Former United States president Jimmy Carter has said the Catholic Church’s practice of not ordaining women gives tacit permission for discrimination and abuse.
Mr Carter said this during an interview with National Public Radio in the United States ahead of publication of his latest book.
“ . . . [T]he fact that the Catholic Church, for instance, prohibits women from serving as priests or even deacons gives a kind of a permission to male people all over the world, that well, if God thinks that women are inferior, I’ll treat them as inferiors,” Mr Carter said.
“If she’s my wife, I can abuse her with impunity, or if I’m an employer, I can pay my female employees less salary,” he said.
Mr Carter said it is very difficult to get the Catholic Church to change its policies.
“I’ve written to the Pope, by the way, and I got an encouraging letter back from him saying that he believes that the status of women and the activity of women within the Church need to be increased.”
“But there are some specific and very difficult things to overcome if the Catholic Church made that an ordained and official commitment.”
“But at least the new Pope is aware of it and is much more amenable, I think, to some changes than maybe most of his predecessors.”
Mr Carter also criticised the Southern Baptist Convention in the United States, of which he used to be a member, for alleged anti-woman policies.
In “A Call to Action”, his latest book, Mr Carter wrote of how some selected scriptures are interpreted, “almost exclusively by powerful male leaders within the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and other faiths, to proclaim the lower status of women and girls”.
“This claim that women are inferior before God spreads to the secular world to justify gross and sustained acts of discrimination and violence against them,” he wrote.
In 1988, in Mulieris Dignitatem, Pope John Paul II wrote that Christ upheld the dignity of women, but freely acted to choose only males as his apostles.
Sources: