Submission of wives to their husbands

The submission of wives to their husbands has got to be one of the least popular teachings of the Catholic Church today — and the case can be made that the Catholic Church isn’t teaching this today at all. The folks at Heart, Mind, and Strength are busy finessing this doctrine into oblivion where it shall die the Death of a Thousand Nuances. For instance, Greg Popcak writes:

“BUT, when the man stops listening to the voice of God speaking through the needs of his wife and children, he becomes not a leader, but a despot. And obedience to such a husband would not be Christian obedience, but rather, idolatry … A husband can only claim authority to the degree that he is aware of the specific needs God has written on the heart of his wife and children and spends his days finding godly ways those needs can be fulfilled.”

What could this possibly mean in practice? That a wife whose husband doesn’t understand her “needs” does not have to submit to his authority? That a husband’s authority is contingent upon his spiritual awareness? (How does this square with Saint Peter’s instruction that Christian wives should obey their pagan husbands?) I understand that submission and obedience issues are not always crystal clear, but the above formula is too easily translated “Wives, submit to your husbands when they are meeting your needs, but do as you will the rest of the time.” And who better to define a woman’s needs than the woman herself, right?

Oh, and then there is Kevin Miller’s claim that wifely obedience can only be understood in the context of “mutual submission”: i.e., “you don’t submit to me, I don’t submit to you, Buster”.

How much more sublime and illuminating is the teaching of Pope Pius XI in Casti Connubii here:

“Domestic society being confirmed, therefore, by this bond of love, there should flourish in it that ‘order of love,’ as St. Augustine calls it. This order includes both the primacy of the husband with regard to the wife and children, the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience, which the Apostle commends in these words: ‘Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife, and Christ is the head of the Church.’[29] This subjection, however, does not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the woman both in view of her dignity as a human person, and in view of her most noble office as wife and mother and companion; nor does it bid her obey her husband’s every request if not in harmony with right reason or with the dignity due to wife; nor, in fine, does it imply that the wife should be put on a level with those persons who in law are called minors, to whom it is customary to allow free exercise of their rights on account of their lack of mature judgment, or of their ignorance of human affairs. But it forbids that exaggerated liberty which cares not for the good of the family; it forbids that in this body which is the family, the heart be separated from the head to the great detriment of the whole body and the proximate danger of ruin.

For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love. Again, this subjection of wife to husband in its degree and manner may vary according to the different conditions of persons, place and time. In fact, if the husband neglect his duty, it falls to the wife to take his place in directing the family. But the structure of the family and its fundamental law, established and confirmed by God, must always and everywhere be maintained intact. With great wisdom Our predecessor Leo XIII, of happy memory, in the Encyclical on Christian marriage which We have already mentioned, speaking of this order to be maintained between man and wife, teaches: ‘The man is the ruler of the family, and the head of the woman; but because she is flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, let her be subject and obedient to the man, not as a servant but as a companion, so that nothing be lacking of honor or of dignity in the obedience which she pays. Let divine charity be the constant guide of their mutual relations, both in him who rules and in her who obeys, since each bears the image, the one of Christ, the other of the Church.’”

Their papal enthusiasm notwithstanding, the HMS crowd sometimes exhibts a strange aversion to the concepts of human authority and submission, as if these old-fashioned ideas were too horrible to contemplate in our enlightened age. This attitude also carries over into their ideas about child discipline. But the doctrine of male headship should not be reduced to a meaningless anachronism: instead, Catholics should be taught to embrace this doctrine in its fullness as it is unambiguously found in Casti Connubii.