The preparation for Easter is an important process that draws on the spiritual tradition of the Catholic Church. It involves prayer, fasting, penance, works of mercy, living the message of the Lenten liturgies and also celebrating the Sacrament of Penance after an honest and thorough examination of conscience.

One element of a thorough examination of conscience that is frequently overlooked is the attitudes that live within us. Attitudes are easy to overlook. Frequently, we are not even aware of them. Yet they can control our thinking, blind us to truth, inflame our emotions, affect our relationships and even lead us into sin.

Our attitude about the collaboration of men and women is an issue that may not appear to be a proper subject for Lent. Actually it is because attitudes can be in need of purification. Lent is not a private process exclusively about personal issues.

Lent is also about the truth and relational issues flowing from the truth. The issue of the collaboration of men and women involves the biblical vision of the human person that has implications for the proper understanding of self and the proper understanding of relationships. The issue is important for the Church, the State and for global society. Obviously, it has enormous implications for family and how the next generation will understand itself.

A Vatican document

Last year, a Vatican department called, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church about the collaboration of men and women. It is important to remember that the Vatican receives information daily from all over the world.

Based on that information, it judged there is a problem. It offered the Church a document (thirteen pages) for study, reflection and dialogue to address the problem. For the next few weeks, I shall use my column to summarise the document and highlight issues that must be given honest consideration.

Introduction

In stating the question, the Vatican document lists two tendencies that have appeared in recent years about women's issues:

1) The tendency to emphasise conditions of subordination of women. Women, to protect themselves, tend to make themselves adversaries of men. The response of women to the long historic abuse of power, leads women to seek power. The process leads to opposition between men and women in which the identity and role of one is emphasised to the disadvantage of the other resulting in confusion about the human person.

2) The tendency to avoid domination of one sex over the other by denying their differences as mere effects of historical and cultural conditioning. In this perspective, physical difference, termed sex, is minimised while the cultural element, termed gender, is maximized.

This theory of the human person, intended to promote the equality of the sexes through liberation from biological determinism, has already called into question the family in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, made heterosexuality and homosexuality equivalent and is developing a new model of polymorphous sexuality.

The naming of the two tendencies explains why the Church sees a problem. The Vatican document states that the perspective of the need to be freed from one's biological conditioning has consequences regarding the Scriptures: 1) Scripture is seen as handing on a patriarchal concept of God nourished by a male dominated culture and 2) The fact that the Son of God assumed human nature in its male form is considered unimportant.

In the face of the current trend of thought contained in these tendencies, the Church invites people to consider a biblically based alternative view: an active collaboration between the sexes precisely in recognition of the difference between a man and woman .

Biblical vision of the human person

The first three chapters of the Book of Genesis contain the revealed truth that each person is created in the image and likeness of God – the immutable basis of all Christian anthropology.

The theology of Genesis teaches that the creative power of God makes distinctions in the original chaos. An ordered world is born out of those differences that carry with them the promise of relationships. From the beginning humanity is described in terms of the male-female relationship.

The second creation account (Gen 2:4-25) shows Adam was experiencing a loneliness, which the presence of animals is not able to overcome. God created Eve as a vital companion so that Adam's life would not become a sterile encounter with himself. (The Holy Father makes the same point in the book The Theology of the Body which reprints his addresses from his General Audiences.) Adam must enter into relationship with another being on his own level. As a union of two, the original solitude is overcome.

The human body marked by masculinity or femininity includes from the very beginning the capacity to love – that love in which the person becomes a gift and by means of the gift fulfils the meaning of his being and existence. Each person exists for the other.

That relationship is the spousal connection, which is patterned on our Triune God - a communion of love each for the other. The document teaches that not only marriage, but all of human history unfolds within the context of this call to interpersonal communion and to the integration of what is feminine and what is masculine.

God looked at creation and said it was very good. The document concludes: God's plan can never be abrogated.

Reflection questions

1) Do we understand the power of attitude in our lives?
2) Are the two tendencies listed above present in our attitudes in any way?
3) Do we see the importance of the proper collaboration of men and women for Church and society?
4) Do we accept all the nuptial dimensions of the creative will of God?
5) Do we try to live in communion with others in peace as a gift to those with whom we relate?