File spoon-archives/french-feminism.archive/french-feminism_1998/french-feminism.9809, message 8


Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 20:17:59 -0600 (MDT)
From: Jake A Paisain <paisain-AT-selway.umt.edu>
Subject: A Letter from Francoise d'Eaubonne (fwd)




Francoise d'Eaubonne (Paris), who coined the term Eco-feminisme in 1974,
asked me to translate this open letter to the Pope and disseminate it to
as many of my Catholic and Protestant Feminist friends as possible. 

I am presenting it here on the french-feminism listserv for your
consideration.

If anyone is aware of a Christian Feminist Journal that might like to
publish this, please let me know.

Thank you.
Jake Paisain
University of Montana

An Open Letter to Pope John Paul II

Your Holiness,

It is with great joy that we applaud the amends made by the Catholic
Church to the ill-fated Jewish people, so long persecuted for the false
accusation of deicide.

But Papal authority is equally as well as principally responsible for the
accusation, torture and burning for two centuries (1450-1650) of tens of
thousands of victims of another group of human beings who had no hope of
recourse.    We speak of the sexocide of the witches: a fact afflicting a
much larger part of humanity, about half, the women, who before this
massacre and for a long time after were made to suffer the hostility,
contempt and repulsion which served as fodder for this attempt at
extermination.

Sexocide is the right word because it was a matter of misogyny striking an
entire sex under pretext of witchcraft and held responsible for Original
Sin, as were the Jews for the death of Christ: a misogyny brought to a
head by the writings of the Fathers of the Church as well as by brilliant
theologians like Tertullien and Origene. For a long time, amidst the
influence of Thomas Aquinas, Jean Chrysostome and Saint Jerome among so
many others, the insults and curses of this tradition served to lay the
way for this "witch-hunt" which was, above all, a "woman-hunt" more than a
hunt for witchcraft itself, because just as the Malleus of Kramer and
Sprenger states, "Sorcerers (male witches) are of little consequence."

We remind Your Holiness that these two authors were not the fathers, yet
the birthers of this bane - the plague of misogyny - the most famous being
the Dominican Jakob Sprenger (1436-1496) now recognized by historians as a
sexual obsessive on the brink of psycopathology despite his chaste
morality. On the contrary it was the completely corrupt Pope Innocent VII,
whose orgies maintained the anxiety of Sin and the fear of the daughters
of Eve, who gave print to this wide call to murder and upheld it.  He
approved of Sprenger's choice to elect the term Maleficarum rather than
Maleficorum to underline that it was especially a question of pursuing and
killing the Evil in women, hardly in male witches.  These are well-known
historical truths.

The story is even more remarkable when one considers that despite the
passage of time, a very convincing case of heresy in regards to this
famous manual, prelude to Mein Kampf, has never been exposed.

One of the most established tenants of the Church is the washing away of
sins by the body of Christ, washing away accomplished by Baptismal water
for any human being, irregardless of station or race.  Yet Kramer and
Sprenger attribute an inborn sin to a specific group of humans which
places them outside of the realm of the human, despite Baptism.  "Let us
give thanks to God to have spared our sex from such an evil," says the
Malleus.  Why has the heretical impertinence of this declaration never
been denounced?  Were women required to undergo a second baptism, one of
fire?

However iniquitous the persecution of the Jew, an escape-root was offered
to him: he could become baptised by holy water.  He was strongly
encouraged to do so; the poorest of Spanish Jews could choose the king as
godfather, if he converted.  But the woman, unable to change herself into
a man, was condemned in advance.  Even nuns were always suspect of
sorcery.  The self-satisfaction that the two authors of the Malleus give
to their own sex contradicts their first opinion that "sorcerers are of
little consequence," finally, they're nothing.  And Evil lives only within
the already disparaged, insulted and cursed sex: the second.

This is how it was possible for the Bishop of Trves to burn little
seven-year-old girls because they were, at that age, beginning to mature
into women;  the Germanic banks of the Rhine were at one point so
depopulated of one half of their inhabitants that men were complaining of
having to travel far to find a wife.  It is because of these monstrous
assertions that women constituted four-fifths of those murdered by fire,
for two centuries, across the West.  Here are the official numbers:


16th and 17th Centuries :

 Ble: 95%
 Aragon: 57%
 Namur: 92%
 Prvts "Luxembourg Germans": 69% 
 Pays de Vaud: 66%
 Montbliard: 82%
 Franche-Comt: 67%
 Germany: 80%
 Austria, in Voralberg: 100%, where only women were persecuted.

The fact that the Reformed regions were just as ardent, or sometimes even
more than the Catholic countries to apply sexocide does not exonerate the
Church and its Inquisition in any way.  What's more, it was a Protestant
tribunal, that of Salem, in America, which was the only one to recognize
its error and to admit its guilt.

The assimilation of women by Jews is also an element rarely examined in
the study of this question; it is however so flagrant as to constitute one
more argument in the necessity of an exoneration of these victims by the
Church.  The sabbath, name chosen for the witches holy day, is the Jewish
day of rest.  What's more, it was said that witches went to synagogue.
Already in the 14th century the theologian Alvaro Pelayo proclaimed: "The
woman is similar to the Jew."  This analogy is not only a part of the
vices and misdeeds which we reproach, but also of an appalling
contradiction; the Christian, for whom the trafficking of money was
forbidden, had a fundamental need of the Jew for whom the Catholic world
reserved this specialty; and in order to reproduce human life, the same
Christian world needs the woman;  this is the appalling "compromise."  The
historian Jean Delumeau has highlighted this: "Anti-Semitism and the
witch-hunts coincided." (La grande peur de l'Occident, Paris: Fayard
1978.)

But there is another area of damnation upon which the Feminine touches,
that Feminine doomed to evil spell by her sinful yet reproductive anatomy:
that of homosexuality.  The "silent sin," the most horrible of
fornications since the first Christian Emperor Constantine's legislation
finds its abomination in the fact that a man might imitate a woman, even
though "he has the good-fortune not to be one." In the presence of
witchcraft, "buggery" was always suspected.  

But the witch brought forward a new aspect to this old problem: "They
loved each other amongst themselves, thus excluding men"  As Jean Duby
revealed, the affection that women felt for one another disturbed the men
of the Middle Ages, who at the same time saw nothing wrong with the
indestructible affection that knights felt for one another.     In fact,
for these simpletons, such a relationship in no way resembled "effeminacy"
and thus nothing sexual was suspected.  But the sisterly solidarity of the
witches could only reveal the abomination condemned by Leviticus and by
Constantine.

This element of the allergy to the Feminine has not often been analyzed in
the abundant records of the witch-hunts.  It remains, however, an integral
component of it.

For over two centuries filled with the horrors and tortures inflicted by
an assimilationist culture, the witch thus represented the climax of the
allergy to the Feminine already so largely demonstrated at the highest
levels since the beginnings of the triumphant Church, and exemplified by
the persecution of the Jews and the condemnation of homosexuality.

The indignation that women of today feel, especially if they are members
of this Church or this religion, is even more vehement since the Gospel,
"on which Peter built his Church," is, of all the holy books in the world,
the only one which is feminist.   Not only is this exemplified in the
person of the Virgin, not only by the passages consecrated to the
Samaritan, to the adulterous woman, and to Mary Magdalene, but also by a
very significant comparison between Temptation itself and the other
scenarios of the diverse prophets or holy persons whom the Devil
comes upon; the confrontation of Jesus in the desert with Satan brings
with it temptations of power and of greed, and not once that of the flesh
of woman, the temptation which is primordial in other accounts of this
kind.  Not one word of the Gospel ever condemned the feminine, and the
role of women therein supplants that of the apostles through fidelity in
love and the precedence of the apparition in the Resurrection.

The plague of misogyny and the massacre of the witches belong then to a
perversion of religious doctrine which the women of the 20th century now
have the right to see condemned by the supreme leader of this Church which
slandered, humiliated and killed such a large number of our grandmothers.

This is why we await that amends be made by Your Holiness in the same vein
as that which dictated the deploration of the medieval genocide of the
Jews, now cleansed of the accusation of deicide, while the "witches" were
never accused of anything so insane.  And we assure Your Holiness of our
confidence in Your sense of Justice of which you have already shown such
an equitable and perfect example.

Franoise d'Eaubonne, writer
Andre Michel, Honorary Director of Research for the National Council of
Scientific Research, France.
Translated from the French by Jacob Paisain, University of Montana, USA
(1998)






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