LOURDES 1: POPE BETWEEN MARY AND FEMINISM

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

UPI Religious Affairs Editor

PARIS, Aug. 10 (UPI)

Editor's note: This coming weekend, Pope John Paul II will be in Lourdes, the world's most important site of pilgrimage. His journey to this Marian shrine comes at a time of a new Vatican letter written by Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican's highest-ranking cardinal, and seen as a condemnation of the excesses of modern feminism.

Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees, says perhaps more about the relationship between Roman Catholicism and women than any other Christian site in the world. Its central figure is the Virgin Mary, who is said to have appeared to a peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirou, in 1858 introducing herself with the words, "I am the Immaculate Conception."

Women make up a majority of the six million pilgrims who pour into Lourdes from all continents every year to pay homage to Mary: nuns, desperately ill patients hoping for a miracle, housewives, but also young nobles prepared to serve the poor and the sick, cheerful Irish and German singles, all game for a flirt and a tipple in between the prayers.

There are plenty of Protestants, too, and why not? Did not Martin Luther praise the Blessed Virgin as the Spiritual Mother of all Christians? Did not Huldreich Zwingli, the Zurich reformer, rate her above all creatures, "including the saints and angels"? Did not John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, affirm her continuing purity (after Christ's birth, that is)?

It is hard to conceive of a more feminine, loving atmosphere than that of Lourdes (this writer, by the way, is a Protestant). It is much in keeping with the attributes of the woman "who in her deepest and original being exists 'for the other' (cf., 1 Corinthians 11:9)," as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger phrased it in his recent controversial Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church.

This "being there for the other" is of course what Luther, too, saw manifest in Mary; this is why he called her "blessed above all nobility, wisdom and sanctity." This is why his exegesis of the "Magnificat" (Luke 1:46-55) -- "My soul magnifies the Lord" - is arguably one of most spectacular theological commentaries, so much so that it is taught in most Catholic seminaries.

And yet while Cardinal Ratzinger's letter "On the collaboration of men and women in the Church and World," which the pope had approved, made essentially the same point as Luther, Zwingli or Wesley, it became the object of worldwide controversy. Why? Because even before its publication, the letter was purported to be an attack against worldwide feminism.

And so Margot Kaessmann, Lutheran bishop of Hanover in Germany, bemoaned the paper's "clichés." Ekin Delgoez, a spokeswoman for Germany's Green Party, accused the church of remaining stuck between the Middle Ages and modernity.

Christel Hildebrand, chairwoman of a Conference of European (female) theologians, called Ratzinger's reflection anathema. Emma Bonino, an Italian politician, opined that the paper might just as well have been written by an imam of Cairo's Al-Azhar mosque.

Danièle Hervieu-Léger, France's leading sociologist of religion, warned that the church was about to lose the women - at least in Western Europe and in North America - just as in the past it had lost the working class.

Yet, as Eberhard von Gemmingen of Radio Vatican pointed out, Ratzinger's observations are much more about women's rights and equality than about feminism.

True, Ratzinger does chastise the feminist tendency making "women ... adversaries of men." But he emphasizes clearly that women, like men, are equally created in the image of God, and that this constitutes "the immutable basis of all Christian anthropology."

Ratzinger reminds his readers of a previous statement by the pope declaring women as "another 'I' in common humanity." He links the warped bond between men and women to the Fall: "When humanity considers God its enemy, the relationship between men and women becomes distorted. When this relationship is damaged, their access to the face of God risks being compromised in turn."

This is part of a basic Christian theology most denominations share, based on the apostle Paul's powerful statement to which Ratzinger also referred: "For all of you who have been baptized into Christ ... there is neither male nor female" (Galatians 3:27-28).

In the face of all the criticism, the Vatican takes comfort from the ancient verity that the "dernier cri (latest fashion) of reason expires more rapidly than sound Christian doctrine."

Ratzinger's paper goes out of his way to stress the woman's right to equal pay and career chances in the secular world and to an even fuller recognition of her role in the family.

In the still more earth-bound opinions of his critics, this seems to take second place to Rome's insistence that women cannot be priests because, as one senior prelate put it, "for a woman to take Christ's place at the altar in an ontological absurdity."

Rome is not alone in making this point. Eastern Orthodoxy and some major Protestant denominations do the same, but they are spared reproach.

It may not be politically correct to say (as did Ratzinger) that "man and woman are different from the time of creation and will remain so for all eternity."

But that is what at heart most people realize and are grateful for - be they Catholic or not. And this is what, in a sense, gives women the edge in the biblical narrative: Women, not men, courageously stood by Christ's cross. Women, not men, discovered his resurrection and revealed it to the world.

As Luther observed about Mary: "Men have crowded all her glory into a single phrase: the Mother of God. No one can say anything greater of her, though he had as many tongues as leaves on the trees."