Why young Catholics are rejecting feminism, Pt. 2: The magisterium

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 03, 2025

In part one of this essay, I made two general critiques of Erika Bachiochi’s Wall Street Journal article, “John Paul II, the Feminist Pope”. First, Bachiochi unfairly framed the intra-Catholic debate about feminism merely as a conflict between the Church’s magisterium and misogynist Catholic podcasters, whereas many young Catholics reject feminism precisely because of Church teaching. Second, she conflated critiques of gender egalitarianism (which holds men and women to be equal in every respect and therefore interchangeable) with a denial of the equal dignity of the sexes (which is based on sharing the same human nature, not equality in every respect).

In this second part, rather than continuing to criticize Bachiochi’s own particular views, I will use her piece as a jumping-off point to defend the anti-feminist position on the various issues mentioned. Against those on both sides who see Pope St. John Paul II as nullifying the prior magisterium, I will show that his teachings are either the same as or compatible with what came before.

Authority, obedience, and mutual submission

In the Wall Street Journal, Bachiochi stresses Pope St. John Paul II’s well-known teaching on mutual subjection between spouses, throwing only a meager bone to “husbands’ responsibility as leaders”. In her subsequent appearance on Lila Rose’s podcast, she paints a more balanced picture, describing mutual subjection as asymmetrical and compatible with the authority of the husband.

However, Catholic feminists frequently invoke St. John Paul II’s phrase not to contextualize what St. Paul wrote in Ephesians 5 about wifely submission, but to explain it away, flattening the Biblical picture of marriage and effectively doing away with the unique authority of the husband. But it would be impious to suggest that this holy pope intended to overturn the Church’s consistently straightforward reading of this Scripture passage, and heterodox to suppose that he had the authority to do so.

While the phrase “mutual subjection” is admittedly novel and ambiguous on its own, I believe that what St. John Paul II meant by it can be found in the earlier magisterium, namely Pope Pius XI’s 1930 encylical Casti connubii:

For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love. (27)

Because John Paul II primarily emphasized mutuality for a generation that is allergic to the notion of authority, reading Casti connubii is essential to understand that mutual submission means mutual service, but not equal authority. (Though there is one area in which the spouses have equal authority over one another: each rules over the other’s body with respect to his or her conjugal rights.)

Casti Connubii is also essential reading for those on the other extreme, who wrongly believe that the authority of the husband over his wife is the same as his authority over his children, or that the husband has the right to micromanage his wife. Among other qualifications, Pius says that St. Paul does not imply “that the wife should be put on a level with those persons who in law are called minors, to whom it is not customary to allow free exercise of their rights on account of their lack of mature judgment” (27).

Bachiochi correctly states the Church’s teaching that “the domination of man over woman that God describes in Genesis isn’t his original design but a debased product of the Fall.” This is perfectly true as long as we don’t make the modern error of equating domination with authority. Some Catholic feminists, like Abigail Favale in her otherwise excellent book The Genesis of Gender, claim that there was no hierarchy in marriage prior to the Fall. On the contrary, Pius XI called the “primacy of the husband” and “subjection of the wife” part of the “order of love” and the “structure of the family and its fundamental law, established and confirmed by God” (26, 28).

Feminists are constantly warning about how the Scriptural teaching on the husband’s authority is overemphasized or used to justify abuse, but in reality we seldom hear about it at all. That the real imbalance today is primarily in a feminist direction cannot really be debated, given the lectionary’s infamous “bracketing” whereby the New Testament passages enjoining wives to obey their husbands may be omitted in the short form of the day’s reading (this happens on three days in the calendar). When Ephesians 5 is read in its short form, the congregation hears only about the husband laying down his life for his wife, giving the impression that husbands have duties toward their wives but wives have no corresponding duties toward their husbands. Young traditional-leaning Catholics see this for the scam that it is.

Perhaps some of these Catholic feminists do, deep down, accept the Church’s teaching that there is a genuine hierarchy of authority in marriage, but they usually react so defensively to any mention of it that it is hard to tell.

Wives and mothers working outside the home

As Bachiochi notes, Pope St. John Paul II approved of women taking a legitimate place in the world of work. However, he also taught clearly that women and men do not have the same relationships with work, public life, and the home. Wives and mothers must prioritize their domestic role above all else:

There is no doubt that the equal dignity and responsibility of men and women fully justifies women’s access to public functions. On the other hand the true advancement of women requires that clear recognition be given to the value of their maternal and family role, by comparison with all other public roles and all other professions…. Furthermore, the mentality which honors women more for their work outside the home than for their work within the family must be overcome. This requires that men should truly esteem and love women with total respect for their personal dignity, and that society should create and develop conditions favoring work in the home. (Familiaris consortio 23)

Note that St. John Paul II does not dichotomize between work as such and the home; instead he says that society should favor “work in the home” for women. He is in continuity with Leo XIII, who wrote in Rerum novarum: “Women…are not suited for certain occupations; a woman is by nature fitted for home-work, and it is that which is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty and to promote the good bringing up of children and the well-being of the family.” (42)

This is the consistent line of the popes in between Leo XIII and John Paul II. Even as they somewhat adapted their language in recognition of the new sociological reality where women were taking greater part in public life, they continued to stress the woman as the heart of the home and the home as the heart of the woman.

A clear, if not rigid, differentiation between men’s and women’s roles in work and the home can be seen elsewhere in Catholic teaching on the economy as well. The teaching that employers ought to pay a “family wage” is predicated on the father, the head of the family, receiving this wage—this is seen in Rerum novarum (46) and in Pius XI’s Quadragesimo anno (71). John Paul II says the same in Laborem exercens:

Such [just] remuneration can be given either through what is called a family wage—that is, a single salary given to the head of the family for his work, sufficient for the needs of the family without the other spouse having to take up gainful employment outside the home—or through other social measures such as family allowances or grants to mothers devoting themselves exclusively to their families. (90)

Thus John Paul II affirmed that the head of the family (the husband and father) is most properly the one who goes out to earn a wage if it is necessary to do so, and that even in the absence of a family wage paid to the husband, social assistance should favor “mothers devoting themselves exclusively to their families.”

Likewise, a well-known theme repeated by the 20^th-century popes, including John Paul II, is that it is a great evil for women to be compelled to work outside the home. Thus in Quadragesimo anno Pius XI writes:

Mothers, concentrating on household duties, should work primarily in the home or in its immediate vicinity. It is an intolerable abuse, and to be abolished at all cost, for mothers on account of the father’s low wage to be forced to engage in gainful occupations outside the home to the neglect of their proper cares and duties, especially the training of children. (71)

It might be argued that it is the “force” and the “neglect” which are condemned, not the mere fact of working outside the home, and that it is possible for mothers to work for a wage to some extent, perhaps part-time (especially with today’s greater flexibility of hours and remote work), without neglecting their duties. This is reasonable and in line with the teaching of John Paul II, though there remains the consistent strong presumption of the popes that remaining in the home should be primary for mothers. But what I want to point out is that while they affirm the importance of the father in the family, none of these popes ever express concern that men are being “forced” to work outside the home—indeed the very idea of such a warning is humorous, because we all know instinctually that it is normative for the father to be the one who goes out into the world, while the children need their mother constantly near them. In sum, we can see that the popes including John Paul II consistently uphold for men and women different activities in the home, and a different relation to any work outside it.

Nor can these papal statements be dismissed as no longer relevant due to the industrial revolution having changed both men’s and women’s relations to work and home—for the obvious reason that all of the popes since Leo XIII were writing expressly in response to the new economic conditions! These are teachings for modern times.

For more on this issue in debate with the Catholic feminist position, I highly recommend Margaret McCarthy’s excellent essay, “The Case for (Just) Sex Discrimination”.

Don’t fear healthy inquiry

Bachiochi worries that “it isn’t uncommon to hear [young Catholics] wondering aloud whether women should bother with a college degree or even be allowed to vote.”* In fairness, “wondering aloud” is precisely the sort of healthy questioning generally encouraged in young people. I do not think many young Catholics have a dangerously dogmatic opinion against education and suffrage for women, and if Bachiochi accuses critics of early feminism of “misreading fringe views as central”, we ought to take care not to do the same in this case. But perhaps the more important point is that the Church has no teaching on either of these questions.

If someone were to say that women should be forbidden education, I would be the first to condemn that view. Like my patron, St. Thomas More, I strongly believe in education for women, and like St. John Paul II, I love to see women being themselves, true to their gifts. In fact, proponents of homeschooling (which surely includes the trad manosphere) more than anyone should favor women’s education—what self-respecting patriarch wants his children taught by an uncultivated mind?

But now distinctions must be made. First, the value of a college degree is now very much in question for everyone, not just for women. Second, college is not synonymous with education. (It is not lost on the homeschooling crowd that the classical education revival is happening largely outside academia.) Today, college degrees are generally pursued not for education but for career purposes, and that is precisely where the difference between the sexes might well be relevant.

Having distinguished education from career credentials, we may note some implications of the aforementioned Church teachings on work. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical on Christian education, condemned coeducation in part because the same training is not suitable for the two sexes; rather, their differences should be “maintained and encouraged during their years of formation” (Divini illius magistri 68). Since many women (especially Catholic women) are in fact much more interested in marriage and children than they are in a long-term career, we should not be surprised if some wonder whether they should “bother” with a conventional college degree.

The question of suffrage is a more sensitive one, since here public authority must necessarily make a decision affecting freedom of choice. I don’t fault any woman for taking offense at the suggestion that perhaps it would have been better, after all, if she hadn’t been given the vote—not that any serious political movement against women’s suffrage exists (remember, these are young people “wondering aloud”).

However, since the Church does not teach that voting is a universal human right, we should at least slough off the propaganda surrounding this historical question. Denial of suffrage was not a denial of women’s humanity, any more than it was a denial of the humanity of non-taxpayers and non-land-owners when they could not vote. Suffrage is a decision of political prudence; it should be extended precisely as far as is expedient for the common good and no farther.

It is a documented fact that most anti-suffrage groups were led and supported by women, who believed that this would undermine the traditional privileges of women and cause division in families. Is the basic cell of the polity the family or the individual? If the former, is it good to have families divided into individuals voting against each other? These are live questions which cannot be dismissed: just last year, an ad for Kamala Harris featuring Julia Roberts used the vote to stoke division between wives and husbands. To be sure, one can be anti-feminist without being anti-suffrage, but one can also ask questions about the ideal relationship between family and polis without being anti-woman.

In general, I would not advise young people to shy away from radical questions, so long as they speak not out of self-indulgent edginess to upset others, but in a sincere, sober, and careful search for wisdom and the common good, and always with deference to Catholic tradition.

---

Having examined these questions in light of Church teaching, it is clear that young Catholics are legitimately unsatisfied with the answers given by Catholic feminism, either because this ideology lacks solid basis in the Catholic faith or, regarding the last two questions, because good Catholics may disagree without any implication against women’s equal dignity.

My experience trying to dialogue with Catholic feminists over the years has been that they are seldom willing to engage seriously with the full range of magisterial teaching on these issues. They often quote the same snippets of St. John Paul II, but do not read him carefully in continuity with prior popes. Their failure to “do the reading” with docility is why they cannot altogether refute the “Catholic man-fluencers” they denigrate. For all his faults (including his dismissal of John Paul II on certain issues), Timothy Gordon cites a large number of magisterial sources—most of them from the 20^th century, not “much earlier historical eras”. The real excesses of the Catholic manosphere cannot be adequately addressed on other than traditional grounds. But instead, like those older prelates who deplore the resurgence of traditional liturgical practices, Catholic feminists are inevitably frustrated when young Catholics won’t get with the program of progress.

In the third and final part of this essay, I will discuss how Catholic feminist messaging affects the divide between young men and young women, and conclude with a reflection on Pope St. John Paul II’s assessment of the women’s liberation movement.

---

*Bachiochi also mentions that many young Catholics are suspicious of John Paul II’s theology of the body. This is highly unfortunate, though not entirely related to the debate over feminism. I believe the reasons are as follows: First, some traditionalists have simply slandered St. John Paul II. Second, John Paul II’s theology of the body has been widely conflated with its popularized presentations, which to some extent distorted it into an overblown sex-mysticism, blurred the lines on certain sexual acts which were traditionally condemned by moral theologians, and denigrated the Catholic tradition of caution and asceticism in sexual matters. It will likely take decades for St. John Paul II’s thought to be disentangled from the first wave of popularizers. Third, feminists have abused “mutual submission” to contradict how Ephesians 5 was interpreted by the Church for 2000 years, which naturally creates distrust of John Paul II among traditionally-minded Catholics.