In her piece, Dowd's assertions often lack context and the column itself is not particularly interesting, but it was a welcome one, nevertheless, because it allows us to consider how the Catholic Church, more than any other institutional body in history, has uplifted women and encouraged them to live to their highest potential.

Yes, a very sound argument can be made that the Catholic Church has been the means of freeing women, and not - as many unthinkingly charge - the means of their oppression.

Prior to perhaps the last 150 years, the great majority of educated and accomplished women were Catholic female religious, who conceived completely original ideas and ran with them.

Think of Elizabeth Bayley Seton, a widow with 5 children, cut off from her own family's fortune due to her conversion, conceiving of what we have come to think of as Catholic elementary education, and essentially inventing a means for the children of the poor and the marginalized to become educated and competitive in the "new world."

Think of Teresa of Avila, who not only reformed a corrupted religious order, but then went on to build 16 monasteries, both for men and women, while often in paralyzing pain.

Oh, and she wrote a few books that are considered classics of theology, and is now a Doctor of the Church.

Not bad for a woman who had spent her youth reading romance novels.

Think of Henriette DeLille, the daughter of freed slaves, and Katharine Drexel, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, both founding individual orders of women who spent their time and energy building schools and hospitals for Native Americans and African Americans in the deep south.

Think of Catherine of Siena, counselor to both popes and royalty, dictating her letters to two scribes at a time. Another Doctor of the Church.

Interestingly Catherine was almost entirely uneducated and "unaccomplished" by worldly standards, but the church - hardly an elitist institution - calls her "Doctor" just as it does Saint Hildegard of Bingen, an intellectual giant of music, science, medicine, letters and theology.

Just as it does Saint Therese of Lisieux, who entered a Carmel at age 15 and never left it, but whose influence has travelled far.

Oh, and let's not forget Joan of Arc. Continue reading

• Elizabeth Scalia is Editor-at-Large at Aleteia and the award-winning author of Strange Gods, Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life and Little Sins Mean a Lot: Kicking Our Bad Habits Before They Kick You.

He said women have always had a special mission in the Church as "first witnesses" of Christ's Resurrection, and because they pass the faith on to their children and grandchildren.

"Faith is professed with the mouth and heart, with the word and love," the Pope told an estimated 50,000 pilgrims at his weekly audience in St Peter's Square.

Pope Francis said the fact that women were recorded as witnesses to the Resurrection is an argument in favour of the historical truth of the event.

"If it had been an invention, in the context of that time it would not have been linked to the testimony of women", since the Jewish law of period did not consider women or children as "reliable, credible witnesses".

"This tells us that God does not choose according to human criteria," the Pope said. "The first witnesses of the birth of Jesus are the shepherds, simple and humble people, and the first witnesses of the resurrection are women."

Pope Francis said Jesus' male apostles and disciples found it hard to believe in the risen Christ.

By contrast, the women "are driven by love and they know to accept this proclamation [of the resurrection] with faith", he said. "They believe and immediately transmit it; they do not keep it for themselves."

Marinella Perroni, a leading member of the Association of Italian Women Theologians, said the Pope's words were "very encouraging".

"Pope Francis is taking up, with a stronger emphasis, the teaching of previous popes about the role of women in the foundation of faith and the resurrection of Jesus," she told Reuters.

"The fact that the Pope acknowledges that the progressive removal of female figures from the tradition of the Resurrection...is due to human judgments, distant from those of God...introduces a decidedly new element compared to the previous papacy."

Sources:

Catholic News Service

Reuters

Rome Reports (video)

Image: CBC