Angelus News | January 15, 2021 | Vol. 6 No. 1

“Madonna of Mercy,” by Sano di Pietro, 15th century.
Why we need the
feminine genius
In the toughest of times, the Catholic Church has
relied on gifts that only women can offer
BY SIMONE RIZKALLAH / ANGELUS
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The COVID-19 pandemic, it
seems, has spared no one.
Sure, some have been blessed
to remain largely untouched physically
or financially by the pandemic.
But the anxiety of these uncertain last
few months, and the consequences of
isolation and loneliness, seem to have
found us all in some way.
As a result, the larger questions about
destiny and meaning — ones that were
dismissed more easily before — today
ask to be revisited in a totally new context.
After the bruising year that was
2020, those questions invite Catholics
to reflect deeply about our place in the
post-COVID world.
St. Augustine of Hippo lived in a time
of chaos and civilizational collapse,
marked by plague and political strife.
His advice for times like these? Stay
rooted in reality.
“Bad times, hard times, this is what
people keep saying; but let us live well,
and times shall be good,” he wrote in
the year 410. “We are the times: Such
as we are, such are the times.”
Such as we are, such are the times.
The great 20th-century philosopher
Simone Weil described being rooted
as the least recognized and yet most
important need of the human soul.
But what can help us fulfill this need?
Ironically, it was one of Weil’s admirers,
St. Pope John Paul II, who argued
that modern man’s loss of its own
sense of humanity called for a “manifestation
of that ‘genius’ which belongs
to women.”
“It is commonly thought,” the
Polish pontiff wrote in his 1988
letter “Mulieris Dignitatem” (On the
Dignity and Vocation of Women), that
“women are more capable than men
of paying attention to another person,
and that motherhood develops this
predisposition even more.”
Throughout history, it is the genius
of women that God has designed to
continually root mankind in reality.
And this is reality: Because of Jesus
Christ we are not victims of our
circumstances. We are being found,
cherished, healed, and saved.
This is what women represent and do
— find, cherish, heal, and save. Why?
26 • ANGELUS • January 15, 2021