Vatican official defends different roles for men, women

Published: 2004-02-02

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Catholic Church's insistence that the differences between men and women are real is not the basis for discrimination but for recognizing the value of each person, said the new president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity. Polish Archbishop Stanislaw Rylko, named president of the council in October, hosted a Jan. 30-31 study seminar on "Men and Women: Diversity and Reciprocal Complementarity." The council for the laity invited about 50 men and women, mainly from Europe, to the Vatican to discuss changing cultural notions of male and female identity and roles and to look at ways to promote church teaching on the subject. Archbishop Rylko, opening the seminar, said, "The culture of our time is questioning what it means to be human" and is doing so in a way "that goes so far as to contort the understanding of sexual identity and relations between the sexes." Pretending that there are no differences between men and women or that those differences are totally imposed by society "has repercussions for the future of humankind," he said.

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