Dominika

“Even if I wanted to appeal to some objective ground for womanhood, I was being trained to think in a strictly secular, postmodern mode—a mode that favors the particular over the universal, that denies the existence of any objective ground from which to approach this question. In this understanding, all of our conceptual categories, our entire sense of reality, is fundamentally created through language—our words make the world, rather than express it. Any meaning we ascribe to bodily realities is arbitrary and ultimately fictitious.

There is no room in this worldview for a sacramental understanding of maleness and femaleness. The cosmos has been flattened; there are no natural signs of divine realities, because there are no divine realities. There is no givenness to our bodily nature at all, no grand order to which we belong and through which we come to understand ourselves. Sexual difference itself is reduced to mere
biology, something we can manipulate at will, rather than something that is intrinsic to our being, that concerns the whole person, not merely chromosomes or body parts. I turned to feminism to discover the significance of my womanness, and I was initiated into an ideology where womanness itself is ultimately renounced.

What I was unknowingly seeking, and unable to find in either secular or evangelical feminism, was the understanding of woman as a sign. It is not merely the priest who serves as an icon during the Mass; every man and every woman is a living icon, carrying in his or her body a divine sign that reveals the sacred bond between God and humankind.”
― Abigail Rine Favale, Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion