Women: So far and no further

I  have for some weeks now, been mulling over a comment by Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican’s outgoing nuncio to the United Nations.

There is, by the way, nothing to beat mulling. My father, who was a great muller, once told me that the occasional mull did in no way indicate idleness, but rather allowed the mind to wander quietly into profundity without the danger of being sidetracked by a myriad of unwanted distractions. Ever since then I have taken every possible opportunity to mull, which I find can be enhanced exponentially by the intake of single malt whisky.

Anyway, having explored the niceties and benefits of mulling to the full, let me drag myself back to that comment by the august nuncio Migliore. He was making an impassioned plea to the United Nations for the empowerment of women, to which my feminine side and innate sense of justice responded with a rousing hurrah.

He stressed that the empowerment of women meant recognising their gifts and talents and that the Vatican “notes with concern the ongoing discrimination, exploitation and oppression of women and girls”. Another rousing hurrah. He added that women must be guaranteed their full enjoyment of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.

What kicked my mulling into overdrive was that I searched in vain among all those things he said women should be guaranteed and tried desperately to find that missing word—“religion”. Nowhere to be found, I’m sad to say.

Which left me mulling over the fact that while the Vatican seemed intent on getting everyone else in the world to do the right thing by women, it was effectively exonerating itself from the process. Which seems more than just a little odd.  After all, if we, as the Catholic Church, want to see women given their rightful place in society, politics, business and so forth, it stands to reason that this implies that we would wish to see them granted their rightful places at the highest possible echelons of these pursuits. Presidents of countries and major corporations. So, why not religion?

As it is, women play a massive role in the Catholic Church and I daresay that without women the vast majority of parishes around the world would not be able to function.

Lately women have been allowed to become altar servers and ministers of the Eucharist. They can take communion to the sick and, depending on who their bishop is, they can baptise children in an emergency and comfort the dying with a sort of lay version of the last rites when a priest isn’t available.

But women have very little influence on the running of the Church, with only a tiny sprinkling occupying offices in the Roman curia.

Somehow it seems a little arrogant to make an impassioned plea for women to be guaranteed rights in civil society but to be denied these in religious life.

It’s a bit like me vociferously campaigning for all races to be allowed into restaurants, and then banning a majority race from coming into mine. I believe the word for that is hypocrisy.

To perhaps add insult to injury, the Vatican has just decreed that any attempt to ordain women as priests as “one of the most serious crimes against the Church”. Does this mean that trying to ordain a woman is held in the same light as child sex abuse and assassinating the pope?

Couldn’t they have perhaps put it a little more diplomatically? The way that statement comes across sounds extremely insulting to women. Just saying that the Catholic Church denied the right of anyone to ordain a woman would have been clear enough, without making it sound as though this misdemeanour would result in death by stoning. It does, of course, result in excommunication.

Given the shortage of priests and the insensitivity of the Vatican in handling recent scandals, I feel that women could contribute a lot more to the reputation of the Church by being allowed to do more than just arrange flowers on the altar and pull up weeds in gardens of remembrance.

That’s not to mention the remarkable amount of work done by nuns or the various orders in the Church. But, above every woman who is a nun there is a man who is a bishop, and while the majority of these are very good people, it is the principle of allowing women to go so far but no farther without getting the approval of men that has a distinct archaic ring about it.

It is encouraging that the Vatican has in recent times been very supportive of challenging debate at all levels of the Church—which is why I am encouraged to raise thorny issues of this kind without fear of death by stoning or excommunication.