The importance of diversity in defining "self-identity" and "social identity" in the modern state: Notes on the counter-Reformation

Unlike "Protestant Reformation/Catholic Reformation", the antithesis "Reformation/Counter-Reformation", emphasizing difference, directs our attention to the normative and symbolic realm and thence to politics. While Protestantism deprived women of a symbolic referent, Mary, Counter-Reformation Catholicism made the Immaculate Virgin the Symbol of a church identified with her celibate sons, thus depriving the mother figure and women in general of their generative power and their subjectivity. The Spanish Jesuit theologian Francisco Suarez contributed centrally both to the new Mariology and to a new political theory assigning to the pope the absolute power of the mother, which proved useful to Spanish monarchs especially in regard to conquered territory in the New World. To use Hannah Arendt's terms, Protestant women were rendered "Parvenues", Catholic women "Pariahs". The separation between their sexual and social identities forced on both in the sixteenth century persists to this day.