Misguided papal misogyny
Sir — I agree with Mary McAleese: it’s high time that the walls of misogyny in the Catholic Church came tumbling down.
Women are excluded from any meaningful decision-making roles in the institutional Church, their duties being confined to the activities of so-called ‘Pastoral Councils’ that are little more than biscuit-eating and coffee morning affairs with some amateur theological chat thrown in to lend a facade of piety and episcopal relevance.
I have nothing against Catholic priests. There are many decent, dedicated men who make lifelong sacrifices in pursuit of a quest to enhance the spiritual lives of their fellow human beings.
Some travel abroad on the missions, risking death or torture in all sorts of benighted places across the planet in their efforts to “help souls on the path to heaven”, as one of them put it many years ago in a talk he gave in my hometown.
We have a decent parish priest here in Callan. He gives well-crafted, thoughtprovoking sermons and he commands the respect of the whole community, even among non-Catholics.
But the point is that a decent woman would do just as well, standing up there in that exalted position, against a gold and marble backdrop…flanked by those divine stained-glass windows and iconic stations of the cross, facing the congregation. “Working the Altar” as the fictional Fr Ted might put it.
I am not an atheist nor materialist. I keep an open mind on issues like the existence of an afterlife and I don’t believe the universe just appeared out of nowhere in the dim distant past when a big bang occurred. But I do have a problem accepting that a powerful, compassionate being behind all of creation wants to prevent women from achieving equality within the Catholic Church, or that he/she/it has some kind of prejudice against allowing a woman to say Mass.
I could be wrong, of course. Maybe there IS a God up there who wants to put the brakes on women wearing priestly vestments and celebrating all that is good in any particular religion. But I seriously doubt it.
The Church’s misogyny strikes me as misguided, indefensible, and ultimately self-defeating. Will the Vatican wait until there are NO more men entering the priesthood before it decides to change the rules? It’s refusal to ordain women is about as sensible as the lyrics of My Lovely Horse.
John Fitzgerald, Callan, Co Kilkenny