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Only women can save original Christianity

2023-06-10T10:23:18.603Z

Highlights: Religion is a feminine name, like faith or life. The masculinization of the religious ended up impoverishing and bureaucratizing the vigor of the faith, which was losing its primitive force. The first Eucharists in memory of the Last Supper celebrated by Jesus before his death took place in the homes of women. They appear historically at the head of the first Christian communities before the new faith was masculinized. And it is evident that religion is intimately linked to the dawn of humanity.


Religion is a feminine name, like life. The masculinization of the religious ended up impoverishing and bureaucratizing the vigor of the faith, which was losing its primitive force.


It is said that the world has entered a new era in which women are emerging in society with such force that, as Brazilian businesswoman Camila Junquera has just written in the newspaper O Globo, "the future needs to be definitively feminine."

If this is increasingly true even in atavically masculine politics, it is also true in Christianity, the greatest spiritual force of monotheistic religions.

Christianity, in fact, began to enter into crisis at the moment when it was masculinized, cornering the feminine force from it. This is revealed every day with greater evidence by the string of sexual scandals perpetrated within the masculinized institution, while the obligatory celibacy of religious continues to be maintained.

Christianity became so masculine that the evidence was forgotten that in its origins, when it showed its greatest vigor, it was markedly feminine. The new religion born of Judaism transformed by Jesus into a universal religion, was born and developed under the strength of women.

So much so that the Gospels tell, with great symbolism, that Jesus, when he was resurrected, appeared before the apostles to a group of women, including the emblematic Mary Magdalene, who could have been his wife. And it was the women who were the only ones who stood at the foot of the cross while it died. The apostles had fled for fear of being executed themselves.

The first Christian rites were performed in the homes of women followers of the new religious faith and they were the protagonists in the catacombs of Rome during the persecutions of the Romans.

Christianity began to masculinize and hierarchize with Paul of Tarsus. The first Eucharists in memory of the Last Supper celebrated by Jesus before his death took place in the homes of women. They appear historically at the head of the first Christian communities before the new faith was masculinized.

There is even pictorial evidence of this in one of the catacombs of Rome, not open to the public, only visible to specialists in the study of Christianity, in which you can see a painting between the second and third century of Christianity of women with priestly vestments.

And it is that the first religious vestiges are already rooted in the feminine. It is enough to remember that the first divinity in history was Gaia, the goddess of the Earth, the begetter of life. In all the histories of religions it is clear that the religious was in its beginnings feminine, related to life and its mysteries.

Christianity and more Catholicism ended up masculinizing religion that even in its language was always feminine: church, basilica, mass, communion, confession. It is curious that even the clothing, the cassock, worn from the pope to the simple priests was and still is feminine.

Religion is a feminine name, like faith or life. The masculinization of the religious ended up impoverishing and bureaucratizing the vigor of the faith, which was losing its primitive force.

Of the last pontiffs who best understood that Christianity is being impoverished because of its excessive masculinization that ended up sacrificing its original feminine force has been the current Pope Francis. It was he who recalled that the early Church, the foundational one, was strong and openly feminine. And he immediately encountered the resistance of the old male apparatus of the Vatican that stopped his feet preventing him from even eliminating the obligatory celibacy of the clergy, which has nothing to do with dogmas and which was the main reason for removing women from the altar.

In his efforts to re-empower women in the Church, Francis has been introducing the female element into the Vatican bureaucracy and trying to return to women some of the powers they enjoyed at the origins of the new religion. And even that with great resistance from the masculine bureaucracy of the Holy See that ended up confronting him.

If it is true that there is a desire in the Curia that Francis may end up resigning for health reasons to curb his openings of the female gender, it is also true that it may be too late and that the next pope can surprise and achieve what Francis is being denied.

The Church is still trailing behind the old masculine clichés in a society in which it is increasingly evident that this is the hour of the greatest vindication of the feminine in all instances.

And if something is evident is that religion since the dawn of humanity was intimately linked to the feminine. Perhaps the first goddess of antiquity was Gaia, Mother Earth, intrinsically linked to fertility. And it was precisely when religion, divinity, became masculine that they lost their primitive force.

It is, in truth, impossible to imagine Christianity devaluing the feminine, the mysteries of faith, of existential anguish, of anxiety before the beyond, of the anguish of the unknown. And also of any kind of mystery that ends up being indecipherable without recognizing the primordial role of the feminine. And this is in happiness as in anguish, in life as in death, in faith as in religion, all of them feminine words, without the woman recovering what History itself recognizes her.

Will Christianity understand it once and for all? Otherwise, that feminine force that religion had at its dawn and that was able to introduce a true revolution in the mystery of faith (another feminine word) will end up fraying sadly and melancholy.

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Source: elparis

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