Philippine E-Journals

THE DIVINE IMAGE AND COMMUNION OF PERSONS: AN EXAMINATION OF GENDER ISSUES IN JOHN PAUL II

Hyginus Chibuike Ezebuilo

 

Abstract:

John Paul II resisted all attempts to incorporate women into the Holy Orders during his papacy, yet he is a strong advocate of gender equality. This presupposes that equality for John Paul II precludes gender differentiation. If so, then differentiated gender roles reflect inequality. However, is this conclusion right? Must all forms of equality obliterate all differences? Or, is it possible for there to be an equality of differences? This does not seem possible because the difference as such lacks commonality, whereby they can be compared and known as equal. The question becomes whether the commonality that allows for comparison must be identical, that is, must equality be a univocal concept? These are the questions that border this study as it examines gender issues in John Paul II. He univocally supports gender equality while upholding gender roles that would allow equality to be based upon a commonality that is analogous rather than univocal or equivocal. There is no room for the slightest sexist discrimination anywhere in human life. But the equality of men and women is an analogous one so that the differentiation of the sexes must not be lost, not in any of our behavior, laws, customs, and traditions. Our laws must somehow allow for the difference between the sexes, and the era demanded by the feminists would have been a tragic mistake. The research method employed is a critical method. The study discovers that the Pope expresses a commitment to gender equality based upon a sacramental theology wherein nature images the divine and wherein the equality of man and woman was definitively biblical. For him, man and woman are equally persons and equally image of God in whose likeness, both were created. Why then are these equal images sexually differentiated? This is the problem that this paper confronts.