VATICAN - Benedict XVI to participants at a Meeting to mark the 20th anniversary of Mulieris dignitatem: “it is necessary to recall God's design that created the human being masculine and feminine, with a unity and at the same time an original difference and complimentary ”

Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - “ A renewed anthropological study is certainly necessary based on the great Christian tradition, which incorporates new scientific advances and, given today's cultural sensitivity, in this way contributes to deepening not only the feminine identity but also the masculine, which is often the object of partial and ideological reflections. Faced with cultural and political trends that seek to eliminate, or at least cloud and confuse, the sexual differences inscribed in human nature, considering them a cultural construct, it is necessary to recall God's design that created the human being masculine and feminine, with a unity and at the same time an original difference and complimentary .” The Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI said this in his address during a special audience on 9 February granted to participants at an international Conference: "Woman and Man, the Humanum in Its Entirety", organised on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the publication of the Apostolic Letter Mulieris dignitatem by the Pontifical Council for the Laity.
The Holy Father underlined the relevance of the Conference theme “The man-woman relationship in its respective specificity, reciprocity and complementarity certainly constitutes a central point of the "anthropological question", so decisive in contemporary culture and ultimately for every culture”. Among the many papal interventions and documents on the question of women, Pope Benedict XVI mentioned those of John Paul II especially his “Letter to Women” (1995) and his apostolic Letter “Mulieris dignitatem”. In
the “Mulieris dignitatem” John Paul II reflected on the fundamental anthropological truths of man and woman, the equality of their dignity and the unity of both, the well-rooted and profound diversity between the masculine and the feminine and their vocation to reciprocity and complementarity, to collaboration and to communion. This "uni-duality" of man and woman - Pope Benedict continued - is based on the foundation of the dignity of every person created in the image and likeness of God, who "male and female he created them" (Gn 1: 27), avoiding an indistinct uniformity and a dull and impoverishing equality as much as an irreconcilable and conflictual difference. This dual unity brings with it, inscribed in body and soul, the relationship with the other, love for the other, interpersonal communion that implies "that the creation of man is also marked by a certain likeness to the divine communion" (Mulieris dignitatem, n. 7). Therefore, when men and women demand to be autonomous and totally self-sufficient, they run the risk of being closed in a self-reliance that considers ignoring every natural, social or religious bond as an expression of freedom, but which, in fact, reduces them to an oppressive solitude.”.
Coming to the end of his address the Pope lamented a persistent masculine mentality "that ignores the novelty of Christianity, which recognises and proclaims that men and women share equal dignity and responsibility. There are places and cultures where women are discriminated against or undervalued for the sole fact of being women, where recourse is made even to religious arguments and family, social and cultural pressure in order to maintain the inequality of the sexes, where acts of violence are consummated in regard to women, making them the object of mistreatment and of exploitation in advertising and in the consumer and entertainment industry”. In this situation the Holy Father reminded Christians of the urgent need strive to promote everywhere “a culture that recognises the dignity that belongs to women, in law and in concrete reality.”.
God entrusts to women and men, "a specific vocation and mission in the Church and in the world”, the Pope said and he concluded. “ Children from their conception have the right to be able to count on their father and mother to take care of them and to accompany their growth. The State, for its part, must uphold with appropriate social policies everything that promotes the stability and unity of matrimony, the dignity and responsibility of couples, their rights and irreplaceable duty as educators of their children. Besides, it is necessary to enable the woman to collaborate in the building of society, appreciating her typical "feminine genius".” (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 12/2/2008; righe 45, parole 635)