Why women put the fear of God into a men-only Church

The tradition of silencing women is so ingrained in the Catholic Church that a Vatican cardinal had no difficulty attempting to silence a former president of Ireland. To deliberately omit Mary McAleese’s name from a list of speakers, sent to him for approval for a conference at the Vatican, highlights the arrogance of Church authority figures when it comes to ensuring opinions they might not care to hear are not heard.

In the event, the organisers changed the venue while remarking that despite the Pope’s call for a more open attitude to the inclusion of women in Church affairs, no authority figure has to date graced the Why Women Matter conferences organised by the Voices Of Faith, with their presence.

Little wonder then that Mrs McAleese last week called the Catholic Church an ‘empire of misogyny’, a description that highlights the contrast between a Church founded on the life and teachings of Jesus and the current institutional model.

My own background is Catholic and I believe in God and in the survival of the soul or spirit after death. I do not believe that God is sexist, racist or homophobic. I have at times found church rituals to be somewhat comforting or soothing. I have heard wonderfully affirming words and ideas expressed from the altar to help people cope with life, its trials and its tribulations.

At the same time, I have been seriously offended at some of the views delivered from the pulpit. In my case, the idea of a group of mostly elderly white men imposing their views and their will on women’s lives and decisions without any consultation or even regard for women, gradually began to rankle. How had it come to pass that our lives could be shaped and formulated by celibate men living in an autonomous enclave in Rome?

It is therefore reasonable for Mrs McAleese to ask, ‘If you are going to exclude women in perpetuity from priesthood and if all decision-making, discernment and policy-making in the Church is going to continue to be filtered through the male priesthood, tell me how in justice and charity, but most importantly in equality, are you going to include the voices of women in the formation of the Catholic faith?’

This question has not been answered. There is, in fact, no forum within the official Church for women to be heard. Women did not speak at the Second Vatican Council. At the Synods on the Family in Rome in 2014 and 2015, women could speak but had no voting rights. They were included but the terms of that inclusion were limited.

Historically, the silencing of women in the Catholic Church has been attributed to St Paul. However, many scholars argue that the words ordering women to be silent in Church were a later addition to scripture and were not Paul’s own. This addition did, of course, fit in with the cultural context of the early second century, which expected women to be silent and invisible in the public arena. But the enforcement of this ‘teaching’ did serve to gradually erase women from the Christian story. As the early Church became more organised, it took on the norms of the society in which it operated, and with the patronage of the fourth-century Roman Emperor, Constantine, was effectively infiltrated by Roman law and culture.

While the advancement of the Christian Roman Empire achieved a measure of uniformity throughout the widely-scattered Christian groups, a more negative legacy was the establishment of a hierarchical, patriarchal institution that prohibited women from holding formal roles in the Church.

The contrast between this silencing of women with Jesus’s own words and actions in relation to women couldn’t be more stark. Women were central to Jesus’s mission and not merely on the periphery. Jesus spoke to women, spoke up for them and, indeed, was accompanied by groups of female followers. It was they who witnessed his death and crucifixion as the disciples had fled.

And, of course, Mary Magdalene was the first witness to the Resurrected Jesus. Following this model, the early Christian movement appointed both men and women, married or single, as administrative and ministerial leaders. Yet, many of us would have difficulty naming the women in the Bible, other than Our Lady and Mary Magdalene. One scholar has, in fact, identified over 60 women in the New Testament and there are many more in the Old Testament. Women are named in St Paul’s letters and are clearly working alongside him, and as leaders, in developing the new Christian communities. The question arises, therefore, if men and women, single and married, led the various groups St Paul established, why is the later Church so adamant the exclusion of women in leadership is absolutely certain?

Given that this is an obvious question and that theologians and historians have been raising it since the 1960s, the Church has attempted to respond. John Paul II was vigorous in his resolve to close down further dissent by declaring in 1994 the Church had ‘no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and this judgment is to be definitively held by the Church’s faithful’.

In 2010, the Church under Pope Benedict XVl went even further in its opposition to the ordination of women by upgrading the status of the veto from automatic excommunication to ‘a crime against sacraments.’

The 2010 change in the Penal Code of Canon Law, an extremely rare occurrence, was explained as a means of ensuring that there would be no further ‘doubt’ about the matter of ordaining women. I was surprised by this as, like most women interested in the Church, I was not aware there had been a discussion. I was quite wrong but until I began to research the topic, I had no idea there had been a sustained questioning about the exclusion of women by historians, theologians and religious personnel. Worse still, that move to copperfasten women’s exclusion from the priesthood and any meaningful say came at a time when the Church was immersed in the scandal of child sex abuse and the coverup of that abuse.

The zealousness with which any discussion of women in priestly ministry has been suppressed can leave little doubt as to how deeply distasteful the idea is to the Church. The sense of fear, and I use that word deliberately, emanating from the institutional Church on the issue of actual, as opposed to ideological equality between the sexes, is difficult for present-day women to fathom.

If, as I believe, the Church’s domination by men and exclusion of women is based more on tradition and a desire to hold on to power rather than on divine law, that fear becomes understandable because the very cultural inequalities in wider society which sustained male power and marginalised women no longer hold sway, at least not in Europe and north America.

While ordinary life has to a large extent dispensed with sexual labelling, in that awareness of sexism is slowly beginning to be acknowledged and addressed, the Church continues to subscribe to the thinking of long-gone centuries. That is no longer acceptable.

For many young women, their attitude towards the Church is at best indifference and at worst is its association with the child abuse scandals, the Magdalene laundries and the forcible separation of women from their babies.

What the Church also fails to understand is young women are simply not interested in an institution that excludes them. And when women leave the Church, they bring their children with them.