ARCHBISHOP BACKS MARY MCALEESE IN ‘MISOGYNY’ FURORE
Martin says Church ‘must accept’ ex-president’s strong criticisms
ARCHBISHOP Diarmuid Martin has backed Mary McAleese’s ‘brutally stark’ criticism of the Catholic Church over its exclusion of women.
In a fierce attack yesterday, the former president called the Church an ‘empire of misogyny’ and challenged Pope Francis to do more to include women.
In a subsequent speech, delivered in Rome, she said women had been rendered ‘invisible and voiceless in Church leadership’. In response, Dr Martin said: ‘Her challenge to the internal culture of the Church was brutally stark. Some may find it unpleasant or unwelcome, I
must accept the challenge with the humility of one who recognises her alienation.’
In her address yesterday, Ms McAleese quoted part of a speech given by Dr Martin in November.
In this speech, the Archbishop of Dublin had said that ‘the low standing of women in the Catholic Church is the most significant reason for the feeling of alienation towards it in Ireland today’.
Delivering another speech yesterday, Dr Martin expanded on these sentiments, saying: ‘Probably the most significant negative factor that influences attitudes to the Church in today’s Ireland is the place of women in the Church.
‘I am not saying that just because of the comments... by President McAleese. Indeed I was happy to note that President McAleese quoted that exact phrase of mine in her speech today.’
In her speech yesterday, Ms McAleese challenged Pope Francis to develop a credible strategy for including women as equals.
She said the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) had called for women to participate more widely in the Church. However, apart from some minor improvements, this had not happened, she said.
‘The Catholic Church has long since been a primary global carrier of the toxic virus of misogyny,’ she said. ‘Its leadership has never sought a cure for that virus though a cure is freely available. Its name is equality.’
She described the current system as leaving women ‘invisible and voiceless in Church leadership’, while ‘expected to do all the hard work that keeps the Church going from generation to generation’.
Having excluded women from the priesthood, the Church should have, at the very least, found ‘innovative and transparent ways’ of including women’s voices, rather than in ‘trickles of tokenism’, she said. She said that if Pope Francis were to call a synod on women in the Church, it would see ‘350 male celibates advise the Pope on what women really want. ‘That is how ludicrous our Church has become,’ she added.
Ms McAleese said yesterday that a Church hierarchy that is ‘homophobic and anti-abortion is not the Church of the future’. She also accused the Pope of patronising women, saying: ‘Pope Francis has said that “women are more important than men because the Church is a woman”. Holy Father, why not ask women if they feel more important than men? I certainly don’t.
‘I suspect many will answer that they experience the Church as a male bastion of patronising platitudes to which Pope Francis has added his quota.’
She added: ‘We challenge Pope Francis to develop a credible strategy for the inclusion of women as equals throughout the Church’s root-and-branch infrastructure, including its decision-making. A strategy with targets, pathways and outcomes, regularly and independently audited.’
She also called on women not to accept being sidelined. ‘We don’t have trumpets but we have voices, voices of faith and we are here to shout, to bring down our Church’s walls of misogyny,’ she said.
Ms McAleese also criticised the Church for discriminating against other groups. While the 2,000-year ‘highway’ of Christian history has given the world powerful stories such as the Nativity, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, it has also bequeathed the world uglier legacies also, she said.
‘Down that same highway came man-made toxins such as misogyny and homophobia, to say nothing of anti-Semitism, with their legacy of damaged and wasted lives and deeply embedded institutional dysfunction,’ she said.
Ms McAleese delivered her strong criticisms yesterday in an address at the ‘Voices of Faith’ conference.
The event was moved off Vatican territory this year after Dublinborn cardinal Kevin Farrell, the prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, declined to sponsor it. It is believed Cardinal Farrell objected to Ms McAleese’s strong support for gay rights, although he has never commented publicly on the reason for his stance.
He is also said to have objected to the participation of outspoken Polish theologian Zuzanna Radzik and Ssenfuka Joanita Warry, a lesbian Catholic who is pioneering LGBT rights in Uganda.
The conference has been held in the Vatican for the past four years. However, instead of replacing Ms McAleese as the keynote speaker and removing the two other women from the programme, the organisers decided to move the event outside the Vatican.
Instead, it was held at the Rome headquarters of Pope Francis’s Jesuit order, on International Women’s Day.
Ms McAleese had written to Pope Francis after the Vatican had declined to approve her and two of the other speakers.
Before the former president’s speech yesterday, Ms McAleese’s son Justin, who is openly gay, spoke with RTÉ’s Seán O’Rourke about his mother’s exclusion from the Vatican.
He said: ‘To think she is in Rome not speaking in the Vatican City on a conference about women in the church on International Women’s Day... I think of the irony there, I don’t think it’s lost on people.’
He said his mother is a product of the Catholic Church and that he believes people will ‘find it hard to stomach’ that she be ‘silenced and banned’ by the Church. Calls to the Catholic Communications Office went unanswered last night.
Women ‘invisible and voiceless’