“This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the Church.” St. Paul is criticized as being anti-women and patriarchal when he says “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands.” What is often missed is the sentence preceding that one: “Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.” St. Paul is not giving marriage advice (always a good policy for celibate males in my experience!) but rather, as Paul explicitly states, is looking at the current state of marriage in the Roman world and using that as an analogy for the mystery of our relationship with Christ. The “head” of the family is Christ which is why there is the call for us to be “subordinate to one another.” At the recently concluded Synod on Synodality the question of the role of women in the Church was repeatedly raised. The resolution is not “mature” (to use the language of the synod) but Pope Francis is pushing the Church to give women greater opportunities to give their giftedness to building the kingdom of God.
