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Religion Confronting Women’s Human Rights: The Case of Roman Catholicism

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Facilitating Freedom of Religion or Belief: A Deskbook

Abstract

This summary article is based on my research, undertaken since 1961, concerning formative Christian anthropology. Conflicts between normative religion and women’s rights are already well analyzed concerning Islam,1 but rather unexplored concerning traditional Christianity. Here the case of Roman Catholicism is highly significant, since the Catholic Church, according to 2001 Vatican statistics, is the world’s largest branch of Christianity, comprising 17.3% of the global population, or 1.050 billion human beings.

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References

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  44. It is important to note that the widespread selective abortion of female fetuses in Asia mainly results from the axiomatic inferiority of femaleness. This discrimination in Hinduism and Buddhism is explained by the ontological hierarchy of reincarnation and rebirth, placing women between men and animals. The current euphemism of blaming cultural relativism instead of androcentric religion is here especially fallacious; consider the widespread practice of direct or indirect female infanticide, well documented from classical antiquity to early modern Europe.

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  45. It is noteworthy that a majority of leading feminist theologians are Catholics. Their contribution as experts will be important in a third Vatican Council. Some influential European scholars are as follows: Elisabeth Gôssmann (Munich), Anne Jensen (Graz), Ursula King (Bristol), Cettina Militello (Rome), and Janet M. Soskice (Cambridge), and in the USA (significantly, all nuns): Anne E. Carr (Chicago), Margaret A. Farley (Yale), Elizabeth A. Johnson (New York), and Sandra M. Schneiders (Berkeley).

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  46. Examples of similar approaches, with a significant time lag, are the following: Letty M. Russell, ed., Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985 ) and Amina Wadud Muhsin, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 ).

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Tore Lindholm W. Cole Durham Jr. Bahia G. Tahzib-Lie Elizabeth A. Sewell Lena Larsen

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Børresen, K.E. (2004). Religion Confronting Women’s Human Rights: The Case of Roman Catholicism. In: Lindholm, T., Durham, W.C., Tahzib-Lie, B.G., Sewell, E.A., Larsen, L. (eds) Facilitating Freedom of Religion or Belief: A Deskbook. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-5616-7_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-5616-7_23

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