There are limits to messaging. In the end, everyone pretty much knows who you are and what you are talking about.

Two Yangs Can’t Make a Baby

by AUSTIN RUSE

I got scolded good and proper at the Vatican conference on man-woman complementarity this week. In an article for Breitbart News I named some of the participants in the conference.

I asked around and no one knew there was an embargo on the identities of the participants. Indeed attendees were busy emailing and Facebooking the names and even pictures of the participants in that packed conference room at Paul VI Hall inside the Vatican walls.

I wasn’t the only one who got in trouble. A major pro-family leader received a phone call scolding him because of the way he had characterized the conference in a press release. He said something along the lines that the conference would set the liberals straight about what the Vatican believes about marriage.

Our crime was being off message.

The concern was that the conference would be pegged as a conservative event. It makes sense that the Vatican would prefer it that way. Though organizers included conservatives, it was a Vatican event, sponsored by various dicasteries including the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. And the Church quite properly is loath to present the teachings of the Church as either conservative or liberal. What’s more, conference organizers do not want to scare away potential allies who might consider themselves other than conservative.

And it is possible that “complementarity” might mean something other than what pretty much all of the speakers at the conference said it means. Almost immediately Daniel Horan published an essay at America scolding the conference for not presenting a diversity of views on complementarity and used the Pope’s own conference talk to make his case. The Pope said, “When we speak of complementarity between man and woman in this context, let us not confuse that term with the simplistic idea that all the roles and relations of the two sexes are fixed in a single, static pattern.” See, complementarity is not a single thing.

Interestingly, many conference speakers addressed this issue pointing out that complementarity isn’t “fixed” or unchanging. The point of complementarity is that men and women fit naturally together but also give to each other aspects of themselves so that the man becomes more like his mate and she more like him. As one speaker said, eventually one plus one equals one.

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