When John Paul II called for a “new feminism” in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), one that rejected the “the temptation of imitating models of ‘male domination’” and instead “affirm[ed] the true genius of women,” he likely knew that his provocation would spur serious focus on the dignity of women and their place in the Church and society.

But what the future saint might not have foreseen was that he was also kicking off an intra-Catholic debate about the merits of feminism that, 30 years later, appears to only be heating up.

That dispute spilled into public view last month in the form of a somewhat contentious exchange of viewpoints between three female Catholic intellectuals in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

The legal scholar Erika Bachiochi got things started March 13 by describing Pope John Paul II as “the feminist pope” — a title the Pontiff had called himself on at least one occasion. Bachiochi argued that the current rise of “red-pilled” Catholic influencers like Timothy Gordon pushing accounts of female inferiority in reaction to radical feminism contravened the late Pontiff’s magisterial teaching on women’s equal dignity, which is still in need of application.

In response, philosopher Carrie Gress, Bachiochi’s colleague at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, contended March 20 that John Paul II used terms like “feminism” sparingly and certainly not in a way that aligned with the feminist movement’s core definition of “women’s autonomy.” 

The critique of Bachiochi continued on March 24, when theologian Margaret McCarthy contended that she had “reduced the Pontiff’s teaching to sound bites about abstract ‘equality’ so that it conforms to the dominant arrangement of socially interchangeable men and women.”

Two days later, the dispute was the elephant in the room at the start of a three-day conference at the University of Notre Dame on the Church’s teaching on women, where Bachiochi was speaking. Some attendees expressed dismay that the dispute had spilled into public view, while an apparent back-channel appeal for the two sides to make peace was made over a listserv of Catholic female scholars.

For theologian Abigail Favale, who organized the Notre Dame conference, the fact that serious Catholic women are engaged in a tug-of-war over John Paul II’s teaching isn’t particularly surprising nor unwanted.

“I’m older than the concept of the ‘feminine genius,’” said Favale, 41, referring to the term the Pope first used in his 1988 apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem (On the Dignity and Vocation of Women) to describe the unique gifts of women. “I think John Paul II was opening up ideas, but the Church hasn’t necessarily fully developed them. So there’s a lot of exciting work to be done.”

And Favale contended that that work “can only really happen if there are proposals and counterproposals” being made.

But if the WSJ exchange is any indication, that exercise isn’t just academic. Given that it directly touches upon Catholic women’s own sense of self, it also can’t help but be deeply personal for those involved. 

And with a new generation of young Catholic women attempting to navigate a society increasingly marked by both radical feminism on the one hand and a reactionary “manosphere” on the other, it’s a debate in which the stakes are also undeniably high.

 

Feminism and Catholicism

That debate is, in part, over rhetoric, asking whether Catholics should use the term “feminism” in their advocacy for fuller recognition of the dignity of women today.

Members of a panel at the Notre Dame conference, which included Bachiochi and Favale, were generally neutral on this question, giving an overall impression that words like “feminism” could be used when they helped build bridges with others and dropped when they didn’t.

But in a more profound sense, current Catholic contestations over feminism are more about the substance of the concept than the use of the word itself.

In short, the dispute can be characterized as a standoff between the view that feminism is “rotten at its core,” as Catholic political commentator Matthew Walsh once contended, versus the position that the feminist movement arose for legitimate reasons and has elements that are worth salvaging.

Bachiochi takes the latter position. In her academic work, including a recent paper for the Heritage Foundation, she makes the case that several important feminist thinkers in the Antebellum period were deeply motivated by their Christian convictions. She notes, for instance, that 19th-century feminist thinkers like Sarah Grimké understood themselves to be correcting a perverted translation of Genesis 3:16, which misconstrued the prediction that Eve’s husband would rule over her as a result of sin into a command for Adam to do so.

But Bachiochi argues that the Christian motivations of these important “first-wave” feminist thinkers has been “memory-holed” by progressives’ revisionist history of the origins of feminism, which highlight more radical figures instead. In turn, Bachiochi suggests that conservatives who reject all versions of feminism, and not just later iterations that embraced the sexual revolution, have bought the progressive account “hook, line and sinker.”

Gress, however, isn’t convinced by this approach. She contends that, “at its root,” feminism ruptures family life and corrodes the Catholic faith, and she has written previously about how some early feminists were influenced by the occult. Catholics, she suggests, should look to their own tradition for a way forward instead of a worldly ideology.

“What started out a few decades ago as a very well-intentioned effort to help clarify Church teaching through feminist language hasn’t happened,” she told the Register by email, pointing to the high rates at which Catholic women contracept and get abortions. 

“The problem is that the ideology of feminism is so powerful, that any effort to tweak it gets pulled back into its vortex unless one remains hypervigilant to define it differently than [that] tradition,” Gress said. “As a result, the word has lost any kind of clear meaning beyond the secular usage.”

The problem for Bachiochi, however, is that dismissing feminism outright ignores the likely impact the broad movement has had on the Church’s own development of related doctrine. As she points out, St. Thomas Aquinas’ opinion that women are deficient in reason, which was seen, for instance, in an interpretation of 1 Timothy 2 that was overly beholden to Aristotle, was once an influential view in the Church. But the Church’s thought on the topic has matured — in large part, she contends, due to engagement with the feminist movement. 

“There is a lack of appreciation for how you get from Thomas Aquinas to John Paul II,” she said. “There’s a lack of appreciation for a need of something like early feminism.”

As evidence of this connection, Bachiochi shared a document by Sister Sara Butler, a Missionary Servant of the Most Blessed Trinity and a former member of the International Theological Commission, that lays out how John Paul II challenged but also affirmed insights from feminist theology. Bachiochi describes this kind of nuanced engagement with feminist theology as consistent with the Church’s classic posture of taking what’s good from non-Catholic perspectives.

“That’s what Catholic minds do all the time,” she said. “They separate the wheat from the chaff.”

 

Equality and Difference

But other critiques of self-identified Catholic feminists like Bachiochi have less to do with their interpretations of history and more to do with current application.

McCarthy, who teaches at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C., has argued that Bachiochi’s advocacy for sex-based antidiscrimination laws is built on a flawed account of the equality of men and women. In contrast, she said, the Church’s social teaching has always emphasized women’s unique responsibility to care for young children, even while it has recognized the equal dignity of the sexes.

“These ‘new Catholic feminists,’ in the end, don’t want division of labor, don’t want to say that the mother should (not just choose to) stay with her young children — and that society ought to be set up for that, not the current regime set up for two exchangeable ‘parents,’” McCarthy told the Register via email.

Bachiochi’s Wall Street Journal article has also been criticized by Thomas Mirus, who wrote March 25 at CatholicCulture.org that by making the reactionary Timothy Gordon her foil, she effectively framed “the Catholic debate over feminism as a conflict between Church teaching and online reactionaries, while ignoring legitimate challenges.”

Some of those challenges, Mirus contends, come from young Catholics who oppose feminism due to their broad reading of Church teaching and their disillusionment growing up in “a world marked by the failures of gender egalitarianism.”

“Reading the signs of the times, they have come to the conviction that what the Church needs is not further attempts to blend the faith with secular ideologies, but a return to her own wellsprings of wisdom,” Mirus wrote.

 

A Fruitful Debate?

The trend Mirus describes is undoubtedly real, as indicated by the growing phenomenon of “trad wife” influencers. In fact, a coed participant at the Notre Dame conference was overheard saying how she didn’t want to be a “JP2 fangirl,” while Favale shared that it’s becoming increasingly common for students in the campus’ more intense Catholic social circles to believe that NFP is immoral and that “one-sided obedience” is demanded by Ephesians 5.

While fully denouncing how modern feminism undermines women’s dignity, Favale also notes the irony of women having these kinds of discussions on a college campus where they wouldn’t have even been admitted 50-some years ago (Notre Dame went coed in 1972). 

She contends that “feminism arose because it was responding to real social problems” and that the movement helped address “some of the ways in which women have been held back from fully developing as human beings.” But, she says, there’s more work to be done — whether it’s under the banner of “Catholic feminism” or not.

“I really do see this as a time where we need concerted attention to the dignity of women,” Favale said, noting that even the concept of what it means to be a woman is more fraught than it was 30 years ago. “I think that’s what John Paul II was calling for: a new approach to women’s dignity that doesn’t just replicate the errors of secular feminism. Whatever that is, we still need it.”

Most interlocutors seem to agree, or at least recognize, that the women involved are largely all on the same team. Gress, for instance, told the Register that there was “significant overlap” between her work and the ideas animating the Notre Dame conference.

Nonetheless, there is also a rift. And it frustrates Favale that it only seems to widen when the “f-word” — feminism — gets mentioned, as it did in The Wall Street Journal affair.

“I understand the ambivalence about the word,” she said, “but I think we should be able to see past that and see substantive agreement where it’s there. I feel like that’s what’s not happening.”

Perhaps it’s something to be resolved in the next 30 years of engagement with John Paul II and his call for a “new feminism.”

(Editor's note: This story was updated April 5.)