Mass boycott a wake-up call to the church

JENNIFER Sleeman’s call for women to boycott mass on September 26 should give all Catholics food for thought on the subject of how women are treated by, and within, their church.

The Vatican has made it clear that anyone who ordains a woman will be guilty of a grave sin, but it failed to elaborate as to whether the offence would be greater or lesser in the eyes of God or the church than the sin of child abuse — or the presumably sinful practise of moving clerical abusers to different parishes instead of standing up for their victims.

One thinks also of the grief and trauma inflicted in the past on thousands of women — mothers — whose babies were refused the dignity of a church-approved burial because they hadn’t been baptised. Their innocent souls, the church had people believing for centuries, were lost in Limbo and could never see the light of God.

The bones of many of those “Limbo babies” lie under stones or in unmarked graves all over Ireland thanks to that cruel teaching that the church thankfully has ditched. The Vatican decommissioned Limbo only after many years of pleading and petitioning from pressure groups worldwide.

The involvement of women as eucharistic ministers in the church might be seen as a step towards equal status, especially as women were for long denied the sacrament of communion for up to six weeks after giving birth — to prevent defilement of the blessed host.

Women are allowed also to join pastoral councils, but these unfortunately tend to be mere extensions of clerical power, rubber-stamping the wishes and decisions of local clergy.

The pastoral councils would need to become radicalised and imbued with a spirit of benevolent revolution for them to have any chance of fostering change for the better within the institutional church.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Sleeman’s boycott plea may serve as a much-needed wake-up call to the Catholic Church that, in the words of the song, “the times they are a-changing”. The men in purple and black need to stop behaving like the patrons of an all-male golf club or the shivering fellows at that former haven of misogynism, the Forty Foot in Sandycove, who used to treat women the way the church still does.

John Fitzgerald

Lr Coyne Street

Callan

Co Kilkenny