by Susan Brinkmann Staff Writer (Feb. 13, 2008) Pope Benedict XVI says Christians must do more to promote a culture that grants women the dignity that is theirs by right and resist cultural pressures to relegate women to either second-class status or to a kind of autonomy and self-sufficiency that traps them in a “state of oppressive solitude.” Speaking to delegates on the closing day of a congress marking the 20th anniversary of the apostolic letter, Mulieris Dignitatem (On the Dignity and Vocation of Women), the Pope said that the relationship between man and woman, in their respective specificity, reciprocity and complementarity, “is without doubt a central aspect of the 'anthropological question' which is so decisive to contemporary culture." Women from around the world attended the congress, entitled “Woman and man, the 'humanum' in its entirety” which was sponsored by the Pontifical Council for the Laity from Feb. 7 to 9 in Rome. The delegation included two well-known authors and contributors to the Women of Grace study program, Genevieve S. Kineke and Dale O’Leary, who served as Vatican liaisons from North America. Each continent was assigned a specific topic to serve as a filter through which to ponder the letter. The North American continent was assigned “Women in a technological and consumerist society.” In his address to the delegation, the Pope mentioned the many documents Pope John Paul II dedicated to this theme, from Mulieris dignitatem to the 1995 Letter to Women, as well as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in The Church and in the World. Much work is yet to be done in helping women achieve the dignity God meant for them to have, he said. In the secular West, there is the problem of cultural and political currents “that attempt to eliminate, or at least to obfuscate and confuse, the sexual differences written into human nature, considering them to be cultural constructions,” he said. “When men or women pretend to be autonomous or totally self-sufficient, they risk being closed up in a self-realization that considers the overcoming of every natural, social or religious bond as a conquest of freedom, but which in fact reduces them to an oppressive solitude.” The answer to this problem is to remember what the late Pope John Paul II taught in Mulieris Dignitatem about how God created the human being as both male and female,“with a unity and at the same time an original and complementary difference. Human nature and the cultural dimension are integrated in an ample and complex process that constitutes the formation of the identity of each, where both dimensions -- the feminine and the masculine -- correspond to and complete each other.” There is also the continuing problem of the “macho mentality” that still exists in many parts of the world, he said. “There are certain places and cultures where women are discriminated against and undervalued just for the fact that they are women, where recourse is even had to religious arguments and family, social and cultural pressures to support the disparity between the sexes, where there is consumption of acts of violence against women, making them into objects of abuse and exploitation in advertising and in the consumer and entertainment industries.” He also called upon the State to do its part in promoting the dignity of women. “From their conception, children have the right to a father and mother to take care of them and accompany them as they grow. For its part, the State must support with adequate social policies everything that promotes the stability and unity of marriage, the dignity and responsibility of the spouses and their right ... to be educators of their children.” In the face of so many grave and persistent impediments to the proper recognition of the inherent dignity of women, “the commitment of Christians appears all the more urgent,” he said, “so that they become everywhere the promoters of a culture that recognizes the dignity that belongs to women in law and in reality.” © All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly/Women of Grace. http://www.womenofgrace.com Discover authentic femininity! Read “Full of Grace” by Johnnette Benkovic. Available in our store at www.womenofgrace.com/catalog.