The Magna Carta of Women (MCW), now in bicameral discussions, has stirred up great passion in some circles. Conservative Catholics see it as part of a “pro-death” legislative agenda. Some women’s groups are incensed at what they interpret as retrogressive attempts by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) to subvert the bill’s gender-equity orientation, through legislators working with the CBCP’s Episcopal Commission on Family and Life (ECFL) and Office of Women (OW). The final versions from the House of Representatives and the Senate seem to be reasonable compromises among diverse positions, but bicameral discussions can unmake and remake what will be signed into law.

Yet, it is simplistic to see the debate over the MCW as a struggle between two irreconcilable standpoints. This view disregards how far the Catholic hierarchy’s perspectives on women have moved in the last 60 years, undeniably toward more equality for women. In 1949, the bishops’ Pastoral Letter on Social Justice argued that one important reason for a “family wage” was to preclude women’s entry into the workforce, “a great social evil … striking at the very constitution of the family.” In 1996, Archbishop Orlando Quevedo criticized that argument as “reflect[ing] an inadequate understanding of women’s rights.”

The 1991 Second Plenary Council of the Philippines (PCPII), which redefined Philippine Catholicism’s mission post-Vatican II, declared that the Church “opposes all forms of discrimination and exploitation of women and fosters the growing awareness of their dignity and equality with men.” Describing Jesus’ attitude to women as “one of openness and great-heartedness,” PCPII admitted that the Church needed to “let go of cultural attitudes that prevent the liberating action of women.” The council’s acts and decrees obliged the Church to challenge “through programs geared to authentic liberation, all forms of discrimination, abuse, and exploitation of women.” The document enjoined women in religious life “to be open to the women’s movement, modeling for them spiritual leadership in living the Gospel” and religious institutes of women to “use their resources for the authentic advancement of the status of women.” (In fact, religious women’s engagement with the women’s movement had preceded this call by at least a decade.)

The bishops followed this groundbreaking endorsement of gender equality with their first collective pastoral statement on women’s rights. In 1994 they praised the Beijing Conference for seeking “to look more closely into the dignity of women and to call on governments on issues affecting women, such as poverty, illiteracy, prostitution, violence against women, and their exploitation in the mass media.” Their 1998 “Pastoral exhortation on the Philippine economy” pressed government “to foster gender equality and shared partnership between women and men as agents and beneficiaries of development.” They added: “It is our contention that the development process will dramatically change for the better when women and men are equally represented and responsible for the common good of society.”

In 2001, the National Pastoral Consultation on Church Renewal, an assembly of bishops, clergy, religious, and laity, named women foremost in a litany of “movements of renewal in Philippine society” meriting celebration.

Given this unprecedented teaching for women’s equality, why do the ECFL and the OW seem anxious about the Magna Carta of Women? One concern is that the bill inadequately emphasizes what they see as women’s primary and divinely ordained role, the nurture of family.

If one restates this concern in the secular terms required by democratic debate — for democratic debate must embrace those who do not think anything is divinely ordained, else it is not democratic, and the Church also endorses democracy — then secular women’s groups can appreciate the anxiety of the ECFL and the OW. The nurture of families is a task no society can neglect without peril. If women participate equally in the political and economic spheres, who will care for the children? Here is an answer which no one who grasps the magnitude of the task ought to quarrel with: men and women both.

Last Jan. 23, a Vatican official, Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, bewailed the phenomenon of fatherless families and its damaging impact on children and society. Many women’s groups disagree with the cardinal’s identification of the problem’s causes, but most agree that the mass abdication by men of their parental responsibilities is a problem.

By insisting on the primacy of women’s domestic roles over all other possible roles, do not conservative Catholics encourage this abdication? And if the nurture of the family is so vital it must be written into a Magna Carta of Women, is it not vital for everyone to undertake?

The Church honors Filipino women by expressing confidence in their capacity to participate in political and economic life without abandoning domestic roles. Surely Filipino men are no less capable of being husbands, fathers, and political and economic actors all at once; then they would also enhance the social participation of their wives, daughters, and sisters. Is not this capability and responsibility important enough to encourage in men as well as in women? And cannot we Catholics agree that men’s coequal responsibility for the family is also divinely ordained?