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  Women May Shun Mass but Church Won't Listen

Irish Independent
August 15 2010

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/women-may-shun-mass-but-church-wont-listen-2297885.html

Jennifer Sleeman wants Irish Catholic women to boycott mass on Sunday, September 26, as a co-ordinated protest at being treated by their church as second-class citizens. Mrs Sleeman, 80, was originally baptised in the Presbyterian faith, and converted to Roman Catholicism 54 years ago. And now she is disillusioned.

She believes the one-day boycott by women will make a marked impact. They are the majority of any congregation, she points out, and the emptiness of the pews across Ireland on that day due to the absence of women who wish for change -- whether it be female ordination, an end to priestly celibacy, or just plain recognition of their role in the church -- will signal that the days of an "exclusively male-dominated" church are over.

Unfortunately for women who want to believe in Catholicism, and who value their faith, those days are not over. The church is not listening even to wise men; it prefers the dogged and stubborn: Sean Brady over Diarmuid Martin, for instance. It is certainly not going to listen to the unclean vessels that it believes women to be.

There are many women theologians, and they twist and turn and wriggle to try to defend the church as not being innately inimical to women. I've even heard the argument that becoming a nun in the early church was a form of feminism, as it avoided being made subject to a man -- as daft an argument as I've ever heard. There's nothing feminist about denying yourself your womanhood, and it leaves out of the equation that nuns very definitely are subject to male domination, from their confessor through to the Papacy.

There are women deacons and lay workers who give faithful service to the church, believing that they have a true vocation for the ministry, and that if they just keep battling on they will wear down the opposition of the Vatican to their demands.

They don't seem to realise that you can never wear down an irrationally held belief. The church hierarchy believes that it was the word of God which decreed that women should not be admitted to the ministry; the decree therefore is not based on rational argument, but on blind faith.

The requirement that priests be not only male but celibate was not always the case in the church, but it too is based on something much deeper than the supposedly rational argument that family responsibilities would be a distraction from the work of a priest. That, in any case, is manifestly disproved by church wives in other Christian denominations, whose ministers find their priestly role powerfully enhanced by their status as husbands and fathers, and most of whose wives are models of involved Christianity themselves. But it doesn't seem to occur to the campaigners for both ordination of women and an end to priestly celibacy that the Catholic Church is deeply and powerfully misogynistic: it fears women. It fears our

sexuality. Indeed, this is the case to an extent with all Christian churches. Christian teaching demeans the core of womanhood: the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, that the Mother of God conceived "without carnal knowledge", demeans all womanhood. A full woman was not worthy to be the mother of the redeemer; there can be no greater insult to womanhood. And there can be no greater insurance that no amount of campaigning will improve the status of women members of the Roman Catholic Church. Womanhood is unclean, indeed until very recently a woman had to be "cleansed" after giving birth before she could resume taking the sacraments. (The ceremony of "churching".)

Individual churchmen may well be sympathetic to the cause of women in the priesthood. Jennifer Sleeman says that her eldest son, a monk at Glenstal Abbey, approves of her planned protest. Equally, she says that others of her adult children, far from a commitment to the religion in which she reared them, are actively looking for a meaningful spiritual life, but they do not find it in their mother's adopted church. And even she, Catholic by choice rather than having her religion imposed on her in infancy, has found in the recent past a warmer welcome and a greater meaning in services in both the Methodist Church and the Church of Ireland. A Catholic priest would probably designate that as a failure of faith in Mrs Sleeman: very few of them would acknowledge it as a profound failure of her adopted church.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, may well be suffering at present from the same deep hopelessness as Jennifer Sleeman. He has offered leadership to his flock, and has been unyieldingly humble in acceptance of the church's disgraceful failures in dealing with the abuse of children by its priests. He, like Jennifer Sleeman, has looked for renewal within the church, and last week he was publicly humiliated by Pope Benedict for his pains.

Diarmuid Martin has not been named by the Vatican as a pariah; but he has been singled out as one. This is the true meaning of the Pope's refusal to accept the resignations of Dublin auxiliary bishops Raymond Field and Eamonn Walsh. The two men were named in the Murphy report into the church's handling of sexual abuse scandals, as were Bishops Donal Murray and Jim Moriarty, both of whom also resigned, and had their resignations accepted, while Bishop Martin Drennan of Galway, also named, flatly refused to offer his resignation. The same was true of Cardinal Sean Brady, even after it was revealed that he had been actively involved in attempting to cover up a particular sex abuse issue by swearing the young complainants to secrecy.

Jennifer Sleeman had words about those scandals too: she finds herself a member of "an organisation . . . run by old celibate men divorced from the realities of life . . . where rules and regulations have more weight than the original message of community and love".

She's wrong there: the rules and regulations were supposed to be about community and love -- Diarmuid Martin proved that when he said that the church had to take responsibility for its shame and failures. Those were the rules of Christianity, he believed. And now the Pope has effectively indicated that power, the status quo, and the egos of two men who failed to differing degrees in their holy ministry are far more important than community and love. And Diarmuid Martin, the one who cared about the children and the church's honour, is the scapegoat.

Jennifer Sleeman may or may not succeed in emptying the churches of women on September 26. But she won't change anything.

 
 

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