I was earlier perusing the Adoro Te Devote blog and found this piece about the relationship between women and the Church.

"I continue to come across blog posts, online comments, and real-life discussions delving into the 'role of women' and condemning the position of the Catholic Church, claiming that the Church is 'oppressive' and even 'treats women as sex objects.'

It is absolutely astounding and heartbreaking to me that someone would so misunderstand and even outright twist the teachings of the Church to support such a position, for claiming such is nothing but an outright lie."

The whole thing is worth read. My take is that it is a sad (but true) irony that the Church--and her teachings--is so often portrayed as a thing created by men to oppress women. Why an irony? Well, for the simple reason that in our modern culture, which has effectively returned to a sort of paganism--modified, with elements of pantheism, dualism or materialism often mixed in--women are often treated by men as little more than sex-objects.

There have been two systems of thought as to how to remedy this. The Church teaches and has always taught that women ought to be regarded as people, and treated not as mere objects but as subjects. In other words, they each become another "I." This has become especially clear in the work of the late great Pope John Paul II and his theology of the body, as popularized by Christopher West and expanded upon by various other Catholic thinkers. Even a number of Protestants and Orthodox Christians have begun to seriously consider theology of the body, and these too have generally regarded women as better than objects.

The second system of though is the radical feminist one. This is often aided by materialists in general and especially the Marxists. This system of thought says that instead of treating women as fellow-subjects, we ought to start treating men as objects. In such a view, "mere" is dropped, and so neither men nor women are "mere sex objects," but rather "sex objects."

Strangely enough, both materialism and dualism (or gnosticism in general) can contribute to this view that there is nothing wrong with treating women as sex objects so long as men also receive this treatment. Materialism does this by denying that there is any higher purpose to life than to breed and thus continue the existence of the species, for materialist deny the reality of the spiritual world. The gnostics and dualists take a different approach, denying that the physical world is real (or at lest denying that it matters), believing that only spiritual things matter. They do not realize that the two are linked in our humanity, and thus to them the body is little more than a vehicle for the soul--an "object" for the soul's use and pleasure.

In the words of Adoro,
"When I go to a Catholic Church, I find the respect towards me as a person that the rest of the world ignores. I am seen for who I am, not for what role some agenda wants me to fulfill. I am encouraged to be who GOD has called me to be, and live that out according to HIS call, not my own selfish desires."

In short, when we (she, I, you) enter the Church, we become more fully human.