NOTES for Luk 8:1-3

In today's passage we see Christ surrounded by women. He restored to women their human dignity, something to which Luke's Gospel bears particularly eloquent witness. We must not forget this. One of the important sociocultural consequences of the spread of Christianity is precisely this: women gained spiritual independence from men. The process, however, followed a rather difficult path. In the earliest Christian communities, when all the Events were still relatively recent, women played a very important role. They carried out works of mercy and social service; they became martyrs and, later, saints. There were many women among the first saints. By the late Middle Ages, however—the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century—when difficult times came upon the Church and so much was happening, as we now understand, contrary to the spirit of the Gospel's preaching, something also went wrong in this respect. Woman came to be seen as a vessel of sin, and the “witch hunt” began. Trials of women were a most evident revival of the spirit of paganism, always bound up with a certain opposition and attraction between the sexes. In our own time, under the influence of secular culture, the situation is again moving out of balance, now in the opposite direction. We must simply always remember the ideal of harmony that Christ gave us.