Dear Jeff:

God is pure spirit and thus is not male or female in that human context.

As human beings, creatures made in the image of God, we hold attributes of God such as the ability to reason, to choose (free will), to love, to be aware of our own mortality, to know and love God, to create art. All this is part of what is called the "rational soul."

Human beings have a "vegetative soul" (the life force), a "sensitive soul" (the ability to respond to the material world around us), and a "rational soul" (the immortal soul that is created uniquely and specially for each person at the moment of their conception).

Animals have the vegetative and sensitive souls, plants have the vegetative soul, but only humans have all three. Only humans are created in God's image.

In addition to the image of God represented in the rational soul, God created human being as male and female, each which represent a part of God's nature and when brought together in marriage and children bring together a image of God that is whole and more complete (as it can be with creatures anyway).

This is one reason why the sexual morality taught by the Church is taught by the Church. It is not because the Church is a prude. It is because sex is sacred. It is a sublime and profound reflection of the nature and image of God. To abuse that sexual faculty through adultery, fornication, etc. is to commit a kind of blasphemy against God.

The Church recognizes and celebrates the full nature of God as represented in both the male and female attributes. God the Father, is the progenitor, the Creator. The God the Holy Spirit is the comforter and nurturer.

I suppose one could say that God split these attributes into male and female in human beings to ensure the propagation of the species (within that biological economy which God is not) and to protect that family within a familial economy. Within this context God represents Himself, in His creation of Man, as the family that He Himself is within Himself.

The female principle, if you wish to call it that, is also represented in the person of the Virgin Mary. Mary is not a goddess, she is a human being, but she is a perfect human being who represents all that we should be as children of God. There are many feast days honoring Mary.

In the Catholic Church we worship the true and only God. We honor Him as Father and experience Him in a motherly fashion, sort-to-speak, through the Holy Spirit. We look to a woman, the Virgin Mary as the perfect vessel, the perfection of God's creation and a model not only for women, but for all of us. We venerate (not worship) her as our Mother.

The wiccans do not worship the true God. Their celebration of the male and female principles lack the Truth of the real God at best, and pervert the sexual principles and faculties at worse to a common earthiness that excludes the sublime and spiritual context of the image of God that God intended sex to be.

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary