ROME – Despite her short stature, Sister María Grazia Caputo, Representative of the Salesian International Institute Mary Help of Christians of the United Nations in Geneva and New York, has plenty of reasons to stand tall.

And she’s had many opportunities to do so, when both men and women within the church tried to set her aside.

“I have had the negative experience of men and women who tried to squash me or move me to the side,” Caputo told Crux. “Each one of us is called to rediscover themselves as a gift from God, who has a project for us to carry out, and for which he has given us an identity. We do not need to be someone else to achieve what God has planned for us.”

That is, in short, her answer to the many attempts today to redefine the roles of women and men to the point that they are no longer different and complimentary but a carbon-copy of each other.

Speaking on the side of the Vatican-sponsored X Family Conference on “Vocation to love and the challenges in the experiencing of masculinity,” she said that attempts at denying the identity of men and women is “a betrayal to the idea that God had for us: male and female he created us.”

The difference between one and the other, she said, “is a wealth,” and she expressed concern over the growing number of women who believe that, in order to be important, they have to adopt the elements that “we perceive are what make man powerful.”

The religious sister has long been working on empowering women, and she is also the founder of Vides, an international volunteer organization that works on the education and development of women.

The various NGOs with offices in Geneva take part in the UN system by raising various problems – women’s and children’s rights, education, poverty, environment – which are then included in what Caputo described as “the political agenda of the world.”

She was in Mexico last week taking part in a Feb. 22-24 symposium organized by the autonomous university of the State of Puebla (UAPEP), ODUCAL (Association of Catholic Universities of Latin America and the Caribbean), and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture.

An annual event, the meeting seeks to promote a dialogue open to contemporary debates. The 2022 edition revolved around concepts such as patriarchy, paternalism, and masculinity.

Listening, reasoning, and proposing are the three fundamental attitudes to approach human realities, emphasized Dr. Emilio José Baños Ardavín, Rector of UAPEP, during his inaugural message.

“We believe that reasoning will also lead us to ask ourselves about the causes that have led to a kind of depressive figure of the male and in correlation to this to the outright rejection of the proposal of Christian marriage as a valid hypothesis and of full personal fulfillment and authentic construction of the social fabric,” the rector said.

He also said that it is necessary to start building new paradigms of masculinity. They will have to echo the most sensible demands in terms of gender perspective, cooperation in domestic and child-rearing tasks, full access to education, professional development, and political and social leadership.

“Our civilization today celebrates the fact that many human rights of women have been vindicated, where there were serious debts and social grievances and particularly, often attributable to the behavior of men,” Baños said. “Now, in the face of the proposal, we ask ourselves, will we as a generation be able to raise the level of debate from the field of equity to that of complementarity, from a level playing field to a shared vision, from a logic of sterile antagonism to that of fruitful unity, and even more so, is it possible to live masculinity as a manifestation of true love, as is now being proposed?”

Caputo said it is normal for a woman to “get angry” when she is disrespected or set aside for the simple fact of being a woman, but she also said she believes that “if you have a firm position, men will treat you with equal respect. Sometimes, it is up to us to make ourselves respected. And you might say that I am speaking as an idealist or that I’m being naïve. But I am speaking from experience. I too have had men and women try to squash me.”

Though she has experienced people trying to oppress her, Caputo said that throughout her life as a religious sister she has been able to stop it. “But I understand that you can’t always do something. It’s the reason why the situations lived by religious sisters in Africa cause me great pain. I have to ask: Why didn’t we act in time?”

RELATED: Vatican meets #MeToo: Nuns denounce priests who abused them

According to Caputo, the Catholic Church lives from the teachings of Jesus, “who gave us the orientation for everything.” For this reason, she said she is “incredibly thankful to Pope Francis, for everything he says and does, putting things in their rightful place, that of the Gospel.”

On female priests, she said that “these are questions, I believe, useless, to try to gage the opinion of someone on this matter,” but “it is not fundamental for women to be priests. Women have an essential role in the Church, and Mary, mother of God, and many other women have shown us so.”

She does, however, appreciate Pope Francis’s efforts to put more women in positions of leadership, while disregarding those who frame new appointments as historic “because they are women.” What matters is that “we come to a point in which we can choose the best person for a task, be it that the right person is a man or a woman.”

“Pope Francis looks at the richness that each person can contribute, whether man or woman,” Caputo sad. “It is a mistake to say ‘finally, this task is no longer exclusively for men. If it is seen that there are men and women who can collaborate, I hope they do it, because there is a richness that each one can contribute according to his or her identity, if his or her identity is well developed.”

Once upon a time, Caputo was lured by feminist movements, but she was not interested in them. She did, however, find the experience useful to try to understand what many women are trying to achieve. However, squashing men to “affirm your identity,” is something she does not see as useful.

“I think it is very necessary at this time in history to talk about what it means to recover the identity of man, because today we are talking about a society without a father, without the authority of the father figure,” she said. “We are facing the extinction of a person who, in general, was a very important point of reference.”

The reasons for this, Caputo said, are plenty. But what’s important in this case is not so much the why but to acknowledge the need for a male identity, one that doesn’t impose things on others by force, but because they have earned the respect of those around them.

Someone “who gives you security, who engenders in you respect and who you see respects you as an equal, without an attitude of superiority. It bothers me when people confuse earning respect with crushing the other person,” Caputo said.