“Venus Restored” by Man Ray, 1936, which the Vatican INEXPLICABLY put on the cover of a document on women’s equality.
Today in Tone-Deaf Things Done by the Vatican…
Last week, the Vatican Pontifical Council for Culture, an all-male body, had a plenary on women’s issues. Women were invited to present their stories, though not to participate in the actual discussion. In advance of the event, they released a working document on women’s issues, with some questions they would cover. The title was “Women’s Cultures: Equality and Difference,” and the illustration was a photo of a sculpture of a headless, limbless woman in bondage.
Micol Forti, director of the Contemporary Art collection of the Vatican Museum, said that the sculpture was chosen among other possibilities because it represents the past as an “anchor to generate new ideas.”
Uh. Sure.
Sadly, the inside is not much better. For example, the section on domestic violence includes the following question:
Why at the first physical act of aggression, or even at the first harsh words, do they not put a distance between themselves and the men who threaten, betraying conjugal love, destroying it, profaning it to the extreme?
“But why don’t they leave??” the Vatican wants to know, ignoring decades of research on the dynamics of abuse and their own prohibition of divorce.
It also asks:
Have we ever asked ourselves what type of woman the Church needs today? Is the way they participate thought of and worked out together with them?
“But what do women WANT?” the church whines, at a conversation in which women are explicitly barred from participating.
Oh Vatican. I don’t think you tried at all. (For much more detailed and thoughtful analysis of how everything about this conference from lead-up to conclusion is basically an offensive mess, Mary E. Hunt at Religion Dispatches has you covered.)