A liberal theologian’s take on Cory Aquino’s legacy.
The final chapter of John Shelby Spong’s book Born of a Woman discusses how the developing concept of the “purity of Mary” has influenced the state of women from the birth of Christianity the present day.
Mary, Spong argues, embodies a male-created ideal of submissiveness (much alive in the Catholic church) that Corazon Aquino typifies - an image that stands in opposition to Reformation-born example of female power, Margaret Thatcher. The rest is a direct quote from pp. 220-221 of Born of a Woman:
The emancipation of women has come primarily in those parts of the world in which the Protestant Reformation kicked over the sexual stereotypes of both virgin Mary and Mother Church. Corazon Aquino was one of the rare women in the twentieth century to achieve political power in a predominantly Roman Catholic country, and she had three things going for her that made her situation unique. She was the widow of the primary political rival to Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Her husband was in fact murdered by Marcos, and therefore she became his political and spiritual heir. She was backed by James (sic) Cardinal Sin, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines. Finally, she had the backing of key military generals. Without all three of those sources of male power she could not have achieved her position. Indeed, her public demeanor of simple piety, obedience to the church and military, and the absence of personal political ambitions made her a “safe” female candidate, a symbol easily controlled behind the scenes by powerful males. Her hold on political power was always tenuous and rested upon the willingness of the background male figures to continue to offer support. Compare that to the figure of Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” of Protestant England’s politics in the 1980s, who ruled, won elections, and scuttled her enemies in her own name and with her own power. She even appointed the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London and bent the Church of England to her own political purposes.
Corazon Aquino and Margaret Thatcher reveal vastly different definitions of what it means to be a woman. Those definitions, I argue, rise out of the still-alive denigration of women that marked traditional Christianity in the case of Mrs. Aquino and a rebellion against that traditional Christian definition of women that was part of the Reformation, which produced Mrs. Thatcher. My point is that beginning with the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke and carrying on through the rise of Mary as a figure in Christian theology, we are not dealing with the image of a real woman in Christian history. Mary is a male-created female figure who embodies the kind of woman dominant males think is ideal - docile, obedient, powerless. (emphasis mine)
Take note that this was written in 1992, long before Gloria became President. Spong’s analysis might also apply to Gloria; her positions vis-a-vis the church and the military prove Spong’s point (in my opinion) rather than refute it.
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