"[W]ith his ascension to the papacy in 1978, Jon Paul II promoted a gendered theology with the dual aim of preserving the male celibate priesthood and the Church’s embattled marital morality. Increasingly, the symbolic representation of the Church as the Bride of Christ eclipsed other representations of the Church (e.g., the Church as the people of God and the sheepfold) in papal pronouncements. As discussed in Chapter 1 and 2, it also served to justify a male celibate priesthood and to support the papal call for a new Catholic feminism-one that emphasized sexual difference, glorified women’s essential role as mothers, and championed papal loyalty. Although this new feminism found few adherents among the disenchanted, it rallied members of the conservative core, such as the German theologian Simone Twents. In her 2002 book, Frau sein ist mehr: Die Wurde der Frau nach Johannes Paul II (To be woman is more: The dignity of woman according to John Paul II), she called on women to employ their “own particular genius and orientation to love” in order to help heal humankind and “not adopt male characteristics.” Archbishop Joachim Meisner of Cologne wrote the foreword to the book, offering effusive praise for Twents’s appreciation of the “fundamental anthropological dimensions of femininity” and for her delineation of a “feminine theology” that rested on the “Catholic image of woman.” The feminized Catholic Church of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, documented by numerous historians, had given way to a Church in which a gendered ideology provided the conservative core with a rallying cry against attacks from within and without. The ideology itself was not new, but in the late twentieth century it acquired a new emphasis and function, as the battle over the future direction of the Church reached feverish heights and neoconservatives worked out new political strategies for promoting official Church teachings in the secular sphere."