Mother Church and her battered daughters

Feb 05, 2016

By Kaitlin Campbell
Addressing the rise in divorce and perceived causes for family division in his sermon on the Feast of the Holy Family on Dec 27, 2015, Archbishop Baurillo Rodríguez of Toledo, Spain, demonstrated his — and by extension, the Church’s — view of the relationship between women and men as a fundamentally hierarchical one.

Domestic violence can’t be adequately solved by “just talking it out” because abuse isn’t just about disagreement between male and female; it’s about power and control. Emphasizing the differences in gender in this context serves to legitimatize male dominance.

The United States Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB) say as much in a relatively unknown document on pastoral responses to domestic violence, “When I Call for Help”: “Domestic violence is learned behaviour. Men who batter learn to abuse through observation, experience, and reinforcement. They believe that they have a right to use violence; they are also rewarded, that is, their behaviour gives them power and control over their partner.” In complete contradiction to Rodríguez, the bishops write: “Ultimately, abused women must make their own decisions about staying or leaving,” and “violence and abuse, not divorce, break up a marriage.”

“Many abusive men hold a view of women as inferior,” another section of the document explains: “Their conversation and language reveal their attitude towards a woman’s place in society. Many believe that men are meant to dominate and control women.” Now, where do you think they got that idea?

As helpful and informative about “women’s issues” the USCCB’s “When I Call for Help” might be, there are, nonetheless, parts of it that reinforce the sexism at the root of Church teaching on gender. The first instruction for Church ministers responding to domestic disputes is: “Listen to and believe the victim’s story.” Even having to stipulate this acknowledges the fact that most automatically don’t believe, unconsciously, because of the victim’s gender. To abusers, the bishops say: “Admit that the abuse is your problem, not your partner’s, and have the manly courage to seek help.”

There are many women in the flock who live with violence, as so many women generally do. A man drowned his partner in Madrid the day after Archbishop Rodríguez gave his homily. In 2015, fifty-six women were killed by abusive partners in Spain.

Although little data is available — due in part to victims’ reluctance to report and a lack of surveys conducted — the UN’s 2013 Global Study on Homicide found that of all women who were the victims of homicide globally in 2012, almost half were killed by intimate partners or family members, compared to less than six percent of men killed in the same year.

The World Health Organization estimates that 35 percent of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or sexual violence by a non-partner at some point in their lives, and according to United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, in some nations, the figure is as high as 70 percent.

In the United States, 63.8 percent of women who reported being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked since age eighteen were victimized by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, boyfriend, or date. It can be argued that the very concept of exerting power over someone, which is often at the root of violent crime, is patriarchal. The entire system depends on the belief that, by virtue of your sex, you have a right to control someone else, to the degree of having ownership over that person.

Let’s continue this conversation because, the needs of so many women are misunderstood by Church leaders and ministers, and because rape and domestic violence will remain inevitable when the hierarchical understanding of male-female relationships has an implicit theological blessing. --Commonweal