Why young Catholics are rejecting feminism, Pt. 1

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 25, 2025

The Wall Street Journal recently featured the relationship between Catholicism and feminism in an article by Erika Bachiochi, titled “John Paul II, the Feminist Pope”.

Bachiochi, a Catholic legal scholar and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is concerned that many young Catholics are turning away from feminism and thereby losing sight of the equal dignity of men and women. Instead of listening to the teaching of Pope St. John Paul II on the dignity of women, she says, many get their views from online anti-feminist reactionaries:

When many young Catholics today have questions about the faith, they turn to religious podcasts, or what a friend calls the Alternative Magisterium. Rather than the church’s reflection on the sexes’ equal dignity, they’ll often find something more akin to the far right’s misogynistic views, which have emerged from dark corners of the web. Popular Catholic influencers increasingly risk bringing them into the mainstream.

I agree that the problem of misogynist influencers is a real one, though Bachiochi is a bit short on examples of Catholic podcasters she considers bad, only detailing one (Timothy Gordon) and briefly mentioning two others (one of which is merely an anodyne tweet by Matt Walsh saying that feminism has been terrible for civilization). If I were looking for a more current, much more popular and obviously misogynist example, I would have mentioned Nick Fuentes instead.

Bachiochi’s paragraph on Gordon illustrates her concerns:

Citing church documents from much earlier historical eras, he claims that the church prohibits women from working outside the home and that they shouldn’t presume to leave their homes without their husbands’ consent. …in Mr. Gordon’s telling, women are ‘naturally’ inferior to men, and submission to ‘their husbands’ directives in all things’ is their ‘primary charge.’ Marriage is a ‘best friendship between unequals,’ wherein women are encouraged to cultivate the virtues necessary for wifely obedience and domesticity.

Now, I agree that Gordon uses an overdetermined reading of certain Church documents to advocate exaggerated subservience of wives to husbands. But using him as her foil allows Bachiochi to frame the Catholic debate over feminism as a conflict between Church teaching and online reactionaries, while ignoring legitimate challenges to feminism, including from the Church’s own recent magisterium.*

The young Catholics I know in real life who oppose feminism are not disciples of Tim Gordon, nor do they reject the teachings of Pope St. John Paul II on the equal dignity of women (though they know he was not the first pope to realize this). Rather, they want to reappropriate the fulness of traditional Catholic teaching. In this as in other areas, they reject the prevalent notion that everything the Church taught before the most recent council is now irrelevant—because that is not how Catholic doctrine works. And at their best, rather than making the opposite error of rejecting the postconciliar magisterium, they read it in faithful continuity with what has been taught consistently by the Church.

These young Catholics have also grown up in a world marked by the failures of gender egalitarianism to make either women or men happy, failures predicted by the popes of the late 19^th to mid-20^th centuries. Reading the signs of the times, they have come to the conviction that what the Church needs is not further attempts to blend the faith with secular ideologies, but a return to her own wellsprings of wisdom.

This endeavor cannot be dismissed as the revival of musty tomes “from much earlier historical eras” (not that those are necessarily irrelevant). We can study papal teachings from St. John Paul II’s own lifetime, like Pius XI’s Casti connubii (1930), which remains the classic encyclical on marriage. In my experience, Catholic feminists are unwilling to engage seriously with the full range of magisterial sources.

Young people are also getting wise to the myth, debunked in an excellent 2008 article by Dawn Eden, that feminism was originally wholesome and compatible with Catholicism until it was “hijacked” by 1960s radicals, and therefore that to create Pope St. John Paul II’s “new feminism”, we simply need a ressourcement back to the “feminist foremothers”. (This narrative is reminiscent of the claim that all we need to do to defeat progressivism is to go back to “classical” Enlightenment liberalism.)

Conspicuously absent in the Wall Street Journal article is the name of a much more mainstream figure than Tim Gordon: Bachiochi’s very own colleague at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Carrie Gress. In her book The End of Woman Gress argues, like Eden, that feminism has been pathological and anti-Catholic from the very beginning.

It is surely disconcerting to Bachiochi that this assault on feminism comes not from some uncouth manosphere YouTuber, but from a woman with whom she shares institutional space. I can’t help but wonder if Gress’s appearance on Pints with Aquinas last month may have had something to do with Bachiochi’s writing this piece now.

Equal dignity vs. egalitarianism

In a way, it is difficult to respond to Bachiochi’s article, because she presents a grab bag of concerns that do not always clearly relate to the theme of equal dignity. Indeed, since some of the issues mentioned are ones on which the Church has taken no position, I question whether it was appropriate for Bachiochi to take legitimate internal discussion among Catholics and attempt to litigate it in a secular publication with such a one-sided treatment of her young coreligionists.

At any rate, Bachiochi lists various ways in which some young people are questioning the orthodoxies of our feminist society, and implies that they are thereby doubting the equal dignity of women. But for a number of these issues, this does not follow unless (as Bachiochi sometimes seems to) we conflate equal dignity with gender egalitarianism, the view that men and women are equal in every respect.

When we speak of things being “equal” but not the same, this is always in a particular context. If two things were equal in an absolute sense (that is, in every respect), they would be the same and interchangeable. That men and women have equal dignity is not a vague claim but grounded in something very specific: they share the same rational, personal human nature made in the image of God.

Beyond that, Bachiochi would admit at least in principle that men and women are different in important ways. But to admit that they are different precisely as men or women is to admit that they are not equal in every respect. Sex difference is found in the body, and there is a whole host of physical traits in which men and women are not equal, including differences in our brains. Note that this does not necessarily mean that one sex is comprehensively inferior to the other; but it would also seem meaningless to assert that men and women are equal precisely insofar as they are different.

The Church, reading the book of nature by the light of divine revelation, has consistently asserted that men and women have equal dignity, while also denying egalitarian sameness. Rather, while sharing the same rational nature and the same call to the divine life, men and women are different in profound ways. Even though both sexes can and ought to attain all the moral virtues, the Old and New Testaments frequently emphasize different praiseworthy traits, characteristic vices, and roles for each sex. We must allow both of these realities, sameness and difference, to shape our lives and culture.

If men and women are different, however, this will inevitably be reflected in social arrangements and even in law (even in some ways Bachiochi surely approves). The Church has taught even in modern times, among other things, that men and women do not have equal authority in the family (Casti connubii, Arcanum divinae), that they do not have the same relationship with work and the domestic sphere (Rerum novarum, Casti connubii, Familiaris consortio), and of course that women cannot be ordained priests (Ordinatio sacerdotalis).

The details of how some these teachings are implemented may vary according to context (as Casti connubii says outright about authority and obedience in marriage, for instance). However, the basic principles cannot be relativized into irrelevance, as Catholic feminists often try to do. Without litigating each issue in the present article, my purpose here is simply to insist that the Church’s consistent prior teachings on differences between the sexes cannot be treated as obsolete, and therefore that Catholics have a legitimate basis on which to dispute the feminist status quo.

Even if they were contradicted by the more recent magisterium (which I dispute), what is more recent would not automatically overturn what is older; it is the teaching that has been given greater weight (by repetition and level of magisterium) which receives interpretive priority. And if it be argued that certain aspects of older documents are relative to cultural conditions or that they are opinion rather than eternal doctrine, then the fidelity of young Catholics should not be impugned on the grounds that they prefer one set of cultural conditions or one papal opinion to another!

Yet you will not find me setting the Magisterium against itself. In the sequel, as I take up some of the specific issues raised by Bachiochi, I will argue for the compatibility of Pope St. John Paul II’s teachings with what came before.

Part 2

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*The same rhetorical framing can also be seen in a new essay by Bachiochi’s colleague Angela Franks, which is in many ways very good, but brings up concern about wives and mothers working outside the home only to dismiss it as a “right-wing power fetish”, never mentioning the magisterium’s many cautions on the subject.