MARTINA DEVLIN
Church cannot preach to us while it still discriminates
‘DEAR Josepha Madigan, thank you for stepping into the breach and leading prayers at your local church when the priest assigned to say Mass did not arrive. Your active participation in the parish is greatly appreciated. Sincere regards, Diarmuid Martin.” How hard would it have been for the archbishop to say that?
It would have been a more sensible reaction than the one which erupted from him. I’m paraphrasing here but it amounted to: “Those dreadful, dreadful women; always banging on about equality. If we don’t put manners on them, they’re going to wreck the Holy Father’s visit.”
The response he chose offers an insight into how Ireland’s Catholic leadership is taking the Eighth Amendment referendum result: it’s hurting. But his tetchy reprimand of a Government minister also lays open the Archbishop of Dublin to a charge of misogyny.
In general, people view him as a progressive archbishop, but he damages his reputation with that ad hominem attack on a committed Catholic who also practises freedom of conscience and speech. The faithful aren’t meant to question Church laws, but such a position is no longer tenable. Either change is embraced, or the Catholic Church will continue to dwindle into inconsequence in the West. The spat exposes a hierarchy and body of the Church drifting ever further apart.
Clearly, the Catholic Church as an institution is prejudiced against women. However, some of us hoped certain senior clerics were more enlightened than to subscribe to the idea of one sex’s inherent inferiority.
An image of woman has been devised by the Vatican – she is a follower not a leader, occupant of a domestic rather than a public space – and it is loathe to surrender that convenient construct.
Its patriarchal attitudes persist in categorising women as not just different but unworthy – they do not deserve to aspire to the priesthood. Such a veto means they can never be instrumental in shaping the Church: no female priests means no female bishops, archbishops, cardinals or popes.
In assigning roles based on gender, the Catholic hierarchy shows itself hostile to diversity. It also ignores the reality of the female intellect. No other organisation, apart from the Islamic Church, betrays such utter contempt for women.
Many of the Church’s tenets affect women disproportionately, from those governing divorce to abortion, contraception and fertility treatment. But women are allowed no say in any of those doctrines. Their exclusion is repressive, designedly so.
While Catholic leaders permit women to have roles in parishes, a step up from traditional functions such as flower-arranging, there is nothing of a significant decisionmaking note.
This relegation was not always the case. Mary Magdalene was given the message of the resurrection to pass on to the apostles. St Paul’s letter to the Romans in the first century mentions a female deacon: “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deaconess of the church at Cenchreae.”
St Brigid not only founded the first Irish nunnery in Kildare in the fifth century, she instituted a double abbey for monks and nuns and appears to have presided over both. How is it that women were once respected as leaders within the Catholic Church and are now downgraded? Which group benefits by women’s systematic marginalisation?
The Catholic Church is the largest global organisation, but it regards its function as teaching the world rather than learning from it. It is an authoritarian as opposed to a listening Church.
How can the Pope speak with authority on homelessness, rampant capitalism and the environment
– all issues he seeks to address – if he ignores discrimination hardwired into the organisation he heads? If he doesn’t believe in the fundamental equality between men and women, how can he expect anyone to pay attention to his teachings on social inequality?
Criticising the workings of the global markets, Francis said: “Meanwhile the excluded are still waiting.” Those words, valid though they are, would have more impact if the Vatican didn’t disbar women from the priesthood (“that door is closed,” he insists) and deny gay families their legitimacy. “The family [as] man and woman in the image of God is the only one,” he said recently.
Mary McAleese has been at the forefront in confronting the hierarchy. The former President marches for the first time in today’s Dublin Gay Pride parade with her son Justin and his husband. She calls the World Meeting of Families, which the Pope will attend in Ireland next month, “a forum for the reinforcement of orthodoxy” and has challenged the Catholic Church to eradicate “the toxic virus of misogyny”.
Regrettably, Archbishop Martin appears not to be immune to the misogyny worm. He gave vent to some outright nonsense during the course of his attack on Minister Madigan, for example claiming there was no shortage of priests – the subtext being that consequently women priests were unnecessary. Really? All might be well on his Olympian heights, but elsewhere older priests have been called into service when they should be enjoying their retirement, while there are parishes with no resident priest.
Madigan, of course, was Fine Gael campaign co-ordinator for a Yes vote in the referendum. Could her connection with the repeal movement have been a factor in provoking the archbishop’s public lash? Catholic teaching relies on the fig leaf that it never changes. Obviously, this is untrue. Limbo has been eradicated, the Latin Mass is all but abandoned, nuns are no longer obliged to live an enclosed life, and so on.
But the Vatican clings to the apostolic succession among reasons for denying equality to women – 12 male apostles were chosen by Christ, with spiritual authority transmitted from them to succeeding bishops, all male. Until the 20th century, woman’s innate sinfulness was also cited in refusing them the priesthood but that reason is set aside now.
Pope Francis has spoken about valuing women in the Catholic Church. Five years into his papacy there is no progress to report. From the hierarchy, we hear a lot of reprimands but little by way of constructive proposals.
A final thought. Josepha Madigan was elected to the Dáil by the people and Mary McAleese was elected to the Áras by the people. Diarmuid Martin was not elected by the people to anything.
Which group benefits by women’s systematic marginalisation?