That the relationship between women and the Church is crossed by evident tensions is no mystery. More surprising, if anything, is the language with which these tensions are often expressed: a verbal violence that especially affects women every time their role, their words or their presence call into question what are considered “traditional” structures. Insults, sarcasm, delegitimizations are not simple communicative slips: they are symptoms. And, like all violence, they reveal not strength but fragility, not security but fear.
In fact, it is striking how verbal violence emerges precisely where identification with certain traditional values is perceived as threatened. When identity – personal or collective – feels under siege, the reaction is often aggressive. But an identity that needs to defend itself by hurting the other is a weak identity. If the reference to “tradition” generates fear of change and produces exclusion, then perhaps it is the very way of understanding that tradition that needs to be rethought.
This is true both in societies and in the Church. Women often become the symbolic terrain on which an identity battle is fought: their body, their voice, their space are loaded with meanings that serve to reassure an order perceived as unstable. But in doing so we betray the very heart of the Christian faith, which does not base the dignity of people on pre-established roles or natural hierarchies, but rather on their unrepeatable uniqueness before God.
Scripture offers radical words along these lines. The famous Pauline statement in Galatians – “there is no longer slave or free, neither Jew nor Greek, nor man nor woman” – does not erase the differences, but denies that they can be used as a criterion of value or access to the dignity of children of God. Reread today, this page does not ask to be domesticated, but taken seriously: as a provocation against every form of violence, even verbal, which arises from the fear of losing power.
If violence is always a sign of weakness, then a Church and a society capable of renouncing aggressive languages show not surrender, but evangelical strength. Rethinking identification with traditional values does not mean betraying them, but freeing them from fear. And perhaps it is precisely from here that a truer, more just and more human relationship – disarmed and disarming as Pope Leo XIV would say – can arise between women and the Church.
by Linda Pocher
Daughter of Mary Help of Christians, theologian
