Saying enough is enough is not enough

There is a date in Italy that marks the birth of a new awareness of the urgency of a response against violence against women. That date is November 11, 2023. On this day, 22-year-old Giulia Cecchettin, on the eve of her graduation, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. In an Italy where a feminicide occurs every three days, the words of Giulia’s sister Elena, leave their mark. “The ‘monsters’ are not sick, they are healthy children of patriarchy, of rape culture. Rape culture is what legitimises all behaviour that harms women, starting with things that sometimes are not even given importance but which are important, such as control, possessiveness, catcalling. Every man is privileged by this culture”.

In Padua, a few kilometres from the Cecchettin house, is the Theological Faculty of Triveneto. The prodirector is a woman, whose name is Assunta Steccanella. “It was precisely her feeling called upon as a woman, as a mother, as a grandmother, to say that we had to do something for the new generations: to question ourselves not only on how to reach young people pastorally, but also on how to be protagonists in addressing certain issues. This gave rise to the course on gender violence, which will start in the second semester,” explains Michela Simonetto, the psychologist who runs the course together with a consecrated expert in spirituality, Marzia Ceschia. “Violence against women also calls into question a whole experience and cultural elaboration that is the heritage of Christianity,” emphasizes sister Marzia.

In 2022, UN figures calculate that some 48,800 women and girls worldwide were killed by their intimate partners or family members. This means that, on average, more than five women or girls are killed every hour by someone in their own family. Globally, about 736 million women - almost one in three - have been victims of physical and/or sexual violence at least once in their lifetime.

According to the criminologist, Adolfo Ceretti, gender-based violence is mostly expressed “in the different declinations of oppression, which can be oriented by the sirens of the desire for domination, the anguish of its loss or the prospect of its reconquest. Before attempting to reconstruct the deliberative processes that lead a man to the decision to attack a woman’s body, it is necessary to consider and understand how the perpetrator perceives and recognizes his own role (superordinate or subordinate) in the specific context of the interaction with the future victim and, at the same time, in the broader life story in which the violent act takes shape”.

Violence against women, said Pope Francis, has “deep roots that are also cultural and mental and that grow in the soil of prejudice, possession and injustice”. Well, according to Lucia Vantini, president of the Coordination of Italian Women Theologians, what still remains weak is the Church’s awareness of how this ground is also cultivated through the imbalances between the genders. “These imbalances have many different forms, they hide in discourses on baptismal equality, in certain ways of describing Mary, in the many removals of women’s voices in the history of salvation, in that continual disregard for women concretely, those who are already Church as daughters of God and as mothers and sisters, and who in the name of the gospel have ideas, visions, and experiences that should not be done without. If we take seriously the idea expressed several times by Pope Francis that where there is domination there is abuse, we cannot think of healing violence against women without touching the question of power in the Church, its narrative form and its practical exercise”, says the theologian. Lucia Vantini is one of the women who spoke at the C9, the Council of Cardinals, to deepen the reflection - the Pope being present - on the role of women in the Church.

It is an operation that starts from a re-reading of the Scriptures. “The figure of God the father lies partly at the root of a system of male domination. Patriarchy means father rule”, comments Baptist pastor Elizabeth Green, author of Christianity and Violence against Women (ed. Claudiana). “Christianity”, she says, “is a historical religion, heir to Judaism, which, like almost all ancient cultures, reflects a patriarchal society. All Churches should make a deconstruction of their implications in patriarchy, which means reviewing theologies and symbols. It is useless to think that we can only change one element of the system or ignore the related symbolic system”. This is the operation that many female theologians have been doing since the 1980s, such as a pioneer of the interpretation of the Bible from a feminist perspective, the Catholic Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza (In Memory of Her. A Feminist Reconstruction of Christian Origins, Claudiana ed.). Because for centuries a certain reading of the sacred texts has justified and crystallized gender roles.

To hold a patriarchal view concretely means to convey “the idea that male human beings should have the most resources available because they can use them for the good of all, since they are predisposed to leadership, teaching, authoritative speech and responsibility. This idea has been wholeheartedly taken for granted and obvious in the Catholic Church, with an aggravating circumstance: attributing directly to God and his will, in the way he has created things and arranged relationships, that men have power and means, while women are content to receive what men decide”. This is the view of theologian Serena Segoloni, the author of Jesus Masculine Singular (edb ).

Discourses that struggle to be understood in Christian communities, where terms such as “patriarchy”, “feminism”, “gender” and “sexuality” are viewed with suspicion, “considered trojan horses for conveying ideas that are destructive to the community, and to educational and affective levels”, says Vantini. “They have never been confronted”, he adds, “with a lucid, frank, honest, historically aware, culturally equipped, ethically just and spiritually supportive exchange. Those who think they can dismiss these issues by saying they are feminists on the one hand say something true on a historical level, it was feminists who first posed the question; but on the other hand, they make themselves known as people who are indifferent to the pain and injustice suffered by women”.

It is precisely in the need to identify the male being with this prevalence that the link between patriarchy and violence exists. Serena Segoloni comments, “In many cases of feminicides, this dynamic is triggered: my wife, my partner, belongs to me, and I can even go so far as to kill her because if she detaches herself, if she disobeys, she loses her sense of existence, as if she were no longer there.”

A pathology that, according to Sister Ceschia, “also makes man a slave to the image that is put on him. Between performance anxiety, of living up to a codified role, and the removal of vulnerability, the not coming to terms with one’s own fragility”. It is a general discourse, which concerns society as much as the Church. But the latter, says Segoloni, has “the antidote” to all this in its ‘testimonial’ par excellence”. “Certainly Jesus was male, yet he lived masculinity in such a way as to redefine it, with a style that never sought to subjugate anyone, never entered into hierarchical struggle with anyone”. Some examples? “The collegial attitude towards women, the fact that he brings female disciples, which he never speaks of in the maternal role terms, let alone virginity. Instead, he speaks of the faith of those who go after him and gives them a missionary mandate. And in the early Churches there are women in leadership positions”.

The theme touches all Churches. If in Protestantism, according to Green, “there is an anthropology of equality, Catholicism rests, even in its ecclesial order, on an anthropology of difference”. However, this does not mean that patriarchy is eradicated in the evangelical churches. “It is produced, reproduced and therefore still finds ways of subsisting, in ecclesiastical organisation and theology”. It is no coincidence that during the Ecumenical Decade of Solidarity of the Churches with Women (1988-1998) called by the Ecumenical Council of Churches, this theme emerged strongly. And about ten years ago, in Italy, the Interfaith Observatory on Violence Against Women was founded, in the wake of the “Ecumenical Appeal to the Christian Churches against Violence Against Women” (March 9, 2015), promoted by the Council of the Federation of Evangelical Churches in Italy, shared, reworked and signed by ten Christian Churches that are located in Italy. “Despite the fact that over the centuries, and in many situations, religions have depowered women’s subjectivity, we do not want to renounce the heritage and treasure of faith, which we consider distinct from religion, because the former has more to do with a spiritual dimension, while religion more with a social dimension and therefore institutional too,” says Paola Cavallari, president emeritus of the Observatory and editor of Non solo reato, anche peccato. Religioni e violenza sulle donne [Not Only Crime, Also Sin. Religions and Violence Against Women] (Effatà, Cantalupa).

It is a matter of teaching literacy to men and also women, to future presbyters, catechists, and pastoral workers so they will be able to read the female reality and the male-female relationship with different eyes. This has to begin from the grassroots, where “a mentality is still widespread according to which men have the role of power, decision-making, while the woman that of service. This thought then creates consequent actions. For example, continuing to speak of woman-care-motherhood, or referring to an image of sanctity and virginity, creates a way of confining women to certain roles. Today, no woman can be called only mother and wife, she is much more besides. Moreover, even Mary is not just a virgin mother, she is also a disciple, a protagonist, and an autonomous woman,” stares Sr. Ceschia. In this, consecrated women also have a great responsibility. “We religious should be aware of the great contribution we could make to the vision of women, starting from our environments, where a certain formation has allowed us to accept having only subordinate roles”. It is no coincidence that the issue of abuse of consecrated women continues to resurface karstically, closely linked to that of patriarchal culture, as Anna Deodato recounts in Vorrei risorgere dalle mie ferite. Chiesa, donne, abusi [I Would Like to Rise from My Wounds. Church, Women, Abuse] (edb ).

In trying to find antidotes, then, for the Church also means recovering an image of God, wounded by the idea that “women are the ones who had to endure, sacrifice and have patience in order to conquer holiness at the price of suffering and sacrifice”, Sister Ceschia emphasises.

The Church is certainly on the front line with its initiatives to welcome those who suffer violence - from trafficking to abuse - and with her words and gestures of concrete solidarity with the victims. “What she still cannot shake off, however, is a criticism of the system that - voluntarily or involuntarily, it matters little - triggers, covers, justifies and supports that violence”. In short, the pastor probably “no longer says “bear with me” but there are many more subtle ways of suggesting the same thing”, Lucia Vantini points out. “You do it when you take it for granted that certain things only happen to those who are difficult, messy, ambitious, lonely, poor, naive; when you smile at misogynist jokes; when you no longer even get angry at the umpteenth disregard for what women have said, written and done in history; when we fail to understand that in gender imbalances, it is not enough to reflect on the psychological, cultural and social models of femininity, because we must also reflect on masculinity, on what models fall on our men of the sacred, on our fathers, brothers, friends, lovers and fellow travelers in this world”.

To observe our words, and pay attention to language that is never neutral and conveys messages, is another job to engage ourselves. “Little girls “beautiful” “princesses” and little “champions”, the “little boy who must not cry like a little girl” are things we hear in schools, in our places of education, in the family,” says psychologist, Michela Simonetto, a graduate in religious sciences at the Istituto Superiore di Scienze Religiose di Padova (ISSR) in Padua. “As Church it is not enough to give the contents of the catechism, but we must offer a knowledge of being. Parish educators have told me several times that they are afraid to tackle certain topics, which, like sexuality, are taboo for the Church. But if we don’t give children the tools, and the information, they look elsewhere, through channels that convey the wrong messages”. If you were working in a concrete community what would Elizabeth Green do? “I would start with a proclamation of the Word by women and training priests to recognise the signs of violence in families. I would seek collaboration, which does not exist today, with the secular world, with anti-violence centres that have decades of experience in this field”.

by Vittoria Prisciandaro
Journalist with the San Paolo Periodicals “Credere” and “Jesus”