Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

defended themselves against the ancient temptation of men to see in them only an 'object' of
desire and possession. Discrimination against women has diminished almost everywhere in
the world, even if it has hardly been overcome yet. The struggle for equal rights, equal treatment,
and equal opportunity continues. This development has made the greatest progress in
industrial states. Here, for the first time in human history, the woman is legally, if not everywhere
in fact, equal to the man in marriage and family, society and public life: the same compulsory
education, the same educational and vocational possibilities, and the same professional
opportunities. Sociologists speak of 'omnipresence' of the woman even in the sense that
women do not veil and cover themselves as previously in the Orient, but are present everywhere
in their characteristic femininity. They face the world with shared responsibility and
shared creativity and do so consciously as women, not as imitators of men. What has taken
place here and still is taking place is more significant for human history than, for instance, the
discovery of atomic energy or the spread of automation. Incidentally, one should not exaggerate
medieval patriarchalism. There were at that time islands of matriarchy in the convents and
abbeys run by women, particularly in the prince-abbeys directly subordinate to the Emperor
(e.g. Essen, Gandersheim, Quedlinburg, Gernrode, Hochelten, Herford, and Zurich), in which
numerous enthralled peasants and even clerics were subject to the abbesses. Emancipation had
its preliminary stages.
2. Only the equality of man and woman and their resulting personal relatedness are compatible
with the Christian image of man. As Francisco de Vitoria († 1546) taught in the patriarchal
Spain of the sixteenth century, the woman is the companion (socia), not the servant (non
serva), of the man. 42 At times the National-Socialist charge is brought forth that the Council
of Macon (585) denied women a soul. In reality, as the acts of the Council establish, this
question was not even discussed at the national synod at all. Gregory of Tours merely reports
that a bishop, probably in a conversation outside the synodal negotiations, asked whether the
word homo still applies to women. This question was not meant anthropologically, but philologically,
since in the developing Romance languages of that time the word homo had gradually
assumed the meaning of 'man' (homme, uomo).
§ 3 The Sexual Power
I. Two closely intertwined meanings inhere in the sexual power, an innate and instinctive vital
urge. On the one hand, this power is directed towards a transindividual goal, the reproduction
of the human species, so that Thomas Aquinas speaks of „a very great good“(11-11, 153,2).
On the other hand, the experience of sexual surrender is for man and woman a mysterious,
physical and mental expression of their giving and self-bestowal in the loving communion of
marriage. The Christian therefore sees nothing evil in sexuality, but rather a truly disposition
bestowed by God and intrinsically related to marriage. Even without the Fall, the reproduction
of paradisical man would have taken place through the sexual union of man and woman, and
Thomas Aquinas is of the opinion that the experience of the senses would have been deeper
than today because man would have had a purer nature and a body with „greater sensibility“(I,
98, 2).
2. Whereas the animal cannot resist the sexual power, but must serve reproduction as driven
by instinct, it is given to man to master and to spiritualize the sexual power, i.e. to live it out
chastely, not through morbid repression, but through genuine sublimation. On the other hand,
man is able to separate the sexual experience from reproduction as well as from marriage. The
spread of contraceptives and the disappearance of moral responsibility allowed premarital and
extramarital intercourse to increase considerably and to become to a large extent a fleeting
and non-binding experience. The more this kind of behavior spreads, the more earnestly is it
42 Francisco de Vitoria, Relectio de Matrimonio, p 2, n 7
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