Women priests would be boon for Catholic Church

Ms Kennedy was talking on the radio with the force and clarity we have come to expect from her. Opposing her was an articulate young woman from the Catholic Herald.

Isn’t the church lucky that articulate women like these are still loyal Catholics despite all the dreadful scandals in which it has recently been mired?

Ms Kennedy is calling for an open debate on the issue. She will be met with a flat refusal. How stupid and short-sighted.

The cleverest thing the church could do is to invite Ms Kennedy in, to seek her assistance in sorting scandals that are building to a mountain under the Vatican carpet. With her strong sense of justice, fine logical mind and unswerving courage she would set about the task like Jesus amongst the money lenders.

By the time she was done, the guilty would be driven out, the victims justly recompensed and proper protections put into place. The organisation would be seen to be squeaky-clean and once more fit for the purpose of saving souls. It would be the rebranding exercise of the century.

Sadly there is more chance of the City of London collectively handing over its annual bonuses to charity.

When I was a small child tagging along with an older sister to the cinema on Saturday morning, I would watch scary scenes through a button hole. Now that I’m an adult I have the same instinct when there is yet another scandalous revelation about the church.

Old loyalties die hard. Many who were brought up as Catholics retain a love of the ritual, the music, art and spirituality. But we find it impossible to rationalise the high moral standards demanded of us with the continuing revelations of cruelty and cover-up.

Most recently a man charged with safeguarding children was found with child pornography. It is alleged he wasn’t investigated for three years after the first alert.

In Spain a horror story is emerging of parents from poor backgrounds and single mothers being told their babies had died shortly after birth. Instead many were allegedly stolen and sold to devout Catholic families.

The scandal emerged when a dying man told his son he had bought him from a priest. The practice is said to have been in place from the Franco regime until 1990. Some say as many as 300,000 children were sold.

There are also cases in Ireland where single mothers were coerced by nuns into signing away their rights to their babies.

What do these scandals have to do with allowing women fully to enter the hierarchy of the church? I’ll tell you. Just as all-male boards in banks and other city institutions make less well-tempered decisions than those that are mixed gender -- so all male churches get blown off course.

I would be making the mirror case if the hierarchy was all female.

In the radio debate involving Helena Kennedy, the Catholic Herald representative was much the younger of the two women. Madeleine Teahan is 25 and a feminist. She says women should make the most of existing possibilities to influence church policy and forget the fights they can’t win. Her unquestioning attitude didn’t surprise me.

Last year I attended a sixth-form gathering of several Catholic schools, both boys and girls. A charismatic priest told them about his community-based ministry, encouraged them to contemplate a life in the church and held a question and answer session.

At the interval I got chatting to a couple of the girls. “I’m surprised none of you asked about joining the priesthood,” I said. “We’re not allowed to be priests,” was the immediate answer. They looked non-plussed when I said they could have asked why not? The idea of questioning the status quo hadn’t entered their minds..

Perhaps younger women have forgotten that women were told their gender meant they couldn’t vote, never mind enter Parliament. They couldn’t be doctors or lawyers or soldiers -- until substantial numbers of them demanded to know why not.

Now most Christian churches have accepted the ordination of women. I haven’t noticed thunderbolts.

The numbers of western European men putting themselves forward for the priesthood is shrinking. If new recruits are increasingly drawn from more fundamentalist countries, the attitudes of the organisation can only grow even more conservative. I can’t imagine that will help the lot of women.

Meanwhile there are devout women who have vocations. Is it really so outrageous to suggest they should be ordained?

Those like me, who were born and brought up in the church, retain a loyalty but I don’t know anyone who isn’t horrified at the scandals that continue to emerge.

They say that if you take a child by the hand you take its mother by the heart. Well, if you harm a child you put an icicle in every mother’s heart.

There is further anger at the self- protective manner with which crimes against children are handled. The church has travelled so far from its origins and from the principles it taught its adherents as to be unrecognisable. If ever there was an organisation that needed fresh thinking, surely this is it.

Helena Kennedy says the theology which bars women priests was constructed by men. She says rules can be changed. Celibacy was introduced, then the requirement was waived for married Anglican vicars who converted to Rome. If married men can be priests, why not women?

We only have to think back to the Spanish Inquisition or to the church’s approval of slavery to know that rules do change. But they change faster when there is a loud and united demand.

The church is the sum of its people. And 50% of the church is female. At the moment they don’t know their own strength. But were they to unite, to demand reform, they would win the day.

Bringing women into the priesthood would re-invigorate the Catholic Church. It would also be a signal to Catholics everywhere that the church finally recognises that an all-male hierarchy has presided over one scandal too many, and has had its chance.