The Hope of a World Transfigured
Inever really understood the power of sacred art until my first visit to the Sistine Chapel. I was twenty years old and had only recently converted to the Catholic faith. I spent a lot of time trying to think and read and argue my way to a deeper understanding of God and the teachings of the Church. But the idea that alongside all that thinking and reading and arguing I could also be looking – simply allowing a beautiful image to raise my heart and mind to God – made no sense to me.
That changed as I stood in the middle of the Sistine Chapel and looked up at Michelangelo’s Last Judgement for the first time.
The ceiling and altar wall of the Sistine Chapel were decorated by Michelangelo in two bursts of world-changing creative industry in the sixteenth century, several decades after the chapel itself was first built. Staring up at that ceiling over four hundred years later, I saw the history of salvation unfolding above me from Michelangelo’s array of beautifully and intricately painted Old Testament characters, a dance
of human figures which drew my gaze forwards, onwards, to the overwhelmingly vast depiction of the Last Judgement on the far wall. There I saw crowds upon crowds of saints gathered around the risen, glorified Christ, some male, some female, each their own size and shape, each with their own gestures and expressions – and each of them as human as I was.
That fresco of the Last Judgement was an astonishing sight. But I later learnt that, had I been standing in the same spot only half a century earlier, I would have seen something very different.
The clean, bright fresco which visitors to the Sistine Chapel see today is the result of a painstaking work of repair and restoration which began in the 1960s and was only completed in the mid-1990s. Before this work began, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel were dim and dingy thanks to centuries of neglect. Lit candles on the altar below the Last Judgement had stained the walls with soot and smoke; birds had defecated onto the paintwork through the open windows. But that was only the accidental damage. Even worse was the damage that had been done to these priceless and unrepeatable works of art deliberately.
Shortly after Michelangelo’s death Daniele da Volterra, an Italian artist and sculptor, was asked by Pope Paul IV to paint over some of the naked bodies of the Last Judgement in the interests of decency. Since da Volterra was an admirer of Michelangelo’s work, he first tried to get away with just
daubing on a few cursory bits of cloth. But he was ordered to go back and cover up even more. In his second round of censorship, da Volterra not only painted over the top of Michelangelo’s work but actually scraped off the original paint, replastering the wall so that he could work entirely from scratch – and earning himself the nickname il Braghettone, ‘the breeches-maker,’ in the process.
Daniele da Volterra does not deserve to go down in history as a vandal. After all, he was simply doing what he was told. But an unhappy combination of candle-soot, bird droppings, and il Braghettone’s handiwork ensured that, for many centuries, the original beauty of Michelangelo’s frescoes were hidden from human sight – not only by accidental damage, but also by deliberate choice.
The restored frescoes were unveiled in April 1994, during the papacy of Pope St John Paul II. At the Mass to celebrate their unveiling, the Pope made clear that this work of restoration was far more than a spot of long-overdue spring cleaning. Instead, it was an act of great spiritual significance. In his homily, he described the Sistine Chapel as a ‘sanctuary of the theology of the human body,’ full of artwork which expressed ‘the hope of a world transfigured’ by ‘witnessing to the beauty of man created by God as male and female’.1
1 Pope St John Paul II, Homily at the Celebration of the Unveiling of the Restorations of Michelangelo’s Frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, April 1994
With these words, Pope St John Paul II gave a very different perspective on these human figures to the one which had compelled il Braghettone to begin his chiselling. These figures with their sexed bodies were not a problem or a scandal, but a witness: to the beauty and intricacy of God’s plan of salvation, and to the human person’s place within it.
It seems particularly fitting that Pope St John Paul II was the one called upon to defend the truth of the Sistine Chapel frescoes. His papal teaching, like the restored Sistine Chapel, is a sanctuary of pro-human theology. It is a place where God’s glory is revealed in and through meditation on the human person made in His image, a place where layers of confusion and lies and nonsense – some of it accidental, some of it deliberate – which have built up over the identity of the human person over time are removed, so that we can see ourselves as God sees us.
But when we enter this sanctuary of pro-human theology which Pope St John Paul II has made, we find that he wants to turn our gaze towards something, or rather someone, who holds a place of particular importance in these teachings.
Someone whose true worth has been damaged and obscured over many centuries. Someone whom society often seems frightened to look upon and see for who they truly are.
Someone whose deepest worth needs to be restored and rediscovered, so that they can witness to their God-given beauty and understand themselves as a sign of hope of a world transfigured.
The Purpose of This Book
This book begins in the Sistine Chapel, the sanctuary of the theology of the body, because it is a book about a topic of supreme importance to Pope St John Paul II and his work of theological restoration: women.
‘The dignity and the vocation of women – a subject of constant human and Christian reflection – have gained exceptional prominence in recent years,’2 wrote the Pope at the very beginning of his apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem (The Dignity of Women). Mulieris Dignitatem was published in 1988, ten years into his pontificate. By then the Pope had already spent much time reflecting on, and teaching about, the significance of the human person in the plan of God. His encyclical letter Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man), for instance, emphasised that each human person, redeemed by Jesus Christ, has an inherent dignity and value. His apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio (The Christian Family in the Modern World) upheld the importance of the human family as the primary place where this dignity is discovered and fostered. Woven around these and other documents are five years of short, weekly teachings on the spiritual meaning of the human body known as the Catechesis on Human Love, or more colloquially – in a phrase already familiar to us – the ‘theology of the body’.
2 Pope St John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem (MD), 1988, I.1
In Mulieris Dignitatem, a letter which the Pope describes as a ‘meditation,’3 he turns his attention specifically to the female human person. In it, the Pope ‘gives thanks for all the manifestations of the feminine “genius” which have appeared in the course of history,’ and calls on women to ‘assume, together with men, a common responsibility for the destiny of humanity’.4 He founded the teaching of the letter in ‘biblical anthropology’5: an understanding of the human person which uses the divine revelation transmitted to us through Scripture to make sense of the basic, observable facts of our God-given nature. Then, atop this biblical foundation, the Pope builds an authentically Catholic vision of women’s ‘active presence’ in both the Church and society.6
This book delves into the Catholic Church’s teaching on the nature and dignity of woman using Mulieris Dignitatem as its inspiration and guide. Following Mulieris Dignitatem, we will consider woman from four different perspectives: the woman of creation, the woman of the Bible, the woman of the Church, and the woman of today.
Looking at women in this way will not only strengthen Catholic women in our own faith, but also give us the confidence to step out into contemporary debates about female identity and women’s rights. After all, the Catholic
3
4
5
6
teaching on woman is not some unimportant niche in Christian theology. It’s not just a set of platitudes to make Catholic women feel better about not being men, or to help them save face with their secular feminist friends. It is a rich and often challenging teaching which, by rooting us in the absolute truth of womanhood, enables us to navigate the inhuman, anti-human confusion of the modern world, and begin to clear away the dirt and the damage which have built up over our conception of ourselves over many decades. Through it we can engage with contemporary questions around sexual relations, family structure and size, the limits of technological progress, the purpose of marriage and the meaning of sex and gender, for which everybody – not just believing Catholics – needs an answer.
While this Catholic teaching on woman as found in Mulieris Dignitatem is certainly inspiring, ultimately what the world needs is something more: not just an abstract, theoretical ‘teaching on woman,’ but actual women, living out this vision in their everyday lives, bringing about a more faith-filled, pro-human society as they do. Pope St John Paul II says this in a striking passage from Mulieris Dignitatem. ‘The human being is entrusted by God to women in a particular way,’ and therefore ‘Christ looks to them’ to accomplish the God-given work of Christian worship and witness.7
7 MD VIII.30
Let those words sink in: Christ looks to them. Standing in the Sistine Chapel at the age of twenty, I first learned the importance of looking: of gazing upon God’s creation, these human bodies He made and redeemed, in order that He might reveal Himself to me through them. In the Word made flesh, that gaze is returned. When we look to woman to discover her true value and dignity, we find that this value and this dignity are not simply a prize to be satisfied with or a laurel to rest on. Instead, they are the means by which we carry out the particular responsibilities God has given us in His divine plan.
Christ looks to woman for the accomplishment of the Church’s mission. It falls to us, then, to look to woman to discover who exactly she is and how she is to do this.
The Woman of Creation
Mulieris Dignitatem Chapters 1–3
In October 2019, the author and academic Dr Susan Matthews gave a speech for Woman’s Place UK – a secular women’s rights advocacy group – as part of their event A Woman’s Place is at the Lectern. In it she quoted Polly Carmichael, then head of the NHS’s now-defunct Gender Identity Development Service, speaking positively about the contemporary trend for, as she put it, ‘exploring gender’. Dr Matthews’ opinion on this trend was very different: The director of the Gender Identity Development Service celebrates the ways in which young people are ‘exploring gender.’ But I lament the failure of the service to offer an alternative way of understanding gender that would help them to accept their bodies. In my view, the proliferating gender identities are like the range of soap powders you can buy in your local supermarket: the packaging is different but they come from the same multinational company and all damage the environment.8
8 Woman’s Place UK, A Woman’s Place is at the Lectern, 4 October 2019, accessed 1 February 2025 https://womansplaceuk.org/2019/11/04/one-possibility-susanmatthews-at-a-womans-place-is-at-the-lectern/
The image of a supermarket shelf stacked with brightlypackaged but toxic products is a striking one. Even more striking is Dr Matthews’ diagnosis of the cause of this surfeit of fake choice: reluctance to accept our own bodies.
At first glance, the idea that our gender is something determined wholly by preference and arrived at by a process of inner exploration seems appealing. Perhaps it even seems liberating. But beneath each colourful label of gender identity held out to us is the same poisonous lie: the lie that we can untether our selfhood from our bodies without losing our grip on reality in the process.
For as long as we have wondered what it means to be human, we have wondered what it means to be male and female. Plato (428/7-348/7 BC) saw the physical distinctions between men and women as insignificant; for him, matter (meaning the physical world perceivable by our senses) did not reveal truth, but instead obscured it, and so differences in bodies had no bearing on our nature and identity. But for Aristotle (384-322 BC), form and matter went hand-inhand. So the truth of who we are was made manifest in and through our bodies, leading him to conclude that women were defective and deprived versions of men, who were the most full and proper embodiment of human nature in the material world.
Neither of these positions begin with the question of sexual difference, of course. Both rest on far deeper foundations: beliefs about the very nature of human beings,
and the reality in which we find ourselves, which are properly called metaphysical. Both Plato and Aristotle are prime examples of a fundamental truth of philosophical enquiry: one of the first places we clearly see the real-world consequences of our metaphysical beliefs is in the attitude they give us towards our own bodies.
Though Plato and Aristotle’s theories of sexual difference originated thousands of years ago, they continue to determine the course of our present-day debates about sex and gender. Without necessarily invoking them by name, successive waves of feminism have been tempted to side with either one of these ancient philosophies: either taking a polarising view of male and female which sees sexual differences as a cause of permanent, inevitable conflict, or a unifying view of male and female which steamrollers over all physical and psychological differences in the search for equality.
From ancient Greece to the twenty-first century United Kingdom, these theories of sexual difference have never just stood on their own two feet. Instead, they are set atop our prior beliefs about human nature itself. If we in the modern world are confused about sex and gender, our problem does not start there. It starts instead with our inability to ‘accept our bodies,’ as Dr Matthews puts it, as essential to revealing what and who we are. The shelves are stacked and heaving with gender identities, but the manufacturers are all the same – and the sell-by date was the fourth and fifth centuries BC.
We might think that present-day theories of gender identity mark, for better or worse, an innovative step forward in our understanding of the human person. But they are simply a worn groove in a very old debate. While the language might have changed, the questions we are asking remain the same: Does taking bodies seriously, as Aristotle does, inevitably lead to the belief that men are superior? Or must we follow Plato, and totally ignore the differences between our bodies in order to affirm that men and women are equal?
Or is there another way entirely?
The Image of God in the Mother of God
Far away from the supermarket shelves of gender identity, in his sanctuary of pro-human theology, Pope St John Paul II begins Mulieris Dignitatem by introducing the woman who is going to guide us through his meditation on female identity: Mary.
Mary, the Pope tells us, is ‘the essential horizon of reflection on the dignity and the vocation of women’. In the first chapter of the letter, Woman – Mother of God (Theotokos), he outlines several characteristics of her life that will form the key points of his teaching. The first one is this: ‘No human being, male or female, created in the image and likeness of God, can in any way attain fulfilment apart from this image and likeness’.9
9 MD II.5
With these words we move into the third chapter of the letter, the first to deeply explore the reality of woman: The Image and Likeness of God. At this point, it’s worth pausing to take stock. The cinematography here in this first part of Mulieris Dignitatem is a little dizzying. We have focused in for a close-up of one woman, Mary, and then panned out for a grand panorama of the whole human race, created in God’s image and likeness. What is the Pope doing? Essentially, he is doing what anyone who thinks deeply about man and woman has to do, whether they know it or not: he is rooting his beliefs about sex and sexual difference in metaphysics. But this time we are guided not by human reason alone, as we were with Plato and Aristotle’s theories. Instead, we are guided by human reason enlightened by biblical faith.
The Pope’s starting-point in this third chapter, The Image and Likeness of God, is a single line from the Book of Genesis: ‘God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them’ (Gen 1:27). Here, he tells us, we find ‘the truth about the personal character of the human being. Man is a person, man and woman equally so, since both were created in the image and likeness of the personal God’.10
To understand the connection the Pope is making here between the philosophical term ‘person’ and the biblical phrase ‘image of God,’ it is helpful to know some of the
historical background to the Book of Genesis. In the ancient Near East, the time and place in which the Genesis creation narratives were compiled, it was understood that the image of an object or person made present the power of that which was being imaged. The phrase ‘image of God’ – rendered in Latin as imago Dei – tells us that the human person makes present, in a limited and imperfect way, something of the very nature of God within the created order. ‘What makes man like God,’ the Pope tells us, ‘is the fact that – unlike the whole world of other living creatures, including those endowed with senses – man is also a rational being’.11
Personhood, rationality, and the imago Dei are closely connected concepts in the Catholic tradition. ‘God created man a rational being,’ the Catechism tells us, ‘conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions’.12 The ‘fundamental reason’ for this personal dignity is our creation in imago Dei, by which we are ‘called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life’.13 Being a rational creature made in the imago Dei means, in short, that we have God-given mastery over our own actions, can freely move ourselves towards what is good by those actions, and can genuinely know and desire that good towards which we are moving.
11 MD III.6
12 Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) 1730
13 CCC 356
What the Pope is doing here, in the first part of The Image and Likeness of God, is an excellent example of how biblical anthropology works. After all, human reason alone can tell us much of what the Pope is writing about: there is something distinctive about human beings, and this distinctiveness is rooted in certain capacities we have to know, desire, and orient ourselves towards what we perceive as good. Yet it is Scripture alone, in particular the creation narratives of Genesis, which directly place in our grasp the knowledge that human reason stretches out towards. It tells us that the good we seek to know and find is God Himself, the origin and the goal of all these distinctive abilities. This is why the Pope founded his teaching in this first part of the letter simultaneously in the observable facts of human nature and the witness of Scripture: both together are needed to reveal the fullness of who we are and for what we are made.
Now we face a problem. When we talk about the imago Dei in this way – rooted in our rational capacity to know, to love, and to direct our actions – it starts to seem immaterial and abstract, concentrated in the mind and the soul. Yet we know that human beings are not just minds and souls. We are also bodies. This intellectual crumb-trail leads us to another observation: these human bodies are sexed bodies.
Beginning at conception, the human person’s physical development progresses along one of two lines, dependent on which gamete our chromosomal makeup has determined we will produce: sperm for males, and ova for females. Our
primary sexual characteristics (our reproductive organs) and secondary sexual characteristics (physical features such as pubic hair and breasts) are organised around, and determined by, this gamete production. Certain physical conditions can affect those sex characteristics in a way that makes biological sex difficult to externally determine. But this does not change the fact that a human being can produce only one of two possible types of gamete, and therefore there is only one of two sexes – male or female – which they can be.
Sexual difference doesn’t just determine what’s in our underwear. Its effects are pervasive. And because human beings are social animals, living within highly complex social groups, these pervasive differences influence our behaviour, our expectations of each other, and our social roles within those groups in various ways. This has given rise to the relatively modern distinction between sex (the physical differentiation between male and female) and gender (the way we present ourselves as male and female within our particular society and culture).
Humans, in short, are what we call a sexually dimorphic species: we are either male or female, and males and females are physically distinct from each other. Yet God is perfectly capable of creating sexually monomorphic species, where no such physical distinctions exist between sexes, or hermaphroditic species, where a single animal can produce both gametes simultaneously. So why would God choose to give these very obvious and profound sexual differences to
the only creature created in imago Dei? If both male and female human beings are the image of the one God, is there any point in making them so very different from each other, and if there is, what is it meant to tell us about men and women?
The Communion of Persons
These are questions that we cannot avoid. Pope St John Paul II tells us that one of the key aims of Mulieris Dignitatem is to explore ‘the reason for and the consequences of the Creator’s decision that the human being should always and only exist as a woman or a man,’ because this will ‘make it possible to understand the greatness of the dignity and vocation of women’.14
To do so, the Pope returns once more to Genesis, to the verse in which God proclaims: ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner’ (Gen 2:18). This verse, he says, reveals another crucial fact about our creation in God’s image. Not only are we ‘a rational and free creature capable of knowing God and loving him,’ but also we ‘exist only as a “unity of the two”, and therefore in relation to another human person’. This means that ‘being a person in the image and likeness of God…also involves existing in a relationship, in relation to the other “I’’’.15
14 MD I.1
15 MD III.7
For the Pope, the importance of this human capacity for relationship is clear from the original Hebrew words of the biblical text. He points out that a new scriptural word for ‘man’ is introduced into the Genesis creation account after God puts Adam into a ‘deep sleep’ and makes the first woman, Eve, from ‘one of his ribs’ (Gen 2:21-22). Up to this point, the only word used for the human person in Genesis has been adam (אָדָם), the word from which Adam, the first man, receives his name. But when Adam first recognises Eve, and exclaims that ‘this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken,’ (Gen 2:23) the word used for man is ish (אִישׁ) and the word used for woman is ishsha (אִשָּׁה). ‘In biblical language,’ the Pope writes, the name ishsha ‘indicates [woman’s] essential identity with regard to man,’ and thus ‘provides sufficient bases for recognising the essential equality of man and woman from the point of view of their humanity’.16
Here in Mulieris Dignitatem, the Pope speaks only briefly about the significance of this linguistic shift. But it’s worth putting his teaching side-by-side with one of his General Audiences from 1979, an address that forms part of his Theology of the Body, in order to understand its significance better. In that General Audience, the Pope suggested that this striking change in language tells us that Adam’s sleep is more than just divine anaesthetic. Instead, this sleep is a
‘return to non-being,’ to ‘the moment preceding the creation,’ so that ‘through God’s creative initiative, solitary “man”may emerge…in his double unity as male and female’.17 Adamby-himself – the man incapable of relationship with another, because there simply is no other – is so strikingly different from Adam-with-Eve that the change is marked in the biblical text by new language and something akin to a new act of creation. The discovery of Eve makes possible Adam’s discovery of himself. ‘The man is both naming woman and renaming himself,’ says the Catholic feminist Abigail Favale, commenting on the Pope’s interpretation of this biblical text. ‘It is through encountering her nature that he is able truly to understand his own’.18 Far from being a symbol of subservience, the creation of Eve after Adam is instead the crowning and completion of the creation narrative, revealing a fundamental truth of human nature inaccessible to solitary man.
The Pope now takes this positive understanding of Eve’s creation and uses it to make sense of a potentially controversial line from earlier in the Genesis creation narrative: the description of woman as ‘a helper’ for man.19 Eve is, indeed, a helper for Adam, but that does not mean she is no more than a supporting role in a male ego-drama.
17 Pope St John Paul II, General Audience Original Unity of Man and Woman, 7 November 1979
18 Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory, 2022, p. 43
19 Genesis 2:18
The Pope tells us that, instead, woman ‘must “help” the man – and in his turn he must help her – first of all by the very fact of their “being human persons”’. It is a ‘mutual “help,”’ he writes, by which we assist each other to understand that ‘to be human means to be called to interpersonal communion’.20
But why? Why is it so necessary that man and woman, the only creatures made in God’s image and likeness, exist in communion with one another? Quite simply, because God Himself exists in communion. ‘The model for this interpretation of the person,’ the Pope says, ‘is God Himself as Trinity, as a communion of Persons’. The communion that exists within the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit – is manifested between individual, sexually differentiated human beings. This revelation of the centrality of relationship to our creation in imago Dei is, the Pope concludes, ‘a prelude to the definitive self-revelation of the Triune God: a living unity in the communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit’.21
Together with person, the concept of communion is central to Pope St John Paul II’s biblical anthropology. It is through communion – above all the unifying, life-giving communion of a man and a woman bonded to one another in marriage – that the human person makes the most of their rational powers of knowing and loving, and thus most
20 MD III.7
21 Ibid.
clearly expresses the image of God within His creation. Discovering this fundamental truth of our humanity through relationship with another is the ‘help’ that man and woman give each other. It is a help which only woman has the privilege of being explicitly named as giving in the biblical narrative.
The Pope returns to this biblical description of woman as helper in his Letter to Women, published several years after Mulieris Dignitatem. There, he describes the creation of woman as ‘marked from the outset by the principle of help: a help which is not one-sided but mutual,’ and which consists not merely in ‘acting, but also… being’.22 The help woman offers is first and foremost the revelatory fact of her very existence, which sheds light on the human call to communion and is returned to her in the help she receives from man to discover that same call for herself.
In the Letter to Women, the Pope uses one key word to sum up this mutual, revelatory help that characterises malefemale relationships: complementarity. The ‘principle of help’ which marks woman’s creation reveals that ‘woman complements man, just as man complements woman: men and women are complementary. Womanhood expresses the “human” as much as manhood does, but in a different and complementary way’. This complementarity, he writes, is not only ‘physical and psychological,’ but also ‘ontological’.
22 Pope St John Paul II, Letter to Women, 1995, 7
Therefore, ‘it is only through the duality of the “masculine” and the “feminine” that the “human” finds full realisation’.23
But the Pope is keen to stress that this male-female complementarity does not mean man and woman are two separate puzzle pieces, each containing one half of the whole picture. ‘Womanhood expresses the “human” as much as manhood does,’24 he writes, and this is because the revelation of the imago Dei comes from the bond of relationship itself. Each of the two persons within that relationship possesses the fullness of human nature, with the full set of emotions and virtues and the capacity to know and to love – but they do so always either as man or as woman.
The Catholic vision of mutual complementarity between the sexes dynamites a hole right through the traditional philosophical debate about sexual difference. As Aristotle would argue, man and woman are not pitted against each other in a hierarchy, nor are they indistinct in all the ways that matter, as Plato would have it. Instead, the differences between men and women are both significant and positive, speaking of a difference that begins on a deeper, more fundamental level than our physical bodies and directs us to a destiny entirely beyond the physical world. The word ‘ontological’ that the Pope uses here in the Letter to Women describes the philosophical study of being, of what things
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
fundamentally are. As we know, human beings are more than the sum of our parts: not just minds stuck in bodies or bodies yoked to minds. We are persons, and it is on this level that we have been constituted as male and female.
Let us pause at this point and consider the real-world consequences of this teaching. All of us, at one time or another, will have had an experience that has made us doubt our femininity or feel out of place in our female body. Perhaps we were told at a young age that something in our personality is not how girls behave, or not what girls should do; perhaps we were told or led to believe by the images of women that surrounded us in media and advertising, that we didn’t look or dress like a real woman should. Perhaps trauma, illness, or disability has shifted our relationship with our bodies and minds so dramatically that we no longer feel at home with ourselves, wondering where we can find our femininity in this new situation. If we live with these uncertainties and insecurities for long enough, they might seep so far into our self-understanding that we start to believe that we are no longer, or never have been, woman enough. Perhaps we might doubt that we are women at all.
If we understand femaleness as an identity that is rooted in the level of the person and not an identity that springs into being on the level of bodies or behaviours, then we can be confident that these doubts are unfounded. Womanhood is an identity that we develop and grow into over time, yes. But because it is ontological, rather than solely physical or
psychological, it is an identity that can be lived out in a vast array of different bodies and personalities. Moreover, it is not an identity that can ever be damaged beyond repair or taken away from us; not by how we look, not by how we act, not by how other people speak to us or treat us, and not by anything that can be done to us.
The Sincere Gift of Self
There is one, final concept that forms the Pope’s biblical anthropology in this chapter of Mulieris Dignitatem. As well as person and communion, he also speaks of gift. This, he says, is the ‘point of departure’ where we can begin to speak of all that is specific and distinct about the role of women in the divine plan. ‘Being a person,’ he writes, ‘means striving towards self-realisation…which can only be achieved “through a sincere gift of self”’. 25 The language of self-gift is taken from the Second Vatican Council, which describes the human person, ‘the only creature on earth which God willed for itself,’ as unable to ‘fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself’.26 Our rationality makes us capable of truly understanding ourselves; our call to communion means we discover it only through freely putting ourselves in relationships with others.
This call to self-gift ‘applies to every human being, whether woman or man,’ the Pope tells us, but we ‘live it
25 MD III.7
26 Ibid.
out in accordance with the special qualities proper to each’.27
As to what those special qualities are, here the Pope offers only the beginning of an answer. He tells us that the ‘spousal character of the relationship between persons [will] serve as the basis for the subsequent development of the truth about motherhood and about virginity, [which are] two particular dimensions of the vocation of women’.28
In time, the Pope devoted an entire chapter of Mulieris Dignitatem to exploring these three identities of spouse, mother, and virgin. For now, we can simply note that each of these three identities touches on what we do with our bodies and with whom. They all relate to how we make a gift of self as physical, relational creatures: uniting ourselves to another in marital relations, bearing a child within our body, refraining from sexual relations with another. We should also bear in mind that the concepts of marriage, motherhood, and virginity are sensitive and emotive – even painful – for many women. Our understanding of them might be in need of healing. We will need to be patient with ourselves, and remain open-minded, as the Pope guides us into a new and perhaps very different understanding of what they are.
We can also reflect on just how careful and thorough Pope St John Paul II has been in laying the foundations
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
for his meditation on the dignity of woman. The biblical anthropology that he presents to us in Mulieris Dignitatem holds together two aspects of womanhood which the traditional philosophies of sex and gender struggle to: dignity and difference. It affirms the intrinsic dignity of women, by rooting that dignity in our common creation in the imago Dei. But it understands the obvious difference between men and women as something both significant and positive: manifesting our capacity for relationship by which we image God in His creation. It avoids all the shortcomings of Aristotle’s polarising view, which uses our physical differences to create a hierarchy placing men above women, and of Plato’s unifying view, which underplays the significance of biological reality. It can do so because it first and foremost takes the human body seriously, as our entrypoint into understanding the mystery of our creation as rational, relational creatures, called to be a ‘unity of the two’.
Beginning a meditation on women with a deep dive into the very reality of human nature might, to some, seem excessive. But here the Pope is simply following the example of God Himself. In one of the General Audiences which form his Theology of the Body, the Pope observes that when the Pharisees ask Jesus a difficult question about marriage and divorce, Jesus takes the discussion right back to Genesis, to the origins of the human story. When the Pharisees “test” Jesus by asking if it is ‘lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause,’ (Matt 19:3) he begins his answer by naming
God as ‘the one who made them at the beginning…“male and female”’ (Matt 19:5). Jesus, the Pope observes, ‘did not accept the discussion at the level at which his interlocutors tried to introduce it.’ 29 Instead, He ‘drew the conclusion… [from] words of the ancient revelation,’30 and this method of inquiry is ‘no less valid for the people of today than for those of that time’. Therefore, the Pope concludes, we are called to ‘put ourselves precisely in the position of Christ’s interlocutors,’ 31 and accept that, in any age, only that biblical ‘beginning’ – the very foundations of who we are as human beings, spiritual and yet embodied, different and yet complementary – can answer our controversial questions.
Adult, Human, Female, and What Else?
For most women of previous generations, those controversial questions were about women’s social and familial roles and, in particular, their relations with men. But with public discourse around sex and gender having philosophically bottomed out in the last few decades, our present-day equivalent of the Pharisees’ question is something even more basic: what even is a woman?
In his 2022 documentary, What Is a Woman?, the political commentator (and devout Catholic) Matt Walsh
29 Pope St John Paull II, General Audience The Unity and Indissolubility of Marriage, 5 September 1979
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
sets out to get an answer to that very question. Across ninety excruciating minutes, he asks a variety of activists, academics, and medical professionals for a definition of woman, and, for his troubles, receives a sorry mishmash of confused, contradictory, and at times outright nonsensical responses. At the end of the documentary, Walsh returns home to his wife and asks her the same question: ‘An adult human female,’ she replies bluntly, ‘who needs help opening this’, after which she hands him a pickle jar with a tightlyscrewed lid.
It’s a hilariously anticlimactic ending, and one clearly intended to hammer home Walsh’s central point, that contemporary theories of personal identity, sex, and gender have rendered many people incapable of stating basic factual truths about men and women, with the main casualty of this ideological signal-scrambling being women themselves.
For the journalist and author Helen Joyce, this scene reveals what she sees as the flaw in Walsh’s documentary: his own understanding of female identity is just as inadequate and problematic as those of the people he interviews. As a result, the pickle-jar scene is a huge missed opportunity to discuss sex relations and sex identity in a thoughtful and nuanced way. ‘Might we want to talk about how women’s bodies differ from men’s, and society is set up to accommodate the men’s bodies, not the women’s?’ she asks. ‘Might it be useful to have words and concepts to analyse all this?’ That Walsh is ‘completely unequipped to think this
through’ is, for Joyce, ‘hardly surprising’. After all, she points out, ‘he’s an old-fashioned Catholic’.32
Joyce makes her argument very eloquently, but is she right? Are Catholics ‘completely unequipped’ to think about sexual difference in an intelligent and nuanced way? The biblical anthropology of woman that Pope St John Paul II gives us in Mulieris Dignitatem, founded in a thoughtful and faithful reading of the Genesis creation accounts, shows that we are not. From a Catholic point of view, ‘adult human female’ can never be a sufficient answer to the question of what a woman is. It is a good starting point, because it is grounded in the observable facts of our sexed bodies. But these bodies are sexed for a reason: they are relational, a sign of our capacity for self-giving communion with others and, ultimately, with the Creator in whose image and likeness we are made. Certainly, we need to begin our answer to the question ‘What is a woman?’ with a healthy acknowledgement of our physical nature. But we also need to understand where that nature comes from, and how it finds its fulfilment. We need what the theologian Fr Thomas Petri OP calls ‘anthropology from above’: a view of woman which ‘raises the dignity of the human body and sexual difference in the light of faith,’ to avoid ‘fall[ing] into sexual prejudice and gender stereotyping’.33
32 Helen Joyce, Joyce Activated, Issue 9, accessed 1 February 2025 https://www. thehelenjoyce.com/joyce-activated-issue-9/
33 Thomas Petri OP, Aquinas and the Theology of the Body, 2016, p. 312, ff. 1
The female body poses a question – who am I? – which, by itself, it cannot fully answer. It is only through communion with others that the full answer is revealed. To be ready to receive that answer, there are two steps we need to take. The first step is to have respect for the basic facts of our physically embodied nature. The second step is to be willing to put these basic facts in the context of a divine plan. In Mulieris Dignitatem, Pope St John Paul II shows us how to do both.
Sexual Difference vs Biological Determinism
Meanwhile, a growing number of feminists are taking that first step. The author and journalist Louise Perry is one example: ‘I start from a position that historically has often been a source of discomfort for feminists of all ideological persuasions: that men and women are different, and that those differences aren’t going away,’ she writes in her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. 34 Later, she lays out her position yet more starkly:
In the modern West, it has become increasingly possible to become detached from the sexually dimorphic body when one does not do a manual job, compete in sports or bear children. But the unwelcome truth will always remain, whether or not we can bear to look at it: almost all men can kill almost all women with their bare hands, but not vice versa.35
34 Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, 2022, p. 10
35 Ibid., p. 29
Another example is Mary Harrington, the author of Feminism Against Progress. ‘If everything that makes us human resides in our consciousness, and there’s nothing natural or integral about our bodies, then we really are just meat,’ she writes. ‘I don’t want to live in this world. It’s one in which few will flourish and many suffer’.36 Instead, ‘we need a movement that honours the interests of women, and of men, as irreducibly sexed fusions of self and body, against an emerging order that seeks to de-sex and disembody us all’.37 Harrington describes this emerging movement as ‘reactionary’ feminism38; others, such as the editors of the online journal Fairer Disputations, describe it as ‘sex-realist’ feminism.39 Whatever the terminology, the principles are the same: a growing number of women, from a variety of religious and philosophical backgrounds, share a common commitment to being honest about the physical reality of womanhood. As such, they share a common starting-point in their understanding of female identity with Pope St John Paul II and the entire Catholic tradition.
But whatever direction the reactionary or sex-realist feminists choose to step next, they have a looming obstacle to avoid: biological determinism, which the philosopher
36 Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress, 2023, p. 160-161
37 Ibid., p. 162
38 Ibid., p. 21
39 Fairer Disputations: About Us, accessed 1 February 2025 https://fairerdisputations. org/about-us
Kathleen Stock defines as ‘the historically persistent idea that a woman’s personality, behaviour and life options are determined by her female biology, making her naturally suited for home life rather than professional work or intellectual life’.40 Modern gender theory, Stock argues, can be seen as the great, decades-long escape from this idea: a movement to shear the chains linking sex and gender so that, to paraphrase the influential feminist academic Judith Butler, our anatomy is no longer our destiny.41
Most non-Catholics – and maybe quite a few Catholics – would assume that Church teaching on sexual difference is close, if not identical, to biological determinism. But this determinism is as alien to Catholic teaching as it is to gender theory. As the Church reminds us, ‘although motherhood is a key element of women’s identity, this does not mean that women should be considered from the sole perspective of physical procreation,’ for this can lead to ‘serious distortions… often accompanied by dangerous disrespect for women’.42
Biological determinism is what results when we look at human nature without at the same time looking beyond it, to its ultimate fulfilment in God. When we take stock of the
40 Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, 2021, p. 15
41 Judith Butler, Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, 1986: ‘The distinction between sex and gender has been crucial to the long-standing feminist effort to debunk the claim that anatomy is destiny’.
42 Pontifical Council for the Laity, Men and Women: Diversity and Mutual Complementarity, 2004, p. 220
human person’s spiritual destiny, we avoid biological determinism entirely. We arrive instead at Mulieris Dignitatem’s integral complementarity: the recognition that male and female bodies are equally dignified, mutually revelatory, and made by, and for, God; for a purpose that cannot be, and is not meant to be, fully satisfied in particular social roles.
Judith Butler need not worry. Anatomy is not destiny –the imago Dei is.
An Alternative Philosophy
This Catholic vision of the woman of creation is not just one product among many on Dr Susan Matthews’ supermarket shelf of gender identities. It is a gift to all women, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. But it is also a serious challenge. It is a challenge to Catholic women because so many of us have become used to being told you only believe that because you’re a Catholic – in other words because you are totally beyond rational argument – that we have internalised the message. How many of us have, at one time or another in our lives, put certain Church teachings in a hidden box in the corner of our minds, wary of looking at them or thinking about them in case they turn out to be just exactly as weird as all our friends think they are? And how many of us have done that specifically to the Church’s teaching on sex and gender – in particular, its teaching on women?
But when it comes to those teachings, it would be far more accurate to say you only believe that because you’re
a human being. The sex-realist principles on which the Catholic vision of woman rests are part of the natural foundation of human knowledge which divine revelation builds upon. It is our Catholic faith that enables us to reach a full understanding of these principles, but in themselves, they are discernible through natural reason. That natural reason is something all of our friends and family, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, possess and can make use of – as the growing popularity of sex-realist feminism shows. Perhaps we should be honest and say that many of us have become slightly too comfortable with keeping certain Church teachings hidden away in that inner box, never studied, never meditated on, and never fully understood or properly engaged with. Perhaps it’s time to bring them out into the fresh air.
Because after all, these teachings also challenge the sex-realist feminists with whom we share that common ground of natural reason. Mulieris Dignitatem is a (perhaps uncomfortable) reminder that one of the most intellectually thorough precursors to this form of feminism comes not from within the feminist movement itself, but from deep within the tradition of the Catholic Church. If sex-realist feminism wants to avoid the biological determinism to which gender theory is a reaction, Mulieris Dignitatem shows that the only way to avoid it is not by going sideways to an alternative philosophy, but instead going upwards, above and beyond natural philosophy, to belief in the Christian God.
Mulieris Dignitatem’s vision of the woman of creation gives Catholic women much to offer to this developing form of feminism. But first, we have to be confident in what we believe and in our ability to express it. Take, for example, the term gender. Recently, society has taken to asking us if we “conform” to our gender or not. Do you act and think like a woman when you present yourself to the world? Do you feel like one, deep within? Are you at home with your female gender, or are you perhaps gender-non-conforming instead? As Catholics rooted in the teaching of Mulieris Dignitatem, we can recognise that this is the wrong question to ask. Human beings do not conform to our gender. Instead, we conform to the imago Dei – our God-given capacity for knowledge, love, and relationality – through our gender. The supermarket shelf of gender identities might leave Catholics feeling understandably suspicious of the whole idea of gender, prone to thinking of it as a concept actively opposed to the basic fact of biological sexual difference. But rather than simply rejecting or avoiding the term ‘gender’, we can confidently and faithfully use it to describe how each of us images God in a particularly masculine or feminine way, living out a sexual distinctiveness that is rooted in the deepest level of our being – a level that is far beyond our, or anybody else’s, capacity to alter. Writing for the twentieth anniversary of Mulieris Dignitatem, the philosopher Sr Prudence Allen called on faithful Catholics to ‘not accept the incorrect rendering of “gender” but instead work hard to ransom it,’
in order to ‘reclaim and reassert its true meaning’.43 Now, as we approach the letter’s fortieth anniversary, we can add a whole new set of concepts for Catholic feminists to ‘ransom’ from the culture – not just for our own sake as Catholics, but for the sake of any woman looking for a sane and healthy way to make sense of her own female identity. And first among those concepts to be ransomed is the most central and significant of all: woman.
43 Sr Prudence Allen RSM, Mulieris Dignitatem Twenty Years Later: An Overview of the Document and Challenges, Ave Maria Law Review, Vol 8.1, 2009, p. 41
