The feminine consciousness of humanity is a glimpse — in the bright darkness in which Christian faith is at home — of the prenatal, virginal reality of divine Wisdom as it actually exists in the womb of God, but as having become all creation, completed, saved and transfigured in humanity’s final parturition of itself and of the whole world with itself, which is our history redeemed, recapitulated and consummated by the divine Incarnation.
This is why woman seems to be naturally religious while man must become so — and, a still more difficult thing, remain so by a constant effort of pursuit of indeed to regain lost ground. A rabbi recently explained to me, with humor not devoid of meaning, that the Jewish law prescribes religious obligations for men, while it does not impose anything definite on women, and he observed that, far from supposing superiority on the part of man, it implies quite the contrary: that he would not serve God if God did not take the trouble to recall him constantly to the task, while woman does not need anyone to tell her to do these things.
This, to be sure, does not imply any automatic merit for woman; for her as for man the value comes in the personalization of her gifts.
—Louis Bouyer, Woman in the Church. trans. Marilyn Teichert (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1984), 65-6.
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