Many of the themes were familiar and echoed earlier audience addresses and papal documents. Some addresses broke new ground, by developing John Paul’s feminism and by confronting recurring falsehoods about Catholic sexual ethics. In both cases, the addresses clarified what the Pope thought was at stake in Cairo.
The June 12 Angelus address stressed the right to life as the basic human right and the foundation of any meaningful platform of human rights.83
At the June 19 Angelus, John Paul proposed that “marriage as a stable union of a man and a women who are committed to the reciprocal gift of self and open to creating new life” was not a sectarian notion but “an original value of creation.” Losing this truth was a “danger for all humanity.”84
During his June 22 general audience, John Paul sketched the outlines of his distinctive feminism. He insisted that women not be reduced to being objects of male pleasure, defended the equal human dignity of women, and argued that “the equality and diversity of women must be recognized” in civil society and the Church.85
At the June 26 Angelus, John Paul proposed that sexuality has a “language of its own at the service of love and cannot be lived at the purely instinctual level.”86
On July 3, the Pope reminded the world that the characteristics of marriage—unity of persons, communion of life, and fidelity—were the characteristics of a covenant, not merely a contract.87
At the July 10 Angelus, John Paul argued that stable marriages were crucial for the welfare of children, who were supposed to be one of the Cairo conference’s primary concerns.88
In his July 17 Angelus address, the Pope confronted a prime anti-Catholic canard, reminding the world that the Church does not teach an “ideology of fertility at all costs.” Rather, it proposed an ethics of marriage in which the decision whether or not to have a child “is not motivated by selfishness or carelessness, but by a prudent, conscious generosity that weighs the possibilities and circumstances, and especially gives priority to the welfare of the unborn child.”89
The July 24 Angelus address rejected coercive or “authoritarian” family planning programs as violations of a married couple’s basic human rights.90
Children, the Pope taught on July 31, are a gift to be welcomed, and may never be exploited for the parents’ “interests or personal gratification.”91
The public dimensions of the abortion issue were the topic at the August 7 Angelus. No just state could authorize a private right to lethal violence for private purposes. The foundations of public justice were undermined when the state did not recognize the unborn child’s moral claim to protection.92
The August 14 Angelus address returned to feminism. Discrimination against women in “workplace, culture, and politics” must be eliminated in the name of an “authentic emancipation” that brings the “feminine genius” into full play in public life.93
And at the August 28 Angelus, the Pope wrapped up the series on a philosophical note. Radical individualism, he argued, was inhuman and dehumanizing, and so was a “sexuality apart from ethical references.” What the Cairo conference should promote was a “culture of responsible procreation.”94
While he was conducting this brief course in the ethics of sexuality and family life, John Paul was urging his press spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, to get into the public debate. “You should say clearly what we think,” was Navarro’s instruction from the Pope about the role he was to play before and during the Cairo conference.95 But to whom was Navarro supposed to speak? Not only, he assumed, to the people who had rigged Prep-Com III and abused the Holy See delegation there. The alternative was to take the case to the world. Navarro started a series of briefings at the Vatican press office, which soon led to another skirmish with the United States. On August 25, Vice President Al Gore, who would lead the U.S. delegation during the early days of the Cairo conference, gave a speech at the National Press Club in Washington in which he stated that “the U.S. has not sought, does not seek, and will not seek to establish an international right to abortion.”96 On August 31, Navarro pointed out that the Cairo document’s definition of “reproductive health care” as including “pregnancy termination” had been a U.S. initiative. “The draft document, which has the United States as its principal sponsor, contradicts, in reality, Mr. Gore’s statement,” Navarro concluded.97 It was an unprecedented rebuke to a public official. John Paul was not displeased with this departure from the Vatican’s conventional diplomatic reticence.98
The Cairo Conference
The image of the Cairo conference as a clash between the United States and the overwhelming majority of world opinion on the one side, and an isolated, prudish, and misogynist Vatican on the other, was shattered in the first hours of the conference itself. On September 5, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan—unmistakably a woman, unmistakably Harvard-educated, and unmistakably a major political figure—took to the rostrum during the opening statements to defend the “sanctity of life” and to condemn the Cairo draft document for trying to “impose adultery, sex education…and abortion” on all countries.”99 The charge that a narrowly sectarian Holy See was holding up consensus on the conference’s final report, which was to be drawn up on the basis of the draft document developed at Prep-Com III, lost whatever remaining credibility it had. It was now time for a serious negotiation.
Five days of impasse followed, as the delegates tried to reach consensus on the final report’s abortion language, its discussion of the family, and its approach to adolescent sexuality.100 The United States began to retreat from its previously stated position that the final report must support abortion on demand as a means of family planning. Meanwhile, anti-Catholic bias was freely vented by delegates and nongovernmental organization activists alike. When Gail Quinn, an American member of the Holy See delegation, tried to explain the Vatican’s objections to some proposed abortion language in the draft final report, she was booed and hissed. Dr. Sai, the conference chairman, did nothing to stop the abuse, and had to be reminded by the delegate from Benin that free speech was sacrosanct at UN conferences. Later, while walking past two U.S. representatives in a delegates-only section of the conference center, Quinn heard one of the Americans say to the other, “There goes that bitch.” Colombia’s Miguel Trias, the head of a government-sponsored family planning organization, complained to the press that “these Latin American countries are trying to make the Vatican happy. But in 2,000 years the Vatican has never been happy.”101
Press reports of Vatican defeats notwithstanding, the Holy See had achieved a great deal during the first week of the Cairo conference. The final report being negotiated now stated, unambiguously, that “in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family-planning.” The centerpiece of the U.S. approach to Cairo—the definition of abortion on demand as an internationally recognized basic human right—had been abandoned, as the Americans and their allies had to concede that there was no international consensus behind their position. The strong-arm tactics deployed at PrepCom III did not work in Cairo. The revised final report now recognized the rights and responsibilities of parents toward their teenage children, and the worst of the Orwellian language about “family structure” had been pared from the document.102
The defeat of the Clinton administration and its international allies at the Cairo population conference was certainly not the result of the Holy See’s efforts alone. As at the previous Bucharest and Mexico City world population conferences, Third World countries were worried by what they perceived as the eugenic agenda lurking behind First World–dominated family planning programs. Political leaders in Latin America, Asia, and Africa understood that it was their populations, not, say, Norway’s, that were to be brought “under control.” The resistance of Islamic, Latin American, and some African countries to the libertinism enshrined in the draft document produced by Prep-Com III was also an interesting sign for the future. One need not admire every aspect of life in these societies to note the importance of their tacit recog
nition that the “permissive cornucopia” was not the goal of genuine human development.103 Truly radical feminists, and of the most secular sort, had also opposed the Cairo draft document prepared at Prep-Com III. In the nongovernmental organization forums that surrounded the Cairo conference, they held mock trials of the World Bank, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the UNFPA, charging them with oppressing women through coercive state-sponsored birth control programs.
All of these factors, in addition to the Holy See’s interventions, helped shift the controlling paradigm at the Cairo population conference from “population control” to “the empowerment of women.” This was a change of potentially historic consequence. If the new paradigm of women’s empowerment could be wedded to a revitalization of the family and a reaffirmation of the distinctively maternal power of women, rather than to the sexual revolution as lived in the developed world, something very different would be afoot in the international politics of the twenty-first century. Such an outcome was by no means assured, and many would regard it as improbable, but that it could even be imagined was one important result of the Cairo population conference—and one that had been virtually inconceivable in January 1994.104
It seems extremely unlikely that the Cairo conference would have played out as it did absent John Paul II’s insistent campaign throughout the preceding months. The Pope’s refusal to concede the Church’s irrelevance to the debate in accordance with the prepared political script had been crucial in shaping the conference’s dynamics and its outcome. Moral argument, it turned out, was capable of rallying an effective resistance to the imposition of certain First World lifestyles on the rest of humanity, through international law and foreign aid.
No one doubted that similar struggles would take place in the future. By appealing to the better angels of a universal human nature through the power of the word, though, John Paul had forced the moral core of the population argument onto the center of the world stage, changed the nature of the public debate, and helped shift the framework of discussion from “controlling” population to empowering women.
And that, in turn, had changed the course of the Cairo population conference.
THE CHURCH AS SPOUSE
During the months of debate leading up to the confrontation at Cairo, John Paul II fulfilled a longstanding desire to reconfigure one part of the rhythm of Vatican life by opening a convent for contemplative prayer, and issued Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, perhaps the most controversial apostolic letter of his pontificate, which reiterated that the Church could not ordain women to the ministerial priesthood. The two events may have seemed utterly disconnected. In fact, both involved the ancient New Testament teaching that the Church is the Spouse of Christ, an image that had decisively shaped the Church’s sacramental imagination about the world, and indeed about all of reality.
Constant Prayer
In addition to the house of mercy he had established in Vatican City under the care of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, John Paul was eager to create a house of contemplative prayer inside the Vatican walls. Prayer, the Pope had long preached, was not only necessary for the ongoing conversion of one’s heart and for obtaining the grace of God, prayer was also essential for accurately reading the “signs of the times” and in devising appropriate pastoral programs in response to them.105 The Church’s pastoral action, like its service to the world, was ultimately rooted in contemplation. The steady, constant, contemplative prayer of consecrated and cloistered men and women whose entire lives were acts of intercession was a particularly powerful expression of the Church’s continuous self-gift to Christ, her Spouse, who returned the Church’s love through grace. That was what the Church believed, and John Paul thought that conviction should be embodied inside the Vatican itself.
Work on a convent for cloistered nuns was begun in 1992 and completed in 1993 in the gently sloping grounds above the Governatorato, the residence and offices of the governor of Vatican City State. On May 13, 1994, the thirteenth anniversary of Agca’s assassination attempt, the first group of eight nuns, Poor Clares, moved into the Monastero “Mater Ecclesiae,” named for Mary, Mother of the Church. The two-story convent, built of brick faced with limestone and nestled against the Leonine Wall, welcomed nuns from the original Poor Clare community in Assisi and from convents in Croatia, Nicaragua, Rwanda, and the Philippines. “Constant prayer next to Peter,” as L’Osservatore Romano put it, would be offered by an international community of women born in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Italy, Central America, East Asia, and central Africa.106 A different group of nuns would occupy the convent every five years. The Poor Clares were chosen to be first because theirs was the oldest order of women contemplatives in the Church, and because 1993 was the eighth centenary of the birth of St. Clare of Assisi.
St. Clare had written eloquently on the consecrated virgin as a bride of Christ. In the Catholic sacramental imagination, the spousal relationship of the Church to Christ touched every member of the Church, not only those vowed to poverty, chastity, and obedience. The New Testament image of the Church as the Bride of Christ had played an important role in John Paul’s theology of the body, in which the Pope had reflected at length on how the spousal character of Christ’s relationship to his Church (suggested by St. Paul in Ephesians 5.22–33) shed light on contemporary questions of human sexuality, marriage, and celibacy. Nine days after the opening of the Monastero “Mater Ecclesiae,” one classic expression of the Church as the Bride of Christ, an intense controversy involving the relationship of this spousal imagery to the priesthood broke out when John Paul signed the apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis [Priestly Ordination] on Pentecost Sunday, May 22, 1994.107
The Ordinatio Sacerdotalis Controversy
The question of whether women could be ordained priests had been debated in the Catholic Church since the mid-1970s, influenced by contemporary feminist theory, by theological speculations about the nature of the priesthood, and by the Anglican Communion’s acceptance of women as priests. The Catholic debate on the question was limited almost exclusively to North America and Western Europe. In those parts of the world, acceptance in most academic theological circles required a judgment in favor of the ordination of women by the mid-1980s at the latest.
Paul VI had responded to the early phase of the Catholic debate through a declaration, Inter Insigniores [Among the Characteristics], issued in October 1976 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF]. Its key sentence read as follows: “The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith judges it necessary to recall that the Church, in fidelity to the example of the Lord, does not consider herself authorized to admit women to priestly ordination.” In defense of that judgment, Inter Insigniores noted the constant tradition of both Catholicism and Orthodoxy, the biblical fact that Christ (who, in so many other respects, was countercultural in his approach to the women of his time) did not call women to be among the Twelve, the continuation of Christ’s practice by the apostles, and the significance of Christ’s manhood for those who stand in his place as his priests. Those who act in the Church in persona Christi, “in the person of Christ,” must be able to represent Christ iconographically as the bridegroom and Head of the Church, the document argued.108
Inter Insigniores fueled, rather than settled, the Catholic debate. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the arguments grew more intense and, in some respects, more radical. Some feminist theologians and activists frankly admitted that they were no longer interested in ordination to the priesthood as it existed, but were intent on disassembling the hierarchical structure of the Church as a whole.109 Finally, John Paul told a group of cardinals and bishops whom he had invited to lunch that he had been thinking about the debate and had come to a conclusion. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger later recalled, the Pope said, “I must speak about this. I have the responsibility to clarify this and to clarify it in a definitive way.”
Given the failure of CDF’s 1976 document to render what was regarded as
a definitive judgment, the Pope knew that this had to be a pontifical statement. He did not think a long document was necessary, as the key theological points had been made in Inter Insigniores. What was needed was a clear, decisive statement that the debate was about an impossibility. Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith were charged with developing the document, and since it was a personal text of the Pope’s there was a close and intense collaboration in the drafting between the Congregation and the papal apartment. The presidents of the national bishops’ conferences most affected by the debate met in Rome to discuss a draft of the proposed apostolic letter and to offer recommendations. Then John Paul gave the letter “its final form,” as Ratzinger put it, and the document was released on May 29, 1994.110
Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was, as John Paul wanted, a brief document. It reviewed Paul VI’s statements on the question of women and the priesthood, including a 1977 address in which Pope Paul had said that the Church’s tradition was a reflection of the “theological anthropology” given to the Church by Christ as part of her “fundamental constitution.”111 John Paul added to his predecessor’s defense of the tradition by noting another biblical fact, which he interpreted in terms of his distinctive feminism: “The fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, received neither the mission proper to the apostles nor the ministerial priesthood clearly shows that nonadmission of women to priestly ordination cannot mean that women are of lesser dignity, nor can it be construed as discrimination against them.”112 Ordinatio Sacerdotalis also addressed the question of “empowerment” raised by feminist theologians and others, stating that “the hierarchical structure of the Church is totally ordered” to the “holiness of the faithful,” rather than to the exercise of power. That was why Inter Insigniores had taught, following 1 Corinthians, that “the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven are not the ministers but the saints.”113
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