For anyone who thinks that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to contraception is about “religious freedom,” or that their assaults on women’s healthcare and reproductive rights is about zygotes, embryos or fetuses, a letter written by Italian Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, Prefect for the Vatican Congregation of the Clergy, illustrates that these actions are products of the profound misogyny of the leaders of the Catholic Church, the subservient role of women as primarily child-bearers.
Piacenza’s open letter to mothers of priests is dated January 1, 2013. I think the following quote is self-explanatory without further commentary.
…the Church's two thousand years of experience teaches us that when a man is ordained a priest, his mother ‘receives’ him in an a completely new and unexpected way; so much so that she is called to see in the fruit of her own womb a ‘father’ who by God's will is called to generate and accompany a multitude of brothers and sisters to eternal life. Every mother of a priest mysteriously becomes a ‘daughter of her son.’ Towards him, she may therefore also exercise a new motherhood through the discreet yet extremely efficacious and inestimably precious closeness of prayer, and by offering of her own life for the ministry of her son.
The entire letter is available here.