It is said that the world has entered a new era in which women are emerging in society with such force that, as the Brazilian businesswoman Camila Junquera has just written in the newspaper or globe“the future needs to be definitely feminine”.
If this is increasingly true even in atavistic masculine politics, it is also true in Christianity, the greatest spiritual force of the monotheistic religions.
Christianity, in effect, began to enter into crisis at the moment in which it began to become masculinized, cornering the feminine force from it. The rosary of sexual scandals perpetrated within the masculinized institution, while continuing to maintain the obligatory celibacy of religious, reveals it with greater evidence every day.
Christianity became so masculine that the evidences were forgotten that in its origins, when it showed its greatest vigour, it was markedly feminine. The new religion born of Judaism, transformed by Jesus into a universal religion, was born and developed under the power of women.
So much so that the gospels recount, with great symbolism, that Jesus, when resurrected, appeared before the apostles to a group of women, including the emblematic, Mary Magdalene, who could have been his wife. And the women were the only ones who were at the foot of the cross while he died. The apostles had fled for fear of being executed too.
The first Christian rites were performed in the homes of women followers of the new religious faith and they were the protagonists in the catacombs of Rome during the persecutions of the Romans.
Christianity began to become masculinized and hierarchical with Pablo de Tarso. The first Eucharist in memory of the last supper celebrated by Jesus before his death, took place in the women’s houses. They historically appear at the head of the first Christian communities before the masculinization of the new faith.
There is even pictorial evidence of this in one of the catacombs of Rome, not open to the public, only visible to specialists in the study of Christianity, where you can see a painting between the second and third centuries of Christianity of women with priestly vestments
And it is that the first religious vestiges are already rooted in the feminine. It is enough to remember that the first divinity in history was Gaia, the goddess of the Earth, the engenderer of life. In all the histories of religions it appears clear that the religious was in its beginnings feminine, related to life and its mysteries.
Christianity and more Catholicism ended up masculinizing the religion that even in its language was always feminine: church, basilica, mass, communion, confession. It is curious that even the clothing, the cassock, used from the pope to the simple priests was and continues to be feminine.
Religion is a feminine name, like faith or life. The masculinization of religion ended up impoverishing and bureaucratizing the vigor of faith, which gradually lost its primitive strength.
Of the last pontiffs, the one who best understood that Christianity is becoming impoverished due to its excessive masculinization that ended up sacrificing its original feminine strength has been the current Pope Francis. It was he who recalled that the primitive Church, the founding Church, was strong and openly feminine. And immediately he found resistance from the old male Vatican apparatus that stopped him, preventing him from even eliminating the obligatory celibacy of the clergy, which has nothing to do with dogmas and which was the main reason for keeping women away from the altar.
In his efforts to restore power to women in the Church, Francis has been introducing the female element into the Vatican bureaucracy and trying to restore to women some of the powers they enjoyed at the origins of the new religion. And even this with great resistance from the masculine bureaucracy of the Holy See that ended up facing him.
If it is true that there is a desire in the Curia that Francis could end up resigning for health reasons to put a stop to his openings to the female gender, it is also true that it may be too late and that the next pope may surprise and achieve what he wants. Francisco is denying him.
The Church is still trailing behind the old masculine clichés in a society in which it is increasingly evident that this is the hour for the greatest vindication of the feminine in all instances.
And if something is evident, it is that religion from the dawn of humanity was intimately linked to the feminine. Perhaps the first goddess of antiquity was Gaea, Mother Earth, intrinsically linked to fertility. And it was precisely when religion, divinity, was made masculine that they lost their primitive force.
It is, in truth, impossible to imagine Christianity devaluing the feminine, the mysteries of faith, of existential anguish, of anxiety before the afterlife, of the anguish of the unknown. And also of any kind of mystery that ends up being indecipherable without recognizing the primary role of the feminine. And this is in happiness than in anguish, in life as in death, in faith as in religion, all of them feminine words, without the woman ever recovering what History itself recognizes.
Will Christianity understand it once and for all? Otherwise, that feminine force that religion had at its dawn and that was capable of introducing a true revolution in the mystery of faith (another feminine word) will end up sadly and melancholically fraying.
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