Church must recognise its own shortcomings

HISTORY has taught us – well, most of us – that when you turn a blind eye to an injustice you are considered complicit in it. It is a lesson that the Vatican has struggled to learn, and yesterday former President Mary McAleese stormed the “patriarchal bastions” of the Holy City with a fiery barrage of criticism.

Addressing the Why Women Matter conference in Rome on International Women’s Day, she said the Catholic Church “has long since been a primary global carrier of the virus of misogyny”. In her withering diatribe, she further accused it of wilfully ignoring the cure, which was “equality”.

Ms McAleese made it clear that women deserve so much more than the hierarchy’s “patronising platitudes”.

Training her fire on past and present popes, she pointed out that John Paul II may have written on the ‘mystery of women’, but all that was really required of the Church was to: “Talk to us as equals and we will not be a mystery.”

She elected to give voice to the frustrations of women who, having being preached at for centuries, finally demanded to be listened to: not as supplicants but as cherished members of a family no longer prepared to be silenced or marginalised.

If the Church finds itself accused of hypocrisy and misogyny, it must examine its own conscience. As the former President pointed out, it regularly criticises the secular world for its failure to deliver on human rights but seldom critiques itself. Talk of inclusion and humility in a declining Church would be far more meaningful were it backed up by a greater recognition of the value and the rights of more than 50pc of its congregation.