of women from the 7-9 Feb 2008.

The Vocation of Every Woman to be a Mother

Every child appreciates a mother's love. This is all the more the case when such love is given abundantly and then, due to death or some similar tragedy, love is silently withdrawn. In this regard, both Karol Wojtyla (the future John Paul II) and I share a loss which binds us together in an uncommon attachment to and grief spilled out for an absent mother. As it happened, Karol and I were the same age, eight years old, when tragedy struck.

After my mother's death, everything was transformed. I returned from school to an empty house. There was no one there to hug me and to elicit from me the little successes and tragedies which mark a young boy's daily existence. In the evenings, it was now up to me to finish preparing the supper which my father had begun that morning. It was now up to me to do the dishes. No longer would my mother sit me on a stool so that I could read to her for a half-hour while she did the dishes. Gone to were the picnics which I loved, the birthday parties which she organized, and the joyful walks in a local park. My dad, meanwhile, was depressed and withdrawn--unable to function as a caring "father" and entirely removed from anything like a tender "mother."

For Karol as well, the loss of a mother was not just the moment of her death, but the long, empty spaces which lingered on for years upon years thereafter. As a university student, Karol poured out this sense of absence in the following poem:

Over Your white grave White flowers of life bloom-- Oh, how many years have gone by Without You--how many years . . . ?

After his mother's death, the parlor in their home was shut down: "the rugs were rolled up and the furniture covered with cloth" (Szulz: 67). As in my case, this was symbolic of the large place in the heart which goes dead, atrophies, and finally decays following the death of a mother.

Within this horizon, it is not unusual for a boy to begin inadvertently to adopt "mothers" so as to fill some of the dry rot within the heart. Thus, for Karol and for me, devotion to the Mother of God was not only a religious pastime but a life-sustaining energy which kept alive what is was to be cared for and loved for oneself by one's mother. But, on the practical level, there were also other "mothers." I used to unconsciously decide upon what boys in the neighborhood would become my special friends on the basis of the degree to which the mothering within their homes was able to pour out upon me as well. At the time, I was entirely unaware of this. In my thirties, however, when the grief of loss first struck deep and violently in my life, I realized what I had been doing in selecting my playmates for those long, lonely years after my mother's death. While I have no evidence of this, I can, nonetheless, presume that something of the same thing happened to Karol while he was growing up in Kraków, Poland.

Against this background, it is no mystery to me that John Paul II would identity "motherhood" and "virginity" as the principal "dimensions of the fulfillment of the female personality" (MD: 17). Nor is it any mystery that John Paul II would first and foremost identify Mary as the one in whom "virginity and motherhood coexist" (MD: 17) whereas they are two paths for most women. The first is lived out by those women religious whose virginity "contains a profound yes in the spousal order: the gift of self for love in a total and undivided manner" (MD: 20). The second is lived out through that "gift of self" which "in marriage [which] opens to the gift of a new life, a new human being" (MD: 18). Thus, in both cases, women find their fulfillment in the gift of self to a spouse (whether human or divine) and in the nurturing of new life (physically, for some, spiritually, for both).

Had I read Mulieris dignitatem in my early thirties, I still would have been entirely satisfied with John Paul's portrayal of women's vocation. But, then, quite unexpectedly I fell into love with a woman who transformed my soul. My youth had been lived under the vision of what mothering and nurturing a woman could bring to me. My twenties had been lived under the vision of how woman could be lured into forwarding my plans, my ambitions, and my sense of self. Now, however, I was overcome by the inner mystery of woman. All my life I had been shown models of how men, in order to be real men, tame women and bend them to their wills.  Now, however, it was I who was being taken in and reshaped by the woman who, for the first time, was revealing a new self to myself. The world of human relations was no longer How to Make Friends and to Influence People but was now a mystery which only the other could unfold and reveal and become.

The curious thing is that nothing of the grace or the promise of romantic love appears in Mulieris dignitatem. One is tempted to conclude that either Karol Wojtyla may have never known this kind of mutual surrender of self or that, have tasted its power, he may have drawn back and decided not to speak of such things. Thus, at this point, my experience and that of vast numbers of men and women in our society moves beyond what John Paul II is able or willing to address. In so doing, however, Mulieris dignitatem circumscribes women's vocation at the level of self-donation to a man and at the level of motherhood.

How Cultural Transitions Have Altered How a Man Clings to His Wife

Thomas Aquinas raised the question as to whether the grace of the word of wisdom and knowledge was becoming to women. His response is telling:

To the credit of John Paul II, the second and third reason have no role whatsoever within his exposition. However, it would appear that his appeal to Gen 3:16 remains the principal reason why women cannot have the same public vocation as men (at least not in the church). Thus, it is to the fall and its consequences that our attention must turn.

Relative to the two accounts of creation (Gen 1-3), John Paul II has many things to say which are exemplary at the same time that they are troubling:

Anyone reading this account will be struck with the "essential equality" which is recognized for both man and woman. John Paul II, to his credit, entirely avoids giving any superiority to the "man" in so far as he was formed first (as does 1 Tim 2:13). Almost immediately, however, this equality is tarnished by the fact that the entire narrative is read from a patriarchal vantage point. Thus, it is the man who is coming to discover himself in terms of what "he needs." The Lord, in this case, appears to be quite uncertain what it is that "man needs" since, in the first instance, the creator endeavors to "make him a helpmate . . . from the soil" and produces "wild beasts" and "birds" (Gen 2:18f). Each of these is paraded before the man "to see what he would call them" (Gen 2:19). Thus, even here, the notion is that the beasts and birds are defined by the man in view of his own private purposes. Thus, the man is clearly lord, and the Lord serves this lord by helping him to discover what "he needs" for himself as “a helpmate.”

When it comes to the creation of the woman, therefore, the needs of the man are still central. Clearly his agenda is dominating the scene, and the Lord is searching for how to satisfy him. Then, despairing of fashioning still more creatures "out of the ground" (Gen 2:18), the Lord brings a deep sleep upon Adam and forms "a woman" from the rib taken from his side. According to the rabbis, the ancient text fails to have the woman taken from a bone in his foot such that he would step all over her or from a bone in his head such that she would dominate him. Moreover, in modern terms, one can say that Adam has to give of himself in order to ever have a "helpmate." Here again, the rabbis, spoke of the creation of the first woman, Lilith, as having been fashioned "out of the ground" but since she had received nothing essential from Adam, she went her separate way and failed to bond with Adam.

The text that stands out for me (one which John Paul II entirely overlooks) is the one where the divinely inspired author specifies the nature of the union according as follows: "Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh" (Gen 2:24). Now, in the society of the day, a man did not leave his father and mother but simply brought his wife to live within his family circle where she worked with and remained subordinate to his mother. Here, therefore, the text speaks metaphorically (in the same way that the removal of the rib is not a physical fact leaving men with one less rib but a symbolic reality). The man "clings to his wife" because he has given himself over to her. The man, consequently, is transformed by his recognition of his beloved and, as a direct result, comes to know himself in a new way, i.e., bound to his Helpmate more than he has ever been bound to his father and mother. "And they become one flesh" suggests sexual union, this is true. First and foremost, however, it suggests that Adam recognizes something of his lost self ("his rib") in his Beloved and that this recognition leads him to bond with his Helpmate more than he has been bonded by the flesh and blood ties with his parents.

When read from a modern vantage point, therefore, the dignity and vocation of woman being presented here is not defined by patriarchal ambitions. This is the way the quest begins but, as seen earlier, it utterly fails. Only when a man surrenders some essential part of himself does the "woman" appear who is able to rip him out of his self-absorption and to render secondary the paternal and maternal ties which, up to this point, have defined his being. The "woman," therefore, becomes the agent of the man's self-transcendence and self-transformation within the very process wherein she is becoming a new being, namely, his Helpmate. She belongs to him because she had given herself over to him. But he belongs to her in so far as she has reshaped his relational and interior reality.

John Paul II gets closest to this mutuality of transformation when he speaks as follows:

One can perhaps read into this that men, due to their initial socialization, are prone to give themselves over to the task of transforming their world and even of transforming people in their environment in order to serve their own ambitions. The "man," therefore, is taught to harden himself against his feelings (esp. his sympathy for others) in order that he might win fame, fortune, and women that abound to his glory. Then the "woman" appears who causes him to fall in love, to surrender his deepest self to be transformed by another who holds out to him his lost soul, his mysterious selfhood, his forgotten dignity that reaches far beyond the achievements which, up to this point, he has habitually used to reinforce his ego and to satisfy his personal ambitions.

Many men never know this experience of surrender. They are frozen in the male mystique and, at their worst, women become one of their projects or playthings, and, at their best, women are patronized and pampered. Under no circumstances, however, does such a man let a woman get under his skin. Nor is he capable of letting himself go, save but a very superficial and rehearsed way. The well-known psychologist, Karl Stern, describes these hyper-active and hyper-controlled men as follows:

Going beyond Stern, I would even say that such men can master the part of being a Lover. When they do so, however, they are indeed "acting the part" by managing the encounter such that the deception is so complete that they themselves cannot imagine that there is any more to love or being in love.  However, Stern warns such men that true "love can neither be planned nor managed, it can only be sown and nurtured" (191). Thus they can never experience how it is that a man in love can leave his father and mother and cling to his wife (Gen 2:24).

When I read Mulieris dignitatem, I discover the soul of a man who has lost his mother and who, despite himself, moves in a world in which he inadvertently regards the vocation of all women to be that of motherhood (whether it be physical or spiritual motherhood). When it comes to the Genesis accounts, John Paul II focuses upon the dignity and the equality of the woman whose "gift of self" provides the man with his true "helpmate." What John Paul II appears to downplay, however, are the intimations of how utterly and irrevocably the man is transformed in the process. Adam comes to the encounter seeking something for himself, something to advance his private ambitions. Even God is bent to serving his self-centered intentions. What surprises and astonishes the man, however, is how the "woman" transforms him and his social world--how he clings to her as bone of his bones because he loses himself in the mystery of her "otherness" which he cherishes and loves "for its own sake." She, in turn, reveals to him that "self" which has been lost to him. Now his inner world of feelings and "letting go" and vulnerability become lovable because they are loved by his significant Other.

These latter things are muted in the meditations of John Paul II. One suspects that he has never given himself over to any woman and, as a result, he cannot envision or imagine what such an encounter might entail. Hence, like the man who is driven by achievement and who has learned to guard himself within carefully constructed "thoughts" about life, John Paul II appears blind to those things which, in the life of most of my contemporaries, are the most precious when it comes to knowing a "woman." David Yallop, the recent biographer of John Paul II, confirms this assessment when he notes that “apart from Mother Theresa and the Virgin Mary, his [adult] understanding of women was severely limited” (The Power and the Glory, p. 404). For these reasons, Mulieris dignitatem leaves one with a truncated understanding of women. As a father, therefore, I would be wary of confiding my daughters to John Paul II when it came to forming their womanhood. Why this is so will become clear as I reflect upon the changing experience of marriage over the last three generations.

The Changing Experience of Marriage

The traditional marriage of my grandparents had little to do with "falling in love" or with vulnerability. To begin with, there were distinct spheres of influence and division of labor. My grandfather knew nothing about cooking, cleaning, or caring for children. He left these things up to his wife just as his own father had left all these things to his mother. My grandmother, meanwhile, knew nothing about running a business, making a living, fixing things (plumbing, electricity, auto mechanics) -- she left all these things in the hands of her husband who acted much like his own father before him. Both of my grandparents came from the same social class (middle-class), the same culture (Slovenian), the same religion (Catholic); hence, when entering into marriage, there were very insignificant disruptions from the habits of thought and practices which both had been used to in their respective homes.

Where there was disruption, the tacit surmise was that the role of the wife was to accommodate to the wishes of her husband. Thus, when my grandfather (who took pride in making his own wine) insisted that he always serve wine to guests and, when there were no guests, it was assumed that his wife would serve him his wine. So, too, when my grandfather made it known that he preferred this perfume, this dress, this posture in love-making, my grandmother gracefully accommodated just as she had seen her mother do. In some things, however, my grandmother refused to accommodate. For example, she always fed her children first (from infancy onward) even if it meant that her husband had to wait for his supper. At first, there were angry outbursts. And later my grandfather fumed about this; yet, in the face of his wife's stubborn insistence that "the children come first," she finally won the day and got her husband to tolerate her "deviance" from what had been the practice during his own upbringing.

Division of labor and mutual need provided much of the bonding within traditional marriages. My grandfather, for instance, needed to eat. Since he regarded cooking as a "women's work" and never took the least interest in watching, much less learning, the rudiments of the art, he was always dependent upon a woman. First, it was his mother. Then, it was his wife. As was the tradition, they postponed their marriage until he could afford to buy a house. Thus, marriage marked the transition from his mother cooking, cleaning, ironing for him and his wife doing all these very same things.

The same thing could be said for my grandmother. She regarded learning a trade and making a living as a "man's work." Thus, with her marriage, she moved from being dependent upon the income of her father to becoming dependent upon the income of her husband. At one point, my grandmother, who was superb at crocheting, was lured into selling some of her doilies to her friends. My grandfather was furious. He insisted that she give the money back. He felt ashamed that his wife was earning income as though to say that he was not providing for her sufficiently. My grandmother, who didn't want to resort to giving her work away, developed the strategy of trading jams and other preserves for her doilies. Later, she returned to the practice of accepting money and insisted that her buyers must not breathe a word of it to anybody. Thus, in a world wherein "the man was king of his castle," my grandmother had to surreptitiously resort to deception in order to avoiding my grandfather's supervision in things where he ought not to have been meddling.

How different this was when it came to my own marriage. From the very beginning, it was clear that I could cook, clean, and iron with a pride and proficiency which rivaled that of my wife. She, from her side, was already training to enter a profession such that there was never the intimation that she would be forever dependent upon a weekly allowance that I would give to her out of my paycheck. Hence, for the very beginning, it was evident that we had great need to influence each other, to decide things together, to work cooperatively.

When it came to children, marriage was a positively expansive experience. I was intent upon taking part in all the delights and headaches of raising children from infancy to adulthood.  My cultural upbringing, however, made it seem "sissy" if a boy showed interest (much less compassion) for a crying, exploring, playing child. That was "girl's stuff." Hence, I had to sympathetically watch, imitate, and receive coaching from my wife who was extraordinarily adept at relating to children. I read books as well. Hence, I had ideas and experiences of my own and, with the appearance of our children, we spent hours discussing, persuading, negotiating how they were to be raised.

Sympathetic listening with the intent of entering into the soul of another--this is the paradigmatic skill of modern marriage. It is for this reason that mutual surrender (the falling in love) provides the ground for the lifelong habit of mutual influencing each other. Under my grandparents system, mutual need and spheres of influence provided the effective glue for marriage. For my wife and I, however, we wanted to only enter into marriage when we had discovered a soul-mate. Hence, romantic attraction ushered us into a mutual surrender that characterized our union. In this, settled instincts were being transformed under the guise of the mutual love which was binding us. I had been the son of Emma and Anthony Milavec. Now, however, I was becoming the soul-mate of my wife and romantic surrender was the graced stuff which made this transformation relatively effortless. I wanted to see the world through her eyes, to taste it as she tasted it, to touch it as she was touching it. For her it was the same. Once the period of romantic surrender wore off, both of us had arrived at a blending of our souls, our loves, our hates, our instincts, our habits for engaging in the world.

My marriage did not appear, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. Both my wife and I had parents who, to some degree broke away from the patterns of their own parents. Thus, my father-in-law had taken pride, over the years, in preparing Saturday morning breakfast. He mastered making various forms of pancakes with fried sausages and various toppings and took a special joy in doing so. At all other times, my mother-in-law did all the cooking and cleaning up. What is significant here is that my father-in-law's manhood was not threatened by doing this nor was my mother-in-law's importance and necessity for the family unit challenged.  On the other hand, they never made meals together! In fact, they only marginally extended the boundaries of the separate spheres of their parents but failed to include any negotiating or cooperative skills which would give them any satisfaction in planning and executing a meal together. In contrast, my wife and I enjoy cooking a meal together and regularly entertain our friends at a table in which both of us have been cooperatively engaged. Doing something cooperatively with another is always a much more complex and more rewarding affair than taking turns or entirely leaving it to one's spouse.

The trouble that I have with Mulieris dignitatem is that I never catch any real glimpse of how marriages have changed within the short span of three generations. More often than not, I get the feeling that John Paul II either has not noticed these changes or, having noticed them, has not considered them worth mentioning. If this is the case, however, I doubt whether he has understood or taken into account the stuff of my marriage. For all I know, he might be still thinking of marriage as he knew it in his formative years in Kraków--a marriage very much like that of my grandparents. The fact that he assigns the role and vocation of woman as directed towards the "gift of self" and towards motherhood gives the feeling that he is still imagining my grandparents' generation.  His wisdom, accordingly, would have admirable fit my grandparents. Today, however, I presume that my wife has a calling and a vocation within the public sphere that stands alongside her being wife and mother. John Paul II does not appear to notice this. As in the case of my own father, he might, under restricted circumstances, allow my wife to continue to work outside the home until the birth of her first child. This "work,"  however, was not her true vocation; it was merely a diversion until "motherhood" set in and revealed who she was meant to be. Fat chance, therefore, that someone fashioned within this era would be receptive to women as ordained ministers within the Catholic Church. The struggle for women in the Church may indeed be much more a question of enculturation rather than an issue of theology.

The Implications for Women of the Fall in the Garden

Within the Fathers and Doctors of the church, one finds a steady and repeated theme: the "woman" in the Garden showed herself to be weak and unreliable. Thus, she was chosen by the demon-serpent as the easier prey and, having fallen into disobedience, she deliberately used her influence to bring her "man" down with her. Thus, in the minds of most Fathers and Doctors of the Church, Genesis provides the paradigmatic warning that women must not to be trusted or given undue influence over men.

The whole of the Hebrew Scriptures (even while it frequently partakes in an ambivalent attitude toward women) never falls into the trap of categorically blaming women for misleading men on the basis of the Genesis account. The first time that Genesis is used to specifically expose the weakness and unreliability of women is in 1 Timothy:

As was pointed out in an earlier chapter, the writer of 1 Timothy wanted to use the cloak of Paul to overturn the equality of discipleship which Paul extended to Jews and Greeks, to slave and to free, to female and to male. Finding no rule given by Paul or by Jesus to stop the practice whereby some women apparently were teaching and were exercising guidance over men, the writer of 1 Timothy fell back upon scapegoating all women because of what he regarded as the permanent character of Eve in relation to Adam. The argument has two prongs: (a) Adam was formed first; hence, not only Adam but all men have a superior dignity and honor which requires that all teachers much be chosen from among them; (b) In the one case where Adam allowed Eve to "teach" him, she deceived him; hence, all men, in all places and all times, should resist the teaching and the influence of women. Despite the faulty logic of this argument, nearly all of the Fathers of the Church felt that they had a certain divine warrant to blame women and to warn men against listening to women.

John Paul II thus becomes a true father and brother to women in the Church by refusing to use 1 Tim 2:12-14 to enforce the notion that all women are to be named as gullible and unreliable due to the supposed fact that Eve fell first. In contrast, John Paul II insists that, despite the different roles played by each, both were equally culpable:

John Paul II, however, was not able to be consistent in maintaining this sense of equal participation, for, when it comes to considering the consequence, the "dominion" of Adam over Eve sadly replaces their original "equality." Thus, in the end, John Paul II falls into the logical fallacy of the Fathers by assuming that Adam's dominion over the Eve after the fall represents the situation that ought to prevail in all times and places (regardless of whether the man in question happens to be wise and self-giving or gullible and selfish). The logic runs as follows:

John Paul II, instead of arguing that Jesus, in his teaching and in his preferential option in favor of women, wished to return to that fundamental equality which was intended by the Divine Creator at the beginning of creation, now uses Gen 3:16 to correct both Jesus and Paul and to relegate, not only Eve, but all women to the permanent and divinely ordained condition of being subject to the authority of men.

That all women at all times are "disadvantaged" and "discriminated against" thus appears to be, more or less, the natural consequence of Gen 3:16:

Immediately after this point, John Paul II makes an obscure reference to "the books of Sacred Scripture confirm . . . the actual existence of such situations and at the same time proclaim the need for conversion . . . from what offends neighbor, what 'diminishes' man . . ." (MD: 10). At this point, one would have hoped that John Paul II might have been more precise in noting that the Gospels proclaim the need for conversion from what offends and "diminishes" women --but he does not. Can it be assumed that the generic terms "neighbor" and "man" were intended to apply to "women"? One would think so. One might hope so. But he never says so.

Yet, while John Paul II is unclear here, he does, nonetheless, make it abundantly clear later that the domination of women by men is both necessary due to the fall and yet transitory due to the effects of salvation:

From reading this, it would seem like the domination of women in Gen 3:16 is an "evil inheritance" which can and must be progressively overcome by the original equality affirmed by Gen 1:27. Yet, this same text can be understood to mean that the "path" to overcome "the inheritance of sin" is precisely for women to embrace their subjection to their husbands.

In the face of John Paul's seeming fixation upon Gen 3:16, he passes over in silence the text which comes immediately before and immediately after. The text immediately before reads as follows: "I [the Lord] will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing" (Gen 3:16a). Given the unclear lessons which John Paul II has distilled from Gen 3:16b, it remains uncertain whether he would promote natural childbirthing which does nothing to diminish the "pangs of childbirth" or, on the contrary, whether he would encourage women giving birth to use relaxation breathing and spinal blocks by way of overcoming "the inheritance of sin."

The same ambiguity greets the silence of John Paul II regarding the text immediately following which registers the consequence of the fall for the man: "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife . . . cursed is the ground because of you: in toil shall you eat of it [i.e., its fruits] all the days of your life" (Gen 3:17). Here again, it remains unclear as to why John Paul II is never tempted to imagine that the vocation of all men is to be farmers as was Adam. Since these words are addressed to "the man" alone, it also remains unclear whether women should be prohibited from assisting their men in the toil of the fields. Furthermore, since Adam and Eve were vegetarians and the Lord gave only them "seed-bearing" and "green" plants for food (Gen 1:29f), a condition which would be changed only after the flood (Gen 9:2-6), one wonders whether John Paul II never entertains the possibility that humans should return to being vegetarians. Finally, since Gen 3:17 clearly places its emphasis upon "toil" and "sweat," one wonders whether subsistence farming using primitive tools appropriate to primitive men is to be advocated or whether, on the contrary, tractors, pesticides, and herbicides are to be greeted as envisioned by the Gospel as overcoming the curses of the fall. All in all, since John Paul II is so keen to define women on the basis of the biology of the womb and his patriarchal reading of Genesis, it remains puzzling why he is not equally zealous to define “man” on the basis of the biology of the penis and to define man’s universal vocation to be farming (whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or social “farming”).

My purpose for imagining issues posed by the text that are silently passed over by John Paul II is to demonstrate the fallacy of supposing that the situations described after the fall were somehow meant to have universal application to all men and to all women down to the end of time. At best, therefore, the reflections of John Paul II are curiously short-sighted and antiquated. At worst, they are patriarchal and self-serving. This then brings me to a personal turning point: if I am aware of these things, would I be a worthy father and trustworthy guide for my daughters if I did not alert them to the severe limitations that I find within the pope’s commentary on those very things that shape their existence as women in our modern world?

Conclusions

John Paul II grew up within my grandparents' era. He knows their life values, their hopes, and their dreams. For this generation, John Paul II is an able father and a wise guide. When it comes to my generation and my marriage, I fear that John Paul II understands little or else he values little what we have tried to achieve. The vague dream of equality which John Paul II holds out to women is the central tenet of my marriage and those in my generation who share our values. Within this world, many women have the vocation of motherhood, a few have the vocation of virginity, but all have the deep stirring of the Spirit which calls them to be engineers, mail carriers, deacons, scientists, child psychologists, priests, cab drivers, theologians, social reformers, and prophets. This world has overtaken the world of my grandparents, just as it has overtaken the world of John Paul II. My grandfather would have vigorously resisted the modern expansion of women's vocations; hence, it is no surprise that John Paul II, with his grandfatherly understanding of the world would do the same.

In the end, the sad truth is that I would not entrust my daughter to the guidance of this "grandfather" when it came to matters of women's vocation, of women's femininity, or women's sexuality. I would have her love him dearly and to listen to his stories and to become familiar, through him, of where her forebears once were. Thus my daughters would come to understand the love in their grandfather's eyes as the real token of his care and affection. As for his practical guidance and wisdom, however, she would realize that he fails to address her world and her dreams since everything he knew had been fashioned within the settled instincts and sources of grace rooted in a vanishing past. When the world is quite stable from one generation to the next, then the elders have only to transmit the wisdom learned during their youth since the present generation has substantially the same experience of growing up. When cultures do change, however, the wisdom of the elders fails. Thus, with some sadness, my daughter must discover that the wisdom of John Paul II almost certainly will not be able to nourish and guide her soul. Jesus, keenly aware of how his own hard-won wisdom hungered for God's future and clashed with the religious norms of his past, would thus be the only authentic road to follow:

Copyright © 2008 by Aaron Milavec