Is Catholicism in any way "anti-female"?

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My teacher suggested that for my Latin project on Religion in the Roman Empire and now around the world, I research the topic of if any religions are anti-female.

As I know very little about this topic I’ve come to the experts.
Therefore, and I’m sorry if this is at all offensive, is Catholicism at all “Anti-Female”?
Why?
Or Why not?
Are there any religions with Anti-female beliefs?

I just considered that I’ve never heard of a female Pope or Archbishop and that the Bible shows Eve to have tempted Adam and wished to know what people thought. Thanks 🙂
 
Tips22 said:
My teacher suggested that for my Latin project on Religion in the Roman Empire and now around the world, I research the topic of how anti-female the religions are.
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you might respectfully remind your professor that any academic research carried out with intent to prove a pre-selected agenda is bound to be unreliable from its inception and would violate research standards, be unethical, yield faulty results, and contributed to the plethora of faulty research being published each year. You might further suggest (if, like me you are not so respectful) that if he does not know this, then he has no business teaching in a college. and by the way my MA is in history, I have researched development of religions in the Roman Empire, and I am familiar with valid historical research methods.
 
I read the article and found it quite helpful-even if I didn’t understand all of it. I might actually use it as a source in my project. It’s a good discussion point. Thank you!!! (I’ll also tell my teacher to be less biased when I see them!) 👍

As for anti-female, I think she meant sees men as better or believes women to be less righteous or just incapable of treating the sexes the same. I’m not too sure. How would you define it?
 
Tips22 said:
**My teacher suggested that for my Latin project on Religion in the Roman Empire and now around the world, I research the topic of if any religions are anti-female.
**
As I know very little about this topic I’ve come to the experts.
Therefore, and I’m sorry if this is at all offensive, is Catholicism at all “Anti-Female”?
Why?
Or Why not?
Are there any religions with Anti-female beliefs?

I just considered that I’ve never heard of a female Pope or Archbishop and that the Bible shows Eve to have tempted Adam and wished to know what people thought. Thanks 🙂
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Make you sure get some answers other places as well, not just the traditional side of Catholicism. :eek: 🙂 I don’t know how objective everyone will be in here.
puzzleannie said:
you might respectfully remind your professor that any academic research carried out with intent to prove a pre-selected agenda is bound to be unreliable from its inception and would violate research standards, be unethical, yield faulty results, and contributed to the plethora of faulty research being published each year. You might further suggest (if, like me you are not so respectful) that if he does not know this, then he has no business teaching in a college. and by the way my MA is in history, I have researched development of religions in the Roman Empire, and I am familiar with valid historical research methods.
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Annie, you mis-quoted in your post. He is asking her to find out **IF **religions are anti-female. I don’t think we should assume he has some pre-selected agenda. He just wants her to research it and study it. Nothing wrong with that. 🙂
 
Would you suggest the other forums on the website or do you know of any other places? I’m a bit new to the research thing.:confused:

Also. I changed my original post because I mis-conveyed the angle my teacher was coming from… I think. ‘Annie’ quoted it right the first time. Sorry. :eek: 😊
 
Tips22 said:
I read the article and found it quite helpful-even if I didn’t understand all of it. I might actually use it as a source in my project. It’s a good discussion point. Thank you!!! (I’ll also tell my teacher to be less biased when I see them!) 👍

As for anti-female, I think she meant sees men as better or believes women to be less righteous or just incapable of treating the sexes the same. I’m not too sure. How would you define it?
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I would say in general in a religion or out of one, in history women were always seen as lesser then then men. I don’t think it is just in religion. However, does the concept come from religion? I would think you would have to dive deeper into history from all angles. This is an interesting topic though.
 
Tips22 said:
As for anti-female, I think she meant sees men as better or believes women to be less righteous or just incapable of treating the sexes the same. I’m not too sure. How would you define it?
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If you are not sure then I guess you would need to ask the instructor. There are misguided folks who think the Catholic Church is anti female because they define anti female in curious ways.
 
Thank you Fix, I’ll do just that in a minute. Email is wonderful!!!

In the article “women and priesthood” marty1818 showed to me, are the quotes at the bottom all from Christians or Catholics?

Also…This is so helpful!!!
 
Tips22 said:
Would you suggest the other forums on the website or do you know of any other places? I’m a bit new to the research thing.:confused:

Also. I changed my original post because I mis-conveyed the angle my teacher was coming from… I think. ‘Annie’ quoted it right the first time. Sorry. :eek: 😊
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Oh ok 😃 sorry! To find out if Catholicism is any way anti-female I would not get all my answers from here because of course you will get the answer of “NO we are not anti-female” but that doesn’t mean you won’t get good advice in here. We have some decent scholars on here that do know some history.

I think you need to look at the history of Catholicism and the many influences from different cultures. Celtic history would be good, just in terms of how the women were viewed etc…early Europe in general. Also the Jewish influence. Christ was Jewish so that plays a big part. 😉

I would do a google search and look up some writers who have written on this topic from both sides. People who think Catholicism is not in anyway anti-female and those who think religion in general is. Being objective is the key 🙂
 
Tips22 said:
Thank you Fix, I’ll do just that in a minute. Email is wonderful!!!

In the article “women and priesthood” marty1818 showed to me, are the quotes at the bottom all from Christians or Catholics?

Also…This is so helpful!!!
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The people quoted on the bottom are from Church Fathers. Church Fathers refers to theologians who were influential in the early Christian Church. Usually in the first five centuries. Also if there’s stuff in the article that you don’t quite understand, feel free to post the quotes and I can try to explain them.

God Bless,
Matt
 
Ohhhhh, thanks. The bit I don’t understand the most in the article is unfortunately very long…

*Further, in 1994 Pope John Paul II formally declared that the Church does not have the power to ordain women. He stated, “Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church’s judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful” (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis 4).

And in 1995 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in conjunction with the pope, ruled that this teaching “requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium (cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium 25:2)” (Response of Oct. 25, 199* 😦 :eek:
 
anamchara said:
People who think Catholicism is not in anyway anti-female and those who think religion in general is. Being objective is the key 🙂
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Which part of the faith is anti female?

How is it objective to start when we have not defined what anti female means?
 
First, you are not getting a biased position because the question is “Are Catholics anti-women?” Well, the best people to ask are Catholics, I mean you wouldn’t ask a Lutheran what a Baptist believes. Also, Catholics are very big fans of Spock (from Star Trek) we love logic and 99.999…% of what we believe can be explained through logic.

So here is a females point of view of the Catholic Church. And this is how you could write your paper…
While many people outside the Catholic Church believe that it is anti-woman, this is a complete falsehood.👍 The Catholic Church places women in a very important role. If you want to see how important the Church feels women are look at how important Mary the Mother of God is treated by good Catholics.

Now another major point is that there are many different levels of Catholics. There are people who say they are Catholic, but they do nothing whatsoever to prove that, they live bad lives and never follow any of the Church’s teachings. Then there are those Catholics who go to Church when they feel like it and only follow the teachings they like. Then there are the Catholics who go to Church every Sunday, but that is all, they never even think about their faith the rest of the week, and they don’t act Catholic. Then there are the Catholics who try their hardest to follow all the teachings of the Church, sure, they mess up every day, but they try.

So you must be aware when you are reasearching the Catholic Church that there are many different types of Catholics. Obviously the best ones are the ones trying to follow the teachings of the Church as best they can.

The women priests are some of the worst “Catholics” out there. They blatently go against the teachings of the Church and flaunt this…While at the same time calling themselves Catholic. This is horrible!

I don’t know all the logic behind the “men only rule” but I do know that it is not an anti-woman rule, In fact, the mothers of priests are held in high esteem because they must have done something extra special to make their son consider the priesthood, especially today. Motherhood is considered sacred to the Church, it is the way in which Our Lord came into the world, and the way each and everyone of us came into the world. Nuns are also very important to the Church, as we have found out since they have disappeared. Where there are nuns, there are vocations, whether they are teaching nuns, or simply cloistered nuns, where there are nuns there are vocations to the priesthood especially.

The Church herself is referred to as the Bride of Christ, I mean what more feminine title could there be?
No, the Church is not anti-woman, though the feminists (I think they are more anti-woman than pro-woman as they claim) claim the Church is anti-woman.

We are followers of Christ and the central part of our Faith is the Eucharist, that was instituted at the last supper. At that last supper there were no women, yes there was a bad man, but no women, not even Christ’s mother, the sinless woman, was “ordained.” Everything in Christ’s life was either to show us who he was, or to show us what to do, well, we base our 7 sacraments off the things he told us to do. Such as baptism, Christ did not need to be baptized, he was perfect in every way, but he allowed himself to be baptized as an example of what we should do. His whole life was an example, and if he did not have any women with him, then that must have been on purpose, because we know that Mary was in Jerusalem at the time, because she was at the passion, but she was not included in The Last Supper.

Christ loved his mother deeply and most Catholics look upon her as a second mother. Women are held in high esteem in the Catholic Church, and just because we can’t be priests doesn’t mean a thing. I mean men can have babies either, so we are even. 😃 👍 :cool:

Remember, Catholics may be imperfect, but the Catholic Church’s teachings are perfect, God has guarenteed this. So if you really want to know something that is without a doubt true, check out EWTN, the Vatican, or even the Ask an Apologist section of this forum. Good Catholics love to study and thus many good Catholics know allot about our faith. I hope that I have helped you.
May the Holy Ghost guide you on your search for Truth.
 
Catholicism is no more “anti-female” than, say, Chassidic Jews, Muslims or a whole range of belief structures – from the most conservative to the most liberal, from the most secular to the most religious – they’re all ‘pro-female’, just their particular vision of it. It really is a non-argument at that level.

The argument, I would suggest, is at another level, certainly it’s about whether anybody who does not subscribe to the particular view of what ‘to be female’ means or what is a ‘good life’ for a woman has to care in the slightest about it. Personally, for example, I’m not bothered about whether a devout Muslim woman wears hijab and never leaves the house – the moment somebody tells me that I should wear hijab and stay at home, that’s something else entirely.
 
puzzleannie said:
you might respectfully remind your professor that any academic research carried out with intent to prove a pre-selected agenda is bound to be unreliable from its inception and would violate research standards, be unethical, yield faulty results, and contributed to the plethora of faulty research being published each year. You might further suggest (if, like me you are not so respectful) that if he does not know this, then he has no business teaching in a college. and by the way my MA is in history, I have researched development of religions in the Roman Empire, and I am familiar with valid historical research methods.
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👍 Good post. But I suspect that the instructor has an agenda. It all depends on what you mean by anti-female. I don’t know of any religion that, when taken in context of that religion itself, is anti-female.

For example: we may view the way that Muslims treat their women as anti-female, but surely they do not feel that way, unless they reject the Muslim religion and look at it from the outside.

A true anti-female religion, by it’s very definition, would have to teach that all females are evil. That would only last one generation.
 
Tips22 said:
I read the article and found it quite helpful-even if I didn’t understand all of it. I might actually use it as a source in my project. It’s a good discussion point. Thank you!!! (I’ll also tell my teacher to be less biased when I see them!) 👍

As for anti-female, I think she meant sees men as better or believes women to be less righteous or just incapable of treating the sexes the same. I’m not too sure. How would you define it?
Click to expand...
The Catholic Church teaches that men and women are equal but different. Women have the same dignity and the same call to holiness as men. But the Church also recognizes that there are significant differences between men and women.
 
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