Still in the back pew

Over 50 years ago, a cardinal asked the Vatican Council: ‘Where’s the other half of humanity?’ In her own inimitable way, Mary McAleese last week posed the same question, writes TP O’ Mahony.

ON October 11, 1962, in front of a phalanx of photographers, 2,400 bishops from all over the globe filed into St Peter’s Basilica in Rome for the opening session of the Second Vatican Council. Inside the vast basilica, Cardinal Leon-Joseph Suenens of Belgium watched as the bishops took their seats. Then he turned to a colleague and asked: “Where is the other half of humanity?”

He was remarking on the total absence of women from the Council, and their exclusion from the decision-making processes that would determine the future of the Catholic Church. Half a century later, and as the Church prepares for a Synod of Bishops in October, the question posed by Cardinal Suenens still resonates.