Plastic surgery is described as a "burqa made of flesh" in a new Vatican document that warns against the practice.
The paper says women should stay away from altering their bodies with plastic surgery because this can threaten their identity in an aggressive way and is linked to the same mindsets that cause eating disorders and depression.
The document, prepared for a conference next week, describes plastic surgery as one of the many "manipulations of the body" that explore its limits with respect to the concept of identity. Cosmetic plastic surgery can be "aggressive" toward the feminine identity, it says.
It can "amputate" human expression from the face, and therefore affect a woman's ability to empathise, it says. The document quotes a woman who said: "Plastic surgery is like a burqa made of flesh."
The note has been prepared by a panel of female consultants to Rome's Pontifical Council for Culture which has a meeting on women's issues.
Titled Women's Cultures: Equality and Difference, the document recognises an "awareness" that there is a woman's "perspective" on the world, life and experience.
Women, it says, "are much more capable of tenderness and forgiveness than men."
Women have different techniques of problem-solving, in the perception of the environment and in models of representation than men.
"Cancelling such differences impoverishes personal experience."
The egalitarian wave, though, is so strong that, in the West, some have even affirmed that there is no difference, the document says.
In the same way that poverty is both cause and consequence of violence on women, a woman's body can become an "object" through hiding, mutilation and constriction, it adds.
"Selective abortion, infanticide, genital mutilation, crimes of honour, forced marriages, trafficking of women, sexual molestation, rape – which in some parts of the world are inflicted on a massive level and along ethnic lines – are some of the deepest injuries inflicted daily on the soul of the world, on the bodies of women and of girls, who become silent and invisible victims."
The document also addresses the place of women in a church where they cannot be deacons, priests or bishops. Women were the first believers and the first witnesses, it says.
"Women have always been a sort of silent rock of strength in the faith, to them has always been entrusted the task of educating children to life as believers. An army of teachers, catechists, mothers and grandmothers that, however, instead of being seen as figures of the Church seem to belong to a small ancient world that is disappearing."
It says that in the West, women between 20 and 50 years old rarely go to Mass. "What is not working, today, so that the image of womanhood that the Church has kept, does not correspond to reality?" it asks.
"If, as Pope Francis says, women have a central role in Christianity, this role must find a counterpart also in the ordinary life of the Church."
Read the document here.
