Hostility of sexes ‘major threat’

Sydney
18 May 2003

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Hostility of sexes ‘major threat’

By Johanna Bennett

Growing hostility between men and women is one of the biggest challenges facing the Church in society, says American Cardinal James Francis Stafford (pictured).

The 70-year-old cardinal, one of the Pope’s right-hand men - he was handpicked by the Pontiff to head the Pontifical Council for the Laity despite having no curial experience - was speaking in Sydney while on a private visit.

“One of the most challenging aspects of modern Western civilisation is the socialisation of the male as husband and father,” said the cardinal.

“And we have failed at this.”

As evidence, the cardinal commented on how, in 1957, when he was ordained a priest, 19 per cent of black families in his home city, Baltimore, were fatherless.

“Today that figure is closer to 90 per cent,” he said.

“I don’t know about the Australian experience specifically, but I think it is similar to that of the US.

“This issue has been aggravated exponentially since the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

“And women have permitted it because they, and men, too, have lost respect for themselves and their human sexuality as gifts from God.”

Contraception and abortion had contributed to the problem, he added.

Cardinal Stafford said relations between the sexes were better at the turn of the last century.

Today there is less evidence of divine grace at work in society today than there was 100 years ago before “the great violence” of the two World Wars.

The cardinal thinks the worrying issues surrounding modern sexuality are connected to the brutalising experiences of the two world wars that dominated the last century.

Christians - Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox - had killed one another. It is incredible this should have happened, said the cardinal.

And in World War II, Christians tried to annihilate a whole race, the Jews.

How can you explain Christians initiating such terrible violence, the cardinal said, when “they should be peacemakers according to their master, Jesus”?

Cardinal Stafford says science, too, has had a part to play in what he sees as the modern dehumanisation of people.

“Scientists refuse to allow us to see that everything is a ‘gift’ (from God), not just something to be manipulated, to be used to dominate others,” he said.

Science has come to dominate modern life, he says.

In the process Catholics have lost their special Catholic identity, their Catholic imagination, which appreciates that there is more to life than that perceived through a mechanistic, scientific view of the world.

The Catholic imagination knows that knowledge is not just power, but also “an openness to the beauty and goodness that God has given to us as in the gift of creation,” said Cardinal Stafford.

The cardinal is also known for his criticism of globalisation and believes this, too, is dehumanising people.

He speaks of the modern capitalist world as being economically aggressive and largely concerned with the bottom line, a world in which human beings are viewed as producers and consumers only, are economically manipulated and frequently given degrading work.

“Globalisation has to be humanised,” he said.

In the cardinal’s view, men and women preying on each other sexually in such a world is no surprise.

During his visit to Australia, Cardinal Stafford, who is one of the prime movers behind World Youth Day, also spoke to students about World Youth Day 2005, which will be held in Cologne, Germany.

He described World Youth Day as being about young people discovering the “Eucharistic Christ”, the Christ who is in all of us and who makes it possible for us - despite being “impossible people” - to live with each other.

In Sydney, he met young Catholics involved in the ‘new movements’ that the he and the Pope are so enthusiastic about.

Representatives of about 40 of these groups, including the Neo-Catechumenates, Focolare, the Disciples of Jesus, the Emmanuel Community and Opus Dei, as well as representatives from the Laity Committee of the Australian Bishops Conference, the Legion of Mary, the Catholic Women’s League and Catholic university student groups, attended a reception for the cardinal at the Mary MacKillop Centre.

He spoke to them about the nature of the lay movements.

Cardinal Stafford also talked to students about the role of the arts in Catholic evangelisation after attending the opening of The Jeweller’s Shop - a play written by the Pope when he was a young man - at Carnivale Christi, the arts festival conducted by Sydney University Catholic students.