My grandmother, Nora Cecilia Loughlin was born in 1891, the same year that the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women was formed in Worcester. They argued that taking care of children and the household left women little time to keep up with political matters. One popular pamphlet quipped “you do not need a ballot to clean out your sink.”
But the year Nora turned twenty years old, however, the Massachusetts Great and General Court voted to ratify the nineteenth amendment, declaring that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged…on account of sex.”
Her experience with suffrage was part of a long struggle, which continues in our day, of trying to understand the respective dignity of men and women as human beings. And while it is not my intent to address the political questions which continue to be debated as passionately today as they were when Nora was born, I do propose to spend a just few moments reflecting on what Christ and his Church teaches us about gender, dignity and equality.
As we hear in Genesis in this morning, God did not want us to be alone. And so he made a suitable partner for Adam, and gave her the name Eve. She was bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, and like him was made just a little lower than the angels. She and he were made for the same reason: to learn how to love others as God had first loved them.
And so, God incited them to enter into a partnership with him, as co-creators of human life, that children might enter the world, as a sign that God has not given up on the human race and its capacity to love.
Several things jump out at us from the Genesis text, the first of which is that gender was created by God. We were each made by God as male or female. Gender is not something I choose, but something I receive as a gift from God.
Second, men and women were created as different. Thanks be to God! I think of the loving adage of an old woman I know, who on the occasion of her 65th anniversary of marriage turned to her husband and said, “Harold, you complete me.” And he looked back at her an replied, “And you, Mary, make me whole.”
Pope Saint John Paul II used to speak about how this love between a man and a women reflects the love which is God, the relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, just as it reflects Christ’s love for his Church. The way a man and a woman love one another throughout the decades of married life, in good times and in bad, preaches about the love of God more eloquently than anything I could ever say.
And finally, while God made man and woman to be different, he also made them to be equal in dignity and worth. In the words of Saint Paul, “there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
And while my grandmother would, I suspect, still be disappointed by a world in which women are often seen by many as inferior to men, where gender is sometimes promoted as an ideology than received as a gift and where we often forget that God created us live and love in his image and likeness, she would probably also take hope that the Faith is still being preached, even by her little grandson Jimmy. A Faith which was in the beginning, is now and will be forever. Amen.
