Modern feminism's fight for power and gender equality is undermining the traditional concept of family and creating a climate where gay marriages are seen as acceptable, the Vatican said today.
In a 37-page document "On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World", the Vatican said women should be respected and have equal rights in the workplace, but differences between the sexes must be recognised and exalted.
Vatican document
"Recent years have seen new approaches to women's issues" including a tendency "to emphasise strongly conditions of subordination in order to give rise to antagonism", it said.
The document, which re-stated Catholic Church positions, including the ban on female priests, said that many women felt they had to be "adversaries of men" in order to be themselves.
"Faced with the abuse of power, the answer for women is to seek power. This process leads to opposition between men and women ... which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family."
The document is a booklet-letter to bishops by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department in charge of safeguarding and interpreting doctrine.
It criticises feminism's attempt to erase gender differences.
This has "inspired ideologies which, for example, call into question the family in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality," it says.
Pope John Paul has repeatedly defended traditional marriage from the trend towards legalising same-sex unions in the United States and Europe.
The document called for greater recognition of a woman's role as a mother and urged society to value it as real work.
"Although motherhood is a key element of women's identity, this does not mean that women should be considered from the sole perspective of physical procreation," it said.
The Vatican said women who choose to be full-time mothers should not be stigmatised, but at the same time, it appealed to governments to make it easier for mothers to hold outside jobs without "relinquishing their family life".