St. Augustine hated women, duh.

 

A FB friend posted the quotation of St. Augustine above which he (my friend) hopes will make it clear how the Dreadful Catholic Church hates women.   I quote my response on FB below, and have added some extra information here only, in order to keep the FB posting short.

“Are you querying the second sentence?  Poor man, he obviously suffered a lot! :-).   It sounds to me like an exasperated outburst after a particular event ... I am not familiar with this quotation, but supposing it is true, let us focus on the first sentence:

Very importantly, this idea is not an official teaching of the Catholic Church.  Saints are humans too, and are permitted to make mistakes.   God uses their good talents to further His plans - He may even be able to use their faults to a useful end, “drawing good out of evil”.   The writings of the Doctors are often considered inspired by the Holy Spirit but of course this does not mean the good men and women are infallible!  It simply means they contributed significantly to the formulation of Christian teaching in at least one area.  St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Therese of Lisieux are three women Doctors of the Church.

The misogynist statement of St. Augustine, if it is true, was the thinking of many men through the ages who happened to be Catholic, mirrored by their Protestant brothers who considered women unworthy of university education or golf club membership not until the very recent past .... the banning of women from public bars also springs to mind but I have to confess I sometimes think that it would be a Good Thing to re-introduce the latter!  Most people, even many Catholics, do not know the history of Catholic Christianity's official attitude to women, because they generally have no inclination to study the subject.  A good writer to correct such thinking is Renee Pernaud. “ End of my FB post. 

 

I could name dozens of women honoured by the Church through the ages for their minds.  Here is a tiny handful:  St. Fabiola, (d. 399), founded the first hospital in Rome; St. Bertha (d. 612) helped bring Christianity to England; St. Hilda, (d. 680), the founding abbess of a great monastery at Whitby and the advisor of kings has an Oxford college named after her; Blessed Hildegard von Bingen, (d.1179), the beloved of feminists, wrote nine books and over one hundred letters, seventy two songs, and seventy poems; Herrard of Landsberg, (d. 1195), is the authoress of a famous encyclopedia, Hortus Deliciarum, (Garden of Delights).  The education of women was not restricted to women religious.   A noblewoman, Dhouda, (about 843) wrote the oldest known treatise on education, “Manual For My Son”.  Who is to say other lay women have not done the same, just because their writings have not come down to us?  It is documented that in the MiddleAges convents educated both girls and boys.

Trottula of Salerno (11^th C.), wrote one of the key medical works of the time on women’s diseases.  Dorotea Bucca, (d. 1436), occupied a chair in medicine at the University of Bologna for forty years; Maria Agnesi was appointed as the first woman to the position of Professor of Mathematics at any university  in 1750 by Pope Benedict IV; Anna Mazzolini, (1760), was a Professor of anatomy at the  university of Bologna.