Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

Son of God was „born in recent times for us and for our salvation from the Virgin Mary,
Mother of God, as to his humanity.” 37 Through the motherhood of Mary, writes Pope John
Paul II, God has revealed „the dignity of women in the highest form possible“ 38 . There is
hardly a man either that does not bear in himself strengths and gifts of sacrifice and solicitude,
just as, on the other hand, one could hardly find a woman who could not also devote herself
objectively and soberly to the activity of work. It is often rightly said that a merely masculine
man is terrible and a merely feminine woman is unbearable. Nevertheless, it remains that the
difference between man and woman reaches into the deepest roots of their bodily and mental
being. The distribution of social roles between the sexes (for instance, in the performance of
work) is indeed historically deter- mined to a large extent, but even when man and woman do
the same thing, the way in which they do it is different, so that the woman's professional work
out- side the home means not only something more, but something qualitatively new.
2. Two erroneous conceptions are opposed to the realization that sexuality be- longs constitutively
to the essence of man:
a) Many sociologists seek to relativize the bisexual expression of man's essence by calling the
differences in the feeling and emotional life and in the mode of thought between men and
women merely 'allegedly universal' and by wishing to reduce them to the historically conditioned
social distribution of roles between the two sexes. To this it must be rejoined that the
historical conditionedness of certain (not all) role distributions is in no way evidence against
the sexuality that leaves its imprint on the whole human essence. Fundamental forms like
'daughter', 'sister', 'wife', 'mother', 'son', 'brother', 'husband', and 'father' are trans- temporally
valid and cannot be interpreted as merely historically conditioned role distributions. Because
of the intrinsically profound relatedness of body and soul, the biological distinction of the two
sexes has mental and spiritual consequences also.
b) It is even more fateful to represent sexuality as the degradation of man, as the sublime antibody
and anti-sex speculations of Persian dualism, oriental mystery cults, Neoplatonism,
Gnosticism, and especially Manicheism have attempted to do. Mani demanded of his chosen
ones that they place „a seal upon the breast and the womb“; for only in this way could the
externally self-perpetuating evil be averted, since the lucid spirit is buried again and again in
the dark prison of the flesh through love and marriage. This anti-sexual spiritualism has
openly and, even more, frequently bewitched Western thought in subtle ways in the Christian
era as well. One perceives its influence among some Church Fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria,
Origen, and John Chrysostom. The heretic Tertullian called the woman a „gateway
to the devil“, since she seduced and defiled „the image of God that the man is. But even St.
Gregory of Nyssa (t 394) opined that God originally wanted to create an asexual „heavenly
man,“ but then, because he foresaw the Fall, created the historical „earthly man“ and divided
him as Adam and Eve into two sexes. Now and then similar thoughts are expressed even today.
Theodor Culmann, for example, stated that Adam was first bisexual in himself and was
only sexually differentiated by his sin. He allegedly perceived a bisexual mode of existence
among animals and felt it as something „lacking to him and therefore desirable.“ That was the
„beginning of sin.“ „God must now condescend to remedy that evil which had broken out in
creation through the sin of man with the formation of woman. The creation of woman is therefore
so terrible a catastrophe that it is surpassed only by death itself, to which she is just a
preliminary stage.“ 39 Theodor Böhmerle also called it a disastrous decision when Adam
37
The Council of Chalcedon, Denzinger-Schönmetzer, n 301.
38
Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, the Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World, November 22,
1981, n 22.
39
Th Culmann, Die christliche Ethik 2nd ed (Stuttgart, 1874), 56.
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