The Women The Vatican Could Not Silence - Dr Mary McAleese and Sister Joan Chittister OSB

A conversation between Sister Joan Chittister OSB and Dr Mary McAleese, moderated by Ursula Halligan

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On 2nd November 2019, two charismatic and prophetic Catholic leaders came together to have a compelling and honest conversation discussing major issues plaguing the Catholic Church today and to shine a light on the solutions necessary to bring about change, equality and justice.

This transcription has been slightly edited for this magazine. You can also watch this talk in full via the Voices of Faith Youtube Channel.

URSULA HALLIGAN (UH) Well, aren’t we the lucky ones to be here this afternoon, in the company of two of the most courageous and inspiring Catholic women on the face of the planet today. They may live on different sides of the Atlantic but they are united in their determination to help make women full members of their church and to end the institutionalised sexism that dresses up as religion.

Both of them have taken up their moral and spiritual responsibility on this issue and both have paid a price for doing so. On different occasions the institutional Catholic church has tried to shun and to silence them. But they were not born to be silenced. They are voices the Catholic church cannot do without.

This afternoon we’re here to celebrate them, the women the Vatican couldn’t silence, to thank them and give support to their efforts to make the Catholic church an equal place for women.

Please give a warm welcome to the former President of Ireland and the new Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin, Dr Mary McAleese, and to the theologian, writer and Benedictine nun, Sister Joan Chittister.

MARY MCALEESE (MM) I am thrilled to be here. I see our provost here and thank you for the joy of now becoming the chancellor of this university. My sister wrote to me this morning and said, it’s a long way since 1975 when I walked through the front gate of Trinity for the first time as a member of staff. So, to come back as Chancellor means a lot to me. I love the bones and stones of this place. I love every inch of it. I love everything it stands for. Back at the turn of the 20th century we had a famous provost then who took the view that women shouldn’t be allowed in the university. He had no idea what they would contribute and he was absolutely morally certain they’d be a danger to the men.

SISTER JOAN CHITTISER (JC) Of course.

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MM In that respect he was absolutely prophetic.

But he also said that they would get in over his dead body. So, he died in 1904 and they were straight in there, walked over his dead bones, and life has never been the same since then, has it? It has blossomed, absolutely blossomed, because that’s what happens when you let the genius of women merge with and meld with the genius of men. That’s what was always intended, I think, by the God who made us and we’re proof of that.

UH Mary, congratulations on the Alfons Suer Ethics Award. What does getting this award mean to you?

MM Receiving this award meant a lot to me.

Anybody who’s a theologian in the audience will know that Alfons Auer was the great moral theologian who advised very strongly, back in the 1960s. He was a member of the commission which advised the Pope on human reproduction and he advised very strongly against the content of Humanae Vitae, particularly in relation to artificial contraception.

He believed that it would destroy the church and in that respect I think he probably was right. I often think in Alfons Auer’s day, just before the Second Vatican Council, our house, like a lot of Irish houses, would have had two pictures on the wall. Besides a picture of the Sacred Heart, you’d have that, but you’d have a picture of President Kennedy and a picture of John the 23rd. Well, there hasn’t been a picture of a Pope in our house since John the 23rd. I think that probably is quite telling because he was followed, of course, Paul 6th and Humanae Vitae I think was one of the big cathartic moments in the church, when they got it wrong, and they got it seriously wrong.

But I belong to a generation. My mum was one of 11 kids, I’m the oldest of nine. My mum and her sisters and brothers between them had 60 children, and obviously my family thought they had to increase, multiply and fill the earth all by themselves. I look at the next generation, you see, and nobody in our generation has nine, ten or eleven children.

We have two or three children and that tells a story. So, to get that award, the Alfons Auer, it’s an award that’s made every two years in his name. One of the first recipients of it was a man whose books on ethics I absolutely adore, Charles Taylor. So, to follow

in his footsteps is tremendous! I stood there thinking how can this possibly be happening, it’s so wonderful. But it is a validation, particularly after being told by the Vatican that I wasn’t fit to talk there.

UH Joan, it was a great award. Would you say that the Vatican were letting off fireworks to celebrate with Mary?

JC Oh, I’m thrilled about Mary! I have a new respect of the university as a result. Who doesn’t respect Trinity? I did start on this stage some years ago, thanks to the invitation of Professor Sean Freyne, and I did a major presentation on the prophetic tradition and its relationship to the present. Trinity received me with great love and enthusiasm and that was a nice thing. But not nearly as nice as seeing a woman, a Catholic woman, mount to this chair. It says so much about where we’ve come as church, as state, as a secular heartbeat on the globe. Because until we can bring those differences together because they are the same, not because they are different, I don’t see how we can continue that kind of progress and when you get up and read the paper in the morning and you realise that the globe is fracturing into small pieces by people who want to maintain those small pieces for themselves, for God’s sake, friends, do not allow it to happen, in your family, on your street and with your friends.

UH Thank you. Well, before we dive into all the big issues, I’d love to talk to each of you about your faith, what it means to you. How would you describe it, Joan?

JC Do you mean my faith in the church?

UH Well, maybe your faith in God first. What do you mean by faith? You tell me.

JC Well, my faith is a lived experience of my life. I’m only here because of my faith. I’m not here because I didn’t believe or I don’t believe. I’m here because I do believe what they said. They told me, for instance, that the church was more than a place, that it was a process, that you grew into church. We had infant baptism and it’s never been right.

I have always maintained that every human

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...faith for me is a very living thing.

It walks with Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem over and over again in my life and I’m not going to give it up because the structures are not keeping up with Jesus.

being goes back as an adult at some time to a baptismal font and decides if they really own it and if it owns them. No infant child can begin to do that. You can bring them up in that structure but there isn’t anybody in this auditorium right now who’s faith hasn’t fractured a thousand times and come back a stronger faith because of the fracturing. So, faith for me is a very living thing. It walks with Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem over and over again in my life and I’m not going to give it up because the structures are not keeping up with Jesus.

UH And has your faith fractured over the years?

JC Honey, I think my faith fractures about once a year and I’m really lucky if it’s not once a day. The challenges are so real, they are so present, they’re so alive that it’s always. You go back down into the centre of yourself and you say, who am I, who is my God, what do I believe and what does that belief demand right now?

That’s the dangerous question. What does that belief demand right now? That will get you into the arms of the holiest people you know and it will also get you on the tips of the spears of the angriest people you know.

And so if you see it as an act of faith, you’ll always be sustained. If it is not an act of faith, if it’s just another bad discussion on a bad day, you will soon be withered by it and then your faith itself will need a resurrection. If every moment of every day is a response to your faith, you will be strong forever.

UH Thank you. Mary, how would you describe your faith? What is it?

What does it mean to you?

MM I find it hard to separate me from faith. Who I am, what I am, what propels me, what impels me, what makes me speak, what makes me stay silent, what makes me love, what makes me forgive, what makes me hold back anger, all of that. It’s going to sound silly but there’s a certainty.

There are things that I’m sure about in life and there are things that I’m not so sure about but one of the things that I’m very sure about is that God has my back and I’ve always felt that hand, if you like, of God on my shoulder, guiding, helping, directing. I’ve always had a very, very strong prayer life.

Prayer is a very important part of my life and I think that was a learnt behaviour from very young that I’ve been very grateful for. So, if today I find myself in the position of speaking strongly, particularly to the clerical governors of my church in terms that they are uncomfortable with, believe me, it will have come from praying about it, asking God, what do I do here? What should I do here? Is it okay to be silent? It would be easier. God knows it would be easier to say nothing, that lovely old expression that Seamus Heaney uses in his poems, “whatever you say, say nothing”.

And yet here we are in Edmund Burke’s Hall, a hall named after Edmund Burke and, if you’ll forgive me for paraphrasing him, but wasn’t it he who said that the worst mistake you can make is to do nothing because you think that whatever you do is just too small, that it won’t make any difference. To use that as an excuse

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for doing nothing, has always seemed to me to be very wrong. Because the doing of small things little by little by little increments to the bigger things and it’s the bigger things we want to keep our eye on here.

JC Well, the first thing I have to do is disappoint you in that case because I can’t argue that I discovered feminism. I think I imbibed it. I imbibed it from my mother.

The God in me has a vision for the world I want to live in. It’s a world where people aren’t excluded, where people are loved.

It’s a place where people are not unequal but are equal. It’s a place where people are kind and decent to one another and behave in an ethically wonderful way that is infused with love, infused with grace, infused with goodness. I look around and, as we’ve heard from Joan, there’s an awful lot of fragmentation. Families experience it, communities experience it, countries experience it and God knows many, many people today, I think of all the poor immigrants who have been forced to leave their homes by conflict and who probably had very decent and lovely and grand communities and suddenly they have nothing and now they rely on the kindness of strangers.

MM Makes two of us.

My God tells me I have to be the stranger who’s kind. That’s simple. I have to be the stranger who’s kind. And it bothers me greatly when a country that I am so proud of and that sometimes people are not experiencing the kindness that I know is there, that is the ethic of our country and our people. We relied on it ourselves so often when we went as immigrants to other countries, poor with our two hands, looking for opportunity.

Now, I’ve been as faithful to that as I know how to be. Let me give you an example. I taught in a small high school in a small city.

I was a junior high school moderator and I was in charge of the honour society and an honour society in the United States, if you belong to it, you average the scores of your kids and, given the size of your school, you’re allowed so many members.

So, you asked me about faith. Faith is the warp and weft of my life. I can’t separate myself from it. I could at times, when I look at the church that I was baptised into, I could at times ask myself the question, should I separate myself from that, and then I remind myself time and time again that church is not clerical governance structures, it’s the people of God and they are at this moment in this room changing the church as we speak.

UH Now, we all know that both of you support equality for women in the church but most of us don’t know your back story. How did that happen, your journey to becoming feminists to appreciating how important equality is for women in the church. Joan, how did you became a feminist. What woke you up to it?

JC I sat down and thought about my mother and I said, you really mean that, Joan. You got all of this from her. I didn’t learn it anywhere.

I’m an only child and I got way too much attention sometimes but her attention was always wisdom-giving.

I sat down the other day and I took her birthday and I examined it in an historical timeline. She was born before the suffrage vote but she was born during the suffrage movement. Now, I cannot believe that that didn’t affect her but that word never came into our conversations under any circumstances whatsoever but what did come was, Joan, you can do anything you want to do. Study hard, decide what you want to be and don’t let anybody stop you.

I was the junior home room teacher and it was my responsibility to tally up all of the averages of all of the students in the junior class, and I did and I handed those over to the headmaster because the kids got big certificates and they got scholarships to college and they got references to nice universities and I was very pleased of the five honour students who met their criteria.

The first three were girls. That morning I went to the faculty room, I reached up into the teacher’s mailbox and here was the list of the honour students who would be awarded that day. The entire list had flipped. The girls wound up at the bottom and the boys were put at the top. I could name those two boys today. I loved those kids, but they were the dumbest sweetest kids you could ever see in an upper level criteria.

So, I raced down the hall to the headmaster’s

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office, a priest, and I said, Father, you have got to postpone the assembly, there’s been a terrible mistake. I don’t think there’s been any mistake, everything’s fine he said. No, it’s not fine, so he asked, well, what’s the problem. I said, the names are in the wrong order. The three girls were one, two and three and the two boys get the B rating and they got the A rating. He said, Sister Mary Peter, there’s been no mistake at all. He said, I changed that.

I said, you what? You can’t change that. If you do not comply with the honour society’s criteria, your school will be taken out of the honour society programme. This was not local. This was important. It was like a big scholarship. I said, you can’t change those.

was the monastery with 46 passionate priests in it at the time, now for sale and empty. So, priests came in and out of the house all the time. I was about 14 or 15 when I first said that I wanted to be a lawyer. I was coming up to a time at 15, a lot of people left school then and that might have been the expectation.

In my parish 70% unemployment, so the idea of girls going on to school or staying on wasn’t exactly embedded in our culture. Our parish priest happened to ask me what did I intend on doing, and I think he expected that the answer would be that I was going to be leaving school and getting a job, maybe in the local mill or whatever, and I said that I’d like to go to university and become a lawyer.

He said, I’m headmaster and I just did, and I said, well, why would you do something like this? And he said, because the boys need the scholarships to go to school. It won’t make any difference to the girls’ lives at all. I can’t tell you how I felt at that moment, I’ve got a dozen stories like that. I’ve got horror stories that will keep you awake for a long time. I’ll tell you just one more, because this one, if there was a moment I flipped and used the word feminist, this was it.

And immediately he said back to me, you can’t, and he said, there are two reasons, one because you’re a woman and, because you have nobody belonging to you in the law. And I was a bit taken aback but not half as taken aback as my mother! Our house was a place where we paid great deference to priests and she literally propelled them out the door. She just told him to leave. Then she said to me, giving me the only piece of career advice I ever got from my mother, which was ignore that man. So, he...that man, incidentally, in fairness to him, became a great supporter when I got into university. The year I got into university was unfortunately 1969, August 14th we got our results. He took myself and another girl from the parish who also got into university, he took us out to dinner. While we were out to dinner of course our parish had imploded. It had been invaded by men in uniform who’d burnt Catholic homes. It was awful but, interestingly, in and around that same time my mother had just given birth to her last child. Of the nine alive of us, my youngest brother was born just a couple of months, very inconveniently, just before my A Levels.

We lived in a convent which had 15 sisters and we slept two and three in a room. We were happy. We were a little community, we liked one another, there was no problem.

Then they decided that this big old house should become the rectory and that we should go to another old house with the same amount of bedrooms. They renovated the house. You know what they got, Ursula?

There were three of us in one bedroom. The first guy got the first floor and the second guy got the second floor, and that’s the day I got off the bus.

UH Thank you. Mary, tell us your story.

MM How can I beat that? Look, I grew up with feisty women. As I mentioned, my mother was one of seven sisters and my grandmother. My father’s from the west of Ireland and when he came at 14 to live in Belfast, it was his three aunts. They all had small businesses. They were all entrepreneurs, every one of them, and they were all independent women. But they lived very deeply.

We lived in Ardoyne. The spine of Ardoyne

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But, anyway, she was very ill after that and she needed a hysterectomy. Our Catholic doctor could not help her. He referred her to a Protestant doctor who referred her to a state hospital. She was really very seriously ill and, anyway, she got her hysterectomy and I still remember. Maybe this is my moment, when the priest came to our home.

Father came, clearly irate. He had heard from whatever source, we think it may have been the hospital Catholic chaplain, and he berated my mother in front of my father and all of us

nine children, most of the children not able to really understand what was being said but what he did say to her in my hearing was that she was still of child-bearing age, she was 39, and she had not asked his permission. That was my moment.

UH Let’s fast forward. Today how would you describe the role of women in the Catholic church?

JC Invisible. You have to understand, and you have to be willing to realise in your head that the Catholic church is a wholly-owned subsidiary of pious males.

UH Pious males?

JC Yes. The Catholic church, and I love it, but let’s start with this. I love my church. I love the Jesus story. I am embedded in my community. I may be a radical but I’m not a revolutionary. I know that. I think things evolve and I’ve given my life to allowing it.

But at the same time, some day you have to wake up. You have to ask what you’re looking at and you have to say what you see and what I see is that the Catholic church for women is a totally owned subsidiary of pious males.

We really are not full members of the church.

We’re the outside edge. We’re the tatted piece. We’re the bow on the package. Why

would I say that? We’re not in the language.

People are still in this room, I bet, going to church on Sunday and every single prayer is a male prayer. Every single one. Now, I in my community took every prayer book that we owned and brought a lot of pencils and pens with us and drew, before every mass and before every prayer, before we started vespers and before we started lauds, we struck out the male references to God and the male pronouns, we substituted so that the prayer would be uniform and beautiful.

To this day people walk into our monastery and say, I don’t know what it is but your prayer is so different. Let them stand there and look at you for a minute and it won’t take them long, not the women. They say, how do you do it? Where do you buy these prayers?

You don’t buy them, you write them yourself.

UH Mary, how would you describe the role of women in the church today?

MM Even more than invisible, deliberately made invisible, deliberately meant to stay invisible. Structurally, the architecture of the church is designed to create the invisibility and maintain the invisibility and the powerlessness of women to corral us.

If you’ll just bear with me, could I just read a little section from the writings of the Pope John Paul II? This is a recent Pope, so we’re not talking

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about the dark ages, we’re talking about a recent Pope from his book ‘Love and Responsibility’. This is his description of marriage, of sex and marriage.

argue... This is a reprise so that I can move to the second level in my mind. What is not in the language is not in the mind and what is not in the mind cannot be in the structures.

”It’s the very nature of the act that the man plays the active role and takes the initiative while the woman is a comparatively passive partner whose function it is to accept and experience. For the purpose of the sexual act, it is enough for her to be passive and unresisting, so much so that it can even take place without her volition, while she is in a state in which she has no awareness at all of what is happening, for instance when she is asleep or unconscious.”

So, for the women who are sitting here this morning saying, well, I think that pronoun thing is very funny but it doesn’t bother me, I don’t even notice. That’s right, you don’t.

You’re so invisible you don’t even know you’re invisible to yourself. Yes, you better get that.

You better get that idea and you better get it quickly because there is no hope for you to grow, not really, nor for the church to grow because of you. If being identified as her and they and us is a problem to you, that means the sense of self is a problem to you.

That is how we are treated in the church – expected to be asleep and unconscious while men get on with doing what they have to do.

And here’s the sequel to that. When Father Sean Fagan called Pope John Paul out on that, he asked a question. “Can this really be Catholic church teaching? It sounds like rape.”

What happened? Pope John Paul becomes a saint. Sean Fagan becomes silenced. That’s our church.

UH Wow, that is shocking. Well can we go from that to ideally what should the church look like?

MM Us. All of us.

JC Well, in the first place there has to be some coherence in the theology. I will always

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Where does that come from? It comes from a very inconsistent theology. We’ve got to pull the theology together. For instance, in first grade I walked in and sister had all those wonderful things on the board and she was teaching us all about God and she told us that God was pure spirit. I liked that. I could look around and there was God. God was pure spirit. So, God was everywhere. That’s what she said too – God was everywhere.

No wonder. If you’re pure spirit, you can be everywhere.

We got out of first grade and went to second grade and a new teacher was teaching us that God was father. Now, that’s a lot of learning. To go from pure spirit to a male overnight. Now what do I do with my sense of my relationship to the eternal? For a little kid that was confusing. That all of a sudden God

was everywhere, became God is there.

And then they moved it another notch.

I understand where it came from. It’s agricultural. It came, I’m sure, 1500, 2000, 2500, 3000 years ago but the notion was the way you got life was you dropped seed into the ground and it grew. It didn’t take that long for them to identify the seed of life.

What would it have been? Come on, your mother told you.

UH Semen.

JC The semen. His seed planted in her made him just like God because God is a creator of life.

Now, that bad biology got theologised and it’s still with us and Thomas Aquinas cited it and certified it, sold it. He made millions on that idea. It undermines every single little kid’s Catholic theology, any place in the globe, and until that kind of inconsistency and contradictory thought about how life is the product of God and not owned by any of us. You see, that whole argument broke down in 1827.

What happened in 1827? They began to use microscopes and when they used the microscope they found the ovum. For 200 years they’d been afraid there was one and,

by God Almighty, there it was and so, honey, you should just sit there and puff up because women are makers of life too and at that moment, you see, this whole notion of the invisibility, the uselessness of women outside of procreation and the discoveries of science

begin to break down years and years of heresy and if you think you’re so smart in this university, you’ve got to start claiming that information.

UH Are there any good reasons why women shouldn’t be priests?

JC Ask somebody else, I’m not answering that.

MM If we’re talking about the theological exclusion of women, the reasons why women are excluded allegedly theologically, no. I mean, I’ve described it before as misogyny dressed up as theology and that’s what I believe it to be. It has no validity. It flatters a position that was adopted by the church.

It flatters the position adopted by a male clericalized church. That’s all that it does.

That’s all that it’s designed to do. It’s an artificial construct that will eventually fade.

Even if women could be priests, why they shouldn’t be, that’s a different matter. And it’s not just to do with women but it is that the clericalization of priesthood does not seem to be attracting into priesthood today, first of all, many, but those who are attracted into it, seem to be, a number of them, deeply problematic. They are deeply problematic in their own sexuality.

Why? Because the church demands of them that if they are not heterosexual, that they pretend to be. That has caused huge problems throughout the clergy in the church

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and I think that lies at the heart of priesthood today. There’s a fundamental lie. Having spent a good part of the last six years in Rome and living in a seminary, in my class, working with many young seminarians and priests, I became very, very much aware of the dysfunction at the heart of seminary life and the dysfunction at the heart of much of the priesthood. The number of fake hetero misogynistic homophobic gays I met, think about all of that now, frightened me because the homophobia of people who are gay is a lie. It’s a vicious lie but they live it and in the living of it, apart from making themselves miserable, they also make a lot of other people miserable, and particularly if they are pastors, their capacity for dispersing misery, trust me, is really, really immense.

That worries me greatly. But the fundamental question, I remember when I first explored this, after John Paul announced in, was it ordinazio sacerdotale? When he said that women weren’t empowered to become priests. I wrote to him at the time and said, look, I have three children and I want to remain communicant with my church but I can’t if I have to believe this. And I certainly will never teach it to my children, the idea that women, that this Christ that I believe in could have deliberately excluded women for a reason that eludes me but that flatters misogyny, that bothers me. So, he wrote back and he said, that was okay, that I was not excommunicant for reasons. That was fine. He said, that provided I could accept that this was the church’s teaching without actually accepting the teaching, I remained communicant, and I lived with that, that was fine. But then wrote to the Archbishop of Dublin at the time, Archbishop Connell and asked him, could he help me with reading lists and he did, he sent me a reading list, at the top of which was a book by a man called Manfred Hauke. Have you read it? Oh, dear sweet God. Yes, I mean, really, if it had been offered up at any university as a thesis, which it was, it would have got a big F written on it because it’s an appallingly written book but it is the go-to book for those who believe in the theological reasons for the exclusion of women.

It’s a very thick book. Most of the references in it, the footnotes, refer back to the author.

It’s hilarious. It’s actually funny. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, this is a great way to write books altogether. God, this is wonderful,

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just keep referring back to yourself. And then in the middle of it there’s a reference that I remembered reading in a book called ‘Learning the Law’ by Glanville Williams.

Whenever I was a first year law student, the first book on our reading list was from an Anglican lawyer who said that women, there’s a whole chapter entitled Women. This is 1969.

And he wanted to know what were women doing in law schools anyway, they had no business being there.

What would we be doing, being lawyers?

We weren’t fit. And he said, we didn’t have voices that carried in order to be barristers in court. Well, he never heard my mother. Oh, God. Or any one of our sisters. Anyway, that was 1969. Suddenly, all these years later I’m reading Manfred Hauke and in the middle of Manfred Hauke’s book, he says, it’s nonsense that women’s voices are lighter than men’s, you’ll have noticed our voices are lighter, and therefore, when it comes to preaching, which is such a central part of the role of the priest, we are inadequate to the task. And you’re reading this going, seriously, cardinal Connell, I’m sorry, but, honestly, it’s not convincing.

And so I got to the end of the book and if it was meant to convince me about the theological impediments to women, all that it convinced me of was that many of the intellectuals in the church were complete dunces and that one should not take them seriously and that we had to stand up and say that, that this is nonsense and that we shouldn’t kowtow. The fact that this guy came off a reading list from a cardinal shouldn’t impress me, and it didn’t.

Unfortunately, people still quote him and he’s still a major reference book, as I discovered this year. I spent the month of September in Rome in the company of a lot of young priests, we were all studying together, and I was astounded. When we raised the subject of women in priesthood, one of them actually had the audacity to mention Manfred Hauke. I almost fell off my seat. I thought, no, seriously, not in 2019. So, anyway, he got my opinion on the subject, which was, I hope, helpful to him.

UH Well, of course the official line from the Catholic church on women goes as follows.

I just want to read it to you and see what you think. The official line is that the Catholic church is not a place where women are oppressed but a place where there are many

and manifest gifts have flourished and been celebrated from Mary the mother of God who was first among all the saints, to Mary Magdalene who was the apostle to the apostle, and to an array of mystic saints, founders, martyrs and scholars. So, that’s the official line from the church. I can see you’re impressed.

MM I’m overwhelmed with complete disinterest in that, actually. Let me just go back to Mary Magdalene. Isn’t she interesting? The woman, one of a number of women, three women, who were entrusted with the story of the resurrection and then completely written out.

Certainly when I was growing up, it was like we went straight on the road to Emmaus and we missed the fact that the whole story of the resurrection had been entrusted to these women, among them Mary Magdalene. And then of course we have the whole change of the story of Mary Magdalene over the years so that she becomes, instead of a woman whose intellect was valued by Christ, she becomes the woman who is associated with prostitution and with fallenness. We’re back to sexual sin suddenly.

No, I’m afraid that doesn’t impress me. I also go back to the story of Mary, the mother of God, for whom I have huge respect and one of the reasons I have huge respect for her is not because of what I was taught about her but what I discovered about her from my own close reading of the text of the appearance of the angel Gabriel. Because all I ever heard at school was, in trying to produce classes of stoical women who had gone back to John Paul, who were quiescent and passive and accepting and receiving, was Mary when told she was going to be the mother of God and she said immediately, be it done unto me according to thy word.

...of course we have the whole change of the story of Mary Magdalene over the years so that she becomes, instead of a woman whose intellect was valued by Christ, she becomes the woman who is associated with prostitution and with fallenness.

We’re back to sexual sin suddenly.

But that’s not what happened because actually there was a dialogue between herself and the angel and in that dialogue she says, hang on a minute, how’s this going to happen, how’s this going to work out, I’m not sure about this, explain it to me. Her immediate reaction was to question, to query, and it was only when she was reassured that God would not abandon her and would be with her that she said, be it done unto me according to they word.

But somehow we took that story and we took out her natural scepticism, we took out her questioning and, most importantly, we took out her right to question and our right to question. And that was, again, all part of the building up of a structure where women become the silent passive receivers in a male-dominated clericalized church.

JC I think I’m right about this, Mary, but I think it was before 1917.

Women’s voices were not permitted in the church itself.

MM In the choir even.

JC That’s it, thank you. And so, you know what, they spent a lot of money maintaining that little canon. Because a woman’s voice was not permitted to be raised in the church, what they did was

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...we took out her questioning and, most importantly, we took out her right to question and our right to question. And that was, again, all part of the building up of a structure where women become the silent passive receivers in a male-dominated clericalized church.

they cut out a choir loft that you then called the vestibule. That was the difference between the wall of the church and the steps of the church. So, what they did then was they got themselves eunuchs. I mean, they castrated men to get the high voices that they would not permit the women to raise. Now, that’s a big investment of church money. I mean, think of how many vestibules there are someplace that were pasted onto the church so that women’s voices would not be heard in the church and it was a canonical truth.

I don’t state this as humour, I state this as progress. Things have changed. These answers all come from the same base.

They come from the wrong question. You asked the wrong question. Is there any good reason? No, because it’s the wrong question. The question is single, it’s basic, it’s universal, it’s the only one and that is; are women human?

Are women human? And if women are human, then they can do anything a human can do. They can be lawyers. They can raise their voices in operating rooms, in hospitals. They can do anything. If you ask for the church answers, you’re going to get the church answer. It’s no. But if you ask the human answer, you must say yes, and that’s the question they will not permit to be applied to the church.

MM Well said. Back at the turn of the 20th Century, the Pope was Pius X. He was the author of a document called Tra le sollecitudini and that’s the document in which captured the church teaching saying women were not fit to sing in church choirs. This was reserved to the men. Only the men were fit to do so. And if you required, for example, a soprano or a contralto, then you should use the boy soprano or, God help us all, a castrato.

JC That’s right. That’s exactly right.

MM And you’re quite right. I mean, obviously we have changed since then, a bit, but the very idea, and, again, it’s important just to remember where these ideas, the shelf life of the embeddedness of attitudes to women, the shelf life of that continues long after women sing in choirs. In fairness, it was American bishops who eventually insisted that this was so stupid and unacceptable that it would have to change. Why did they do that? Because the people of God were telling them this is a nonsense, this is antihuman, this cannot possibly be a representation of the Christ that we believe in.

Imagine a Christ who came on earth and sacrificed Himself so that boy sopranos could sing instead of women. I mean, it’s a nonsense. And eventually, because it was a nonsense it could not sustain and it fell. Going back to the issue of women priests, that kind of construct that they have invented around women and their exclusion from priesthood, that also will go the same way as castrati did in the church. Eventually it will fall under the dead weight of its own irrelevance.

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JC True, it’ll go. It’ll go eventually, provided that people as brave as you and this university continue to do these kinds of public dialogues so that this can sift through the multiple generations. Do you realise that what is being said, and in those readings, you read them, you read the names, we were all expected, and we are still expected, to see those as role models and they were certainly mine. I walked through churches as an eight-year old looking for the pictures in the stained glass windows and I wanted to find Saint Joan of Arc and if I couldn’t find Saint Joan of Arc, that was not a legitimate church.

Somebody had to fix it because it was wrong.

But do you realise that those women all come recognised a thousand years after they’re dead. Only dead women count in the Catholic church.

And it’s a fact that you bring women alive in this great place in this way. This couldn’t have happened 30 years ago. In my lifetime seminarians were not permitted to choose a woman spiritual director. Do you realise what that’s saying? It says that no spiritual woman has anything to say that will enhance the spirituality of a male. Now, that’s sick. That is so sick and it deprives the church, the world, the globe, the country half the spiritual talent, depth, the contemplation that’s been done in kitchens for thousands and thousands of years and nobody knows what it is.

that they’re not still living the faith. I find the most subversive thing going on in the Catholic church today are women’s reading groups. Women’s reading groups are changing the church. Women who used to stay alone in the kitchen, in the house, they’re now getting their friends and neighbours together and they get a crazy book written

by Joan and they say, let’s read this one this month, and even marriage changes overnight, so I know the church can.

UH Now, the two of you, on different occasions you’ve been silenced, or attempts have been made. You haven’t been silenced yet.

JC Attempts, yes.

UH How much pushback or backlash are each of you getting from traditional Catholics?

JC Well, as far as I know, I mean, nobody sent me a letter about this, so I do not want this misunderstood but I do know that I have letters from all over the United States, from lay people who say, Joan, we want to invite you to do this and such a thing but one thing we have to tell you is our priest said, we cannot have you in the church. So, we are renting a unitarian church.

UH And, Joan, what is at the root of the church’s resistance?

JC Well, I want to go back, I’m going to keep going back to that agricultural image. It was bad biology. They really took it for granted that that planting of the semen in the woman was the generation, the initiation of life and when you start there, and it makes sense, if you have nothing, no other science to counter it, well, then you’re building a whole structure.

You’re building a church around maleness and it automatically and endemically weakens the church you’re building.

UH How much longer can the church keep women down?

JC About 24 hours ago. They’ve left in droves, Ursula. It isn’t that they’re not there. It isn’t

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You have no idea how many Catholics go to unitarian churches these days, have whole programmes there, send buses there. So, I believe that there is a hit list someplace and I must be on it because, well, because some bishop is telling some priest that I can’t do a programme there. Now, if there’s anything that ought to make you worry, it’s about the effect of that kind of thinking. How bright are they? Because it’s doubling the audiences.

You now have Protestants and Catholics coming to hear me.

UH So, Mary, are you getting much pushback?

MM Ye there has been pushback, otherwise why would Cardinal Farrell have decided last year that I was not to be permitted to speak at a conference at the Vatican which had been held there for the previous number of years quite unproblematically. But the kind of people who will complain about Joan and I will probably not complain to us. They’ll complain to a cardinal. They’ll send a letter.

I know this from talking to archbishops and other persons about the letters they receive referring to me.

I remember Cardinal Vincent Nichols when I was appointed to Saint Mary’s University and I saw some of the correspondence. Some of it was just so hate-filled and vitriolic and he felt, he was actually worried about it, enough to show it to me. So, look, those kind of people they’re cowardly, they’ll hide in the shadows but they’ll go to the bishop or the cardinal or whatever.

And, unfortunately, in my direct experience with the Dicastery for Family, Laity and Life, I’ve never received an explanation as to why I was unable to speak inside the Vatican.

Even though I asked for one and tried. The Voices of Faith event which was held last March in Rome, unproblematically held there for a number of years, inside the walls of the Vatican, and suddenly two people who were on the list of speakers, they were not approved by Cardinal Farrell. Now, in fairness, this was the first year that he was the person who was supposed to approve. In past years it was a different person who never raised any problems. So, Cardinal Farrell clearly had a problem.

I think his formation as a legionary priest, a legionary of Christ, maybe had something to do with it. I think his formation as a person

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who was effectively a very close associate of Father Marcial Maciel, a person who was a big associate of his, although he had left the legionaries. I still think that formation shapes his thinking in relation to women.

It also shapes the thinking that he at least propounds in the name of the church in relation to gay people and so on. Those two scores probably, as far as he was concerned, I scored badly.

So, ironically, a conference dedicated to women in the church was not to be allowed to have women who were prepared to speak about women in the church. That was really rather strange. It was also particularly strange because by that stage it was known that the Pope was coming to Ireland last year and Cardinal Farrell, since he was born in Drimnagh, probably did know that I had been the President of Ireland for 14 years and somewhere in his mind that must have been a feature of the decision.

So, that bothered me, that he would think it all right to silence me, knowing that the Pope was coming to Ireland, to my country, the following year. And so the complexity of that bothered me and I tried very hard for a number of months, we tried to deal with the matter diplomatically and to get the thing rescinded or at least an explanation as to the thinking.

Through all that time, including with the help from the Archbishop of Dublin, I think Cardinal Farrell believed that the women were so wimpy and wimpish that they would tell the two of us who had been banned, terribly sorry, you’re going to have to go away now, as we must continue to hold the conference in the Vatican, but, as we say, the voices of faith took the heads daggers and decided that they would hold the conference outside the Vatican, rather than silence these women.

And then, miraculously, the Jesuits next door offered their headquarters.

UH Of course the great crime you’re often accused of, both of you, of being too angry.

Joan, what do you make of that?

JC I know too many jokes to be angry. I’m not angry. Or let’s put it this way.

Templeton wrote once, if we had been holier people, we would have been angrier oftener. It’s that kind of anger that I nurse.

It’s an energy. It’s fuel. It’s purpose, it’s meaning, it’s the rest of my baptismal promises and I mean that quite seriously. But am I angry in a way that would either destroy the church or any of its people? No. I’ve been in the peace movement most of my life and I believe it and I’m committed to it. I think that the function of enmity is to make another friend.

UH You wrote a brilliant piece recently about anger. You were saying we need a new virtue called anger, the type of constructive anger you’re talking about. And you ended it by saying no more nice girl.

JC I’m writing a series for National Catholic Reporter in the United States on the virtues needed for this time. Now, I’ll tell you what they are. If you quote them outside this room I’ll say you lied, because I have to feed them to the paper one at a time.

The first one is anger, holy anger. Don’t just let it roll over you.

Take a position. Know what you think and tell other people what you think. Erode the credibility of what is uncredible. I always maintain we’ve spent too much time learning to be nice and not enough time being good.

Goodness demands your anger.

Templeton wrote once, if we had been holier people, we would have been angrier oftener. It’s that kind of anger that I nurse. It’s an energy. It’s fuel. It’s purpose, it’s meaning, it’s the rest of my baptismal promises...

The second virtue for this time is scepticism. Whatever a politician tells you, don’t listen. Anything that any politician tells you, question it, check it, learn it, imbibe it yourself so that if it’s true, you are its carrier on the street. And if it’s not true, you are not its carrier on the street. The third virtue for our time, is bias.

Ask yourself what your biases are and ask yourself what bias you need to develop.

As an American, I can tell you we need a bias for the United States of America, not a bias for either the Democratic or the Republican party. Our politics have abandoned our country. This partisanship is destroying us. We need a bias for wholeness. We need a bias for unity and unification. I’m working on the last three now. I don’t know what they are.

UH That’ll do. Mary, on anger, you get that thrown at you a lot.

MM A lot, and I am indignant. There is no doubt, I am indignant and I think it’s a righteous indignation.

I look at my church and I see the people of God who have done wonderful things in the world. I see a church that is the biggest NGO in the world. It has 1.2 billion members. Of those, half of them are women. It has 300 million children whom it serves.

It is the single biggest service provider of education to our children. It is hugely, hugely influential in the world, that church.

What it teaches, what it says, what it does, what it practices, that is imbibed into hearts of little children, into adults, into communities, into institutions. It is hugely influential.

It was influential in my life. I got my education from the Mercy nuns and the Dominican nuns, Martin from the Christian brothers.

They helped us in life. From our mothers and our grandmothers

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with their faith. A lot of that good that was invested in me as a person but it also gave me an ethical value system, that I am entitled now to hold my church accountable to.

Goodness demands your anger.

And when I hold my church accountable to the very values that it taught me, I am shocked at the extent to which the clerical government structure of my church teaches the opposite of what it should believe and what it should preach.

My church is very good at talking out to the world from the moral pulpit, not good at reflecting back on itself.

That’s particularly true in the human rights field. Nobody ever stops and asks how many of the United Nations human rights instruments has the Holy See signed up to. After all, it is a permanent representative at the United Nations, the only faith system in the world to be such. And the answer is only three.

There are many, many more that it could, and including the one on women, including the anti-discriminatory treaty on women it has never signed up to. The treaty on children it signed up to with great aplomb and with great passion and now is quietly resiling from, disgracefully.

I look at another issue, and here’s an issue we’ve talked a lot about over the last number of years, about clerical child sex abuse. The church has looked for many scapegoats. It has blamed gay people, it has blamed the sexual revolution. But I look, for example, at the culture of corporal punishment embedded in church and state for thousands of years.

If I look at the Catholic catechism, even today it tells parents to beat their children in order to impose discipline on them. We would say spare the rod and spoil the child but it uses a really very awful phrase from the Book of Sirach. You’re to beat their loins. If you love your child, you will beat him. Now, think about that. Thousands of years of teaching people to truly love, you must violate the physical bodily integrity of another human being, and that little human being has no idea where the lines are.

But you as an adult, maybe you know and maybe you don’t know where those lines are.

And we’ve had thousands of years of that that we’re only now dismantling. It’s only in very recent times that here in Ireland or in Scotland, for that matter, that the rules and relation to the reasonable, the legal rules that allowed a parent to plead reasonable chastisement. When a child was physically assaulted by a parent or an adult or a teacher, a person in an institution, an orphanage, an industrial school. This was their element. They were being told by their own church, and, indeed, very often backed up by their state, this is what you can do. I think this is an area that remains utterly, utterly unexplored and it’s something we really need to own up to because in back of much of the physical abuse that travelled across a line and damaged people, and across a line further, you very often find that between the physical abuse and the sexual gratification that the abuser got, the line is not that far apart, that the line is quite thin, and I think that we have walked away from that.

And here we are today. Our church still teaches that, even though it has been asked by the Committee on the Rights of the Child,

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please review that. You have signed up to a treaty that says a child is entitled to its bodily integrity and the Committee on the Rights of the Child is telling you that corporal punishment infringes that and our church still teaches that this very day, after all the debate about child protocols. Read them all. We have them here in Ireland, child protection protocols. All around the world we have them. None of them have raised the issue of the embedded teaching on corporal punishment. Not one.

UH Joan, Pope Francis, how much of a friend is he to Catholic women?

JC Well, it’s very hard to tell. This man’s under a great deal of pressure and I do not believe that this papacy will be evaluated by what he’s done. I believe that his greatest contribution will be, hopefully, the creation of a new environment in which things can get done. For instance, the whole notion of the synod and his format of the synod makes it an event rather than simply a report to bishops. That’s been going on, what, ten or 15 years. Nothing ever came out of it. They went to Rome all the time, sat there with their caps on and somebody read to them what they were going to do and think.

That’s not the way the Amazonian synod functioned, apparently, if what we’re getting back in news reports is true. The question now is what will happen to the recommendations that were made there, one for this renewed look at the diaconate. All I’ve ever heard is my predecessor said, I have nothing to say about it, I cannot do a thing about this.

And when I hold my church accountable to the very values that it taught me, I am shocked at the extent to which the clerical government structure of my church teaches the opposite of what it should believe and what it should preach.

He’s the first one that I know who heard the report of these 200 bishops and lay people and said, I got it, I’m hearing you, you’re talking about the ministeriality of women and we just had a commission that closed on the diaconate that could not come to a conclusion and I just considered it over. I will go back. I will open that commission again, I will add new people and we will continue to consider this question.

I’m at the point in my life when small miracles mean a lot to me and this is a small miracle. Now, will he reverse it? Will he go back, look at the information himself and say, we have 14 centuries of a female diaconate. This is the one theological issue in the Roman Catholic church where theology, history and practice all come together, it cannot be denied.

You have to make up problems to refer this one and it’s, yes, but what was the ordination ceremony. What were the words? And what precisely were they ordained to do? The fact of the matter is somebody considered them quote ‘fit matter for ordination’.

It’s there. It has to be dealt with. You can’t just dismiss this forever. So, if he allows that to go on, that’s something that we haven’t seen for a while.

Will he himself strike a mace and say, this has got to be over, these prayers have to change, the ceremonies have to open, I can’t see that there. I don’t see that there. But I do see a bridge.

I see a change. I see an attitudinal change and I’m grateful for it. Do I want more? I’m too old to want more now. It’s not going to come, not for me. But at the same time, if I can see

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an environment change where we have a listening event rather than an altar boy recitation, I will consider that a step in the church.

UH Mary, your view on Pope Francis. Is he a friend? How much of a friend is he for women?

MM I don’t think he makes us a priority. I don’t think he sees us as a priority. He has other priorities. We’re pretty far down the list, it seems to me, and I agree absolutely with Joan, that if we expect him to sit behind his desk and change the things that we think need to be changed, he’s not going to do that, that’s pretty evident. His use of synods I find interesting because one of the very first documents that he wrote after he became Pope, he was scathing about how useless the synods were and how lacking in fitness for purpose.

So, in fairness to him, the four synods that we have had, have had a qualitatively different feel from previous synods, I wouldn’t find the changes desperately impressive but the fact that he did, for example, authorise the going out by way of opinion polls, asking the ordinary people to submit their views, answering questionnaires, however unfortunately, anybody who’s a social scientist will tell you were deliberately constructed in such a way as to give the most obfuscated answers imaginable, and of course in many cases we were never fed back the information that came from the people of God.

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So, to that extent, it has been synod plus but, we’ve had four synods now, two on the family, one on youth and one on the Amazon. Why were they all held in secret? Why could they not be livestreamed? These are our pastors, after all, talking about our problems and discussing information that we as the people of God have fed to them.

Why could they not be livestreamed as this is? What’s so secret? Why could there not be more women? Why were they dominated entirely, all four of them, by men? For example, at the synod for the Amazon, there were 30-odd women, not one of them had a vote. Now, among the voting men, one layman who had turned out, there was one layman who was given a vote. So, it wasn’t enough to say that these women were laity but an exception was made for him. Why? There’s a simple thing the Pope could do. If he was really minded to show that he got it where women are concerned, he does have a number of additional women working in the Curia but, honestly, that’s so 1970s. We know.

We’ve been here before. It’s the token woman thing. Put them up there, get a photograph and L’Osservatore Romano, photo op and it’s all grand. But it’s not really. What bothers me, take a very simple thing. After Vatican II it was clear, we thought, from the documents in Vatican II, that females could be altar servers. That was simple. And many of us go to church now and we see the only kids who really volunteer nowadays seem to be the girls there on the altar. But here’s the thing.

That caused a pushback and the answer to the pushback from the church, and I’m

talking about from the highest level in the church, was to say, okay females can be altar servers but if any particular bishop and his diocese doesn’t want to have them, he can decree that there shall not be women. Or if he decrees that there can be women, an individual parish priest can decide, not in my backyard.

So, why is that today’s law? It is modern church law. It doesn’t belong to the last century or the century before. It belongs to these times. It’s unjust. There is no reason for it in the wide world. One of the reasons that was offered was that they still wanted to encourage young boys to become altar servers in order to encourage them to think about vocations. Now, just think about that.

I mean, first of all, it has never worked, the numbers going into seminary.

But I also have a problem about the very idea of taking in eight and nine-year old boys and deliberately trying at that stage to somehow channel them in the direction of priesthood. I mean, I have a real problem with their liberty and their freedom in that regard.

So, look, that’s something. He could do that tomorrow with the stroke of the pen and he has not done it, which is why I say that he says things from time to time that show an attitude to women that is paternalistic rather than egalitarian. He talked about female theologians being the cherry on top of the cake. I mean, seriously?! I got very indignant and my response to that was, actually, no, Holy Father, we are not the cherry on top, we are the leaven in the cake and take a look at the cake. The cake is flat in the middle and sinking because the leaven is leaving. It’s out the door and if you want the leaven in the cake and you want the cake to rise, make women your priority. I do not perceive him as a Pope who has made women a priority.

UH Joan and Mary, a lot of the traditional Catholics would listen to you and they’d say, you know what, if you don’t like the rules, just leave the church. So, why do you stay?

JC Because as far as I’m concerned, the church is not a place of rules, it’s a place for growth, the growth of the church as well as the growth of the membership, of the congregation. I went through this years ago, I made up my mind that if I really believed

what I was saying, maybe I had to leave. But I’m a social scientist by training and I know the power of symbols and relationships and I decided to look at it very, very carefully.

And this is the list that kept me in the church.

I decided that I had a great model and it was the model of Jesus with women, the women that He commissioned, the women that He listened to, the women that He raised from the dead. That model I could hold onto. That was clear. No amount of theological leisure domain could destroy that image for me.

Secondly, I had a model of Jesus who went into depression, who had to withdraw Himself, simply to go on in this situation where the feedback on Him was in the end totally destructive. But He did go on, He didn’t just stand there, He just kept moving ahead and ahead and ahead. That model sustained my own fight with rejection and a feeling of being not put out, worse than that.

The Amish call it shunning.

The whole notion that you’re there but you’re not there and everybody else around you is there, that became a reality. The model of Jesus became terribly important to me then.

The sacramental life is very important to me.

I mean, yes, I can take my Bible out and sit on a hill and, if worse came to worse, I would.

But the fact of the matter is that as long as the sacraments are and that whole notion of the sense of the divine, it impels me. But most of all, I think when you come right down to it, this church is my home. This is my family.

Now, it’s a dysfunctional family but I’ve lived in two or three of those already. This is the church that gave me the first images of God, the first sense of goodness and the first invitation into a holy life myself. So, I stay in a church where I get a lot of support. And then, finally, the one reason you ought to stay in the Catholic church is because it’s a master of sin.

UH A master of sin?

JC Yes. This church has sinned so many times.

Think about the inquisition, the crusades, the selling of relics. We finally caught up with Luther. It only took 400, 500 years. I mean, you can’t have it all.

Anyway, it was 1972 and I was in Rome for

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one of my first meetings and I was there for four or six weeks, just enough time to get terribly depressed myself. The pomp and the power and the posturing and the distance. As a woman you just knew this was not your city.

Not your place at all. This was not your mass.

They can turn a woman into an observer faster, so help me God, than you can turn a mosquito into an irritant. I mean, it was really a problem.

So, I went to an old monk up at Sant’Anselmo, he was probably in the community 70 years himself, and I told him. I just poured it out. I was a young kid and was this my church, and he said, “ah, sister pazienza, pazienza.” Oh, man! And he walked away. Now, 25 years later I figured out what I was supposed to be patient about. The church is not God. Only God is God. At its best, the church is a vehicle for your own growth.

I’m a smells and bells person and I know that.

I like the candles, I like the incense, I like all that kind of stuff. Every once in a while I can hardly bear it and then I remember that the system has nothing to do, really, with my sense of Godness and, as I was fond of saying to people a long time ago, the more I thought about leaving the church, I found myself forever thinking about oysters. Oysters? I mean, it went through my mind.

So, one day I said to myself, why does this word oyster keep coming up? So, I tried to figure out what I knew about oysters, which is absolutely nothing. I didn’t even like oysters. I’d never eaten an oyster. It was like swallowing your baby brother. I didn’t want to do any of that. So, I said to myself, what do you know about an oyster? Well, an oyster spawns on a bed of sand, right? And that sand invades that oyster. Immediately the oyster beings to defend itself against the sand and it defends itself by generating a gel that surrounds the sand but, interestingly enough, does not destroy the sand. The sand just keeps getting closer and closer to being a pearl and at the end of the day, the oyster is valuable and the pearl is valuable and the whole process has come together and that’s when I say I discovered the ministry of irritation.

UH Thank you, Joan. Mary, why do you stay?

MM Well, I’m definitely determined to be an

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irritant. Oh, absolutely. I understand that role very much and I think that that’s the grace that God has given me. I think God wants me to be in this church. Occasionally, of course, I get frustrated and it would be easy, as many people do, to walk away. Precisely because I also understand that although the church today still teaches that once we baptised into the church, there is no way out. We don’t have a right to leave. I believe that to be absolutely morally, ethically, legally and every other way incorrect.

We have our human right and our human right to walk away is what many people exercise and do so freely. I choose not to do that. I choose to stay because for all the madness of it at times, there is also the comfort, the comfort of family, the comfort of that which is familiar, the energy of the grace, the meeting of fantastic people who energise you, the watching and seeing around the world what is done in the name of those 1.2 billion people, the lives that they live and how, in those lives, God’s presence very often is the difference between enduring life and enjoying life.

In getting through life with some degree of hope or hopelessness and very often it is the God thing, it is the church thing that allows people just to get through and I look back on my life, which has had plenty of ups and downs and particularly living in a conflict situation in Northern Ireland, being confronted by the ludicrous, awful historic dysfunction that allowed Christians to kill Christians and one set of Christians to regard themselves as superior to the other and both of them to hold that sense of seniority against each other and not to have enough compassion or pity or love for each other to be able, for all those 30 years of the troubles, to just sit around and come up with the answers that were eventually always going to have to be found in the Good Friday Agreement, all of that.

I look at all of that and I ask myself, how did I get through it, and, honestly, it was God who got me through that and very often it was just sitting in a church, going to mass or it was the community of church that very often got me through. So, I still rely on that very often, just to get me through. And also, there’s a kind of a thing in me that I won’t, I wouldn’t be pushed out by anybody. There’s that as well.

UH What can Catholic women do now? Look at all the women here. What practical things can we do in our lives, in our parishes? If you remember, earlier in the year a group of German women went on strike. These are the women who voluntarily worked in churches.

For a week they went on strike. Could that ever happen here in Ireland? What do you think? What can women practically do in their ordinary lives?

JC Well, I would put yourself in a position where you are magnifying your own voice. And by that I mean join renewal groups. I used to talk to people about saving the whales. If whales are your thing and there happened to be no whales in your back yard, you could write to Save the Whales and send $5. That magnifies your voice and your interest and brings it into the local area.

I think more of that has to happen in church but I see it, I really believe that great change has already happened in the Catholic Church and a lot of it is being demonstrated in these intentional communities. House churches.

We’re back to house churches. And we’re also seeing the church become not much beyond a sacramental weigh station because they no longer even have the personnel they need to expand that activity. You can expand it. You can bring your groups together. You can join other groups. I think those things are very important and then I always put a high priority on, for heaven’s sakes, do something about the language in the churches.

deference, and insist on being listened to on equal terms.

And I think that that’s beginning to happen.

I think of my mother who’s going on 90 now and a young priest coming into the parish and giving a homily, in the past there would be a shaking of hands at the very most perhaps and a thank you, Father, and now she’s quite likely to say to him, do you see that 20 minutes of a homily. My life is nearly over, just shorten it. Seriously, shorten it. And I think it’s wonderful to see people in her generation now with a feistiness that they didn’t have maybe 50, 60 years ago and a determination that their life’s experience and their entitlement to respect is not going to be brushed under a carpet of false deference.

So, I think an insistence in those, not the confrontations but in those encounters, that we do not use the false deference. I also think that we need to constantly, whether it’s individually or in groups, make our voices known by writing, whether it’s by email every dicastery in Rome will have an email address. Find it, get it, write to them. And to counter, always to be willing to counter.

UH Mary, what do you reckon?

MM Part of the structure of the church, as we’ve experienced it in Ireland, has been an acceptance of the fact that what we call the ontological change in priesthood places them apart from us. This idea that the priest, when he is ordained, becomes something other, something superior, something better than us who are the laity, and that in turn then feeds a culture of deference, that feeds a culture of false deference, that feeds a culture of silence and I think all of those things now need to be stripped away. I’m not suggesting that we should become rude people but I do think that we need to strip away, in our relationships, for example, with our priests and our pastors, the deference, the false

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I do think that we need to strip away, in our relationships, for example, with our priests and our pastors, the deference, the false deference, and insist on being listened to on equal terms.

One of the great things at the moment is the way in which we’ve had comments from, for example, the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, Bishop Alphonsus. I know, calm down now. I speak as somebody who knows him reasonably well and I think he’s a fabulous singer and he’s a great crack on the golf course. He really is, he’s a fine person but, merciful hour, sometimes he comes out with stuff that just stops you in your tracks and you think, seriously, Bishop? Yoga, a bunch of old ladies in lycra with rolled up mats trying to get their muscles working again, I mean, just give them a break, for God’s sake.

But I think what’s wonderful about that is in the past the saying of that by someone of his stature might have just stopped dead at that point. Now we all go, oh, for God’s sake, Fonsi. No, seriously. And there’s a discussion and there’s a debate and we can be irreverent and we can be contradictory because we live in that world now. The secular world interweaves with the world of church now in a way the church would hope that it didn’t but it does.

The hermetic bunkers are not existing any longer. We talk.

You listen to the radio, you listen to the news and we weave these things in and out. If we can’t get through to them on the episcopal phone, then we go to the Joe Duffy Show and I think that’s extraordinary. I think that’s a wonderful thing. We have social media that we didn’t have before. We have the press.

We have access to the wonders of the secular world where you can speak your mind and, believe me, they do listen. They do.

Because they keep a watchful eye on what is going on out there.

So, write to them. Write to the episcopal conference in particular because it’s the one place where they do all get together. I think they need to be challenged out of a complacency, a place that deference allows them to inhabit and, unfortunately, the vast majority, in my view, of bishops worldwide are quite cowardly because they are cowed by in their turn the deference that they offer to their superiors and to the overreach of obedience to the magisterium.

Obedience to the magisterium should be that narrow but it has such an extensive creep. I’ve been in Rome on a number of occasions in company where Cardinal Law had been invited, and you knew that people were actually offended that he had been invited but yet the same people would kiss his ring and, honestly, I remember at one point, he held out his hand for me to kiss his ring and I just, I won’t say the language that I used but I just said no way. I couldn’t do it.

I was in company with two other clerics, both of whom had just told me how offended they were to see him there and yet they kissed the ring of that man. Now, that’s what we have to cut. We have to have somebody who is able to say, actually, I’m sorry, no, there’s a problem here, and here is why I can’t shake your hand.

JC I think lay people have to realise that when the Pope identifies clericalism as a major problem in the church, he’s right. Why is he right? Because it infects the atmosphere as well as the answers.

But you have to recognise that you are part of that. You have created clericalism and you have allowed it to go on. When you stop it, it will stop.

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MM Correct.

UH Question from the audience. I fear the Catholic Church as we know it today will exclude women’s equality. Do you envision a schism between Rome and the Western Catholic experience, especially America?

JC There’s no doubt that it’s possible but it’s not stirring. There’s nobody out there stirring the pot. It is not the top discussion out for supper at any night. Nobody wants a schism, they want growth. They want the church. They want that divine presence in their life. And so here’s the problem as I see it. The church itself does not realise that the church has changed. You have, haven’t you? Yes, you have. And in you are the changes.

Now, the church is trying to move away from those changes because it will make terrible demands on it, which is why you must make wonderful demands back. Because they are listening, they do hear, and they don’t want a schism any more than anybody I know wants a schism. That schism, if there is one, is what I call the church in waiting. We have lost membership in droves and a lot of them have been women. And I’ll tell you why the seminaries are not going to fill up before the women’s question has been resolved.

Because Irish Catholic mothers are not sitting around, and any place on the globe, saying I want my son to be a priest.

Now, if the women are not sending their first, second, third and fourth born until she’s a girl, honey, think about the priesthood, Cathy, you’d probably be good for it, it’s not going to happen until that day. You have it all. It’s in you. Don’t feed the clericalism, change the language, magnify your voices. The whole notion, I mean, if Donald Trump can tweet, for God’s sake, can’t you tweet a couple of things? Figure out something. You are not powerless. You just don’t know you’ve been empowered. Now, go ye hence and do likewise.

MM Actually, what bothers me is the huge efforts that the church did put in to, particularly in Benedict’s time, to reconcile with those who were regarded as schismatic, Pius X and The Lefevre. I often thought if literally onetenth of that effort had gone into prioritising women, it would have been much healthier

for the church rather than chasing after people who had quite deliberately decided to exclude themselves from the church.

Will there be a schism? I don’t know. I actually don’t believe in a schism, to be honest. I don’t believe in heresy. These are canonical crimes as such. I believe that the issue of schism gets talked about in terms that insist on an orthodoxy that the church really does not benefit from in terms of its health. It benefits from debate. It benefits from dialogue. It benefits from having academics, for example, an academy of scholars, who are able to push out boundaries of knowledge, to raise questions about doctrine rather than what we’ve been through, which has killed off the academy, silenced people, said you can only research provided your research challenges nothing.

You can only be an academic in a Catholic institution if you stay four square inside the bunker, this is not the world that God created.

If it were, we’d all still be in the caves and we’d be still rubbing two sticks together, hoping that we’d maybe light a fire. We are beyond that. We have been given the gift of brainpower, intellectual power, heart power, spirit, soul, brain and we’re meant to use them all.

So, schism seems to me a word that is thrown out because I don’t like what you say and so because I don’t like what you say, I’m going to say you’re threatening the church, you’re threatening the unity of the church. Well, here’s the thing. I’m happy with a church of disunity. I’m happy with a church of disparate voices and argumentative voices and challenging voices and if somebody wants to call that schism, so be it, but, honestly, I think if what they’re really talking about is debate, then that is a healthier church.

UH What will it take for the church to wake up?

JC I happen to believe that the church has woken up.

UH Has it?

JC But it’s resisting. I mean, it’s all out there. Why would you have a cabal trying to attack this particular Pope and calling him unorthodox?

If they didn’t know what was really going on there, why would they want another? They

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want what I call the new old Catholic Church.

I know that. I understand that that’s there.

But I can’t see that it’s a necessary conclusion to a discussion like this throughout the entire church.

What Mary just said is the important thing.

It’s the function of these universities to keep these ideas moving. And if it can’t be done in Catholic universities, do what women have done. When they wouldn’t allow them to come to the seminaries to get their degrees, they went elsewhere. So, now the church has a whole body of women with doctorates in ministry who got them in protestant churches, so I hope that makes them feel better.

UH What can each of us ordinary lay women do now? I tried your idea of reading groups.

Talk a little more about 14 centuries of female deaconesses.

JC Well, you have to realise there are 14 rites, 14 separate formats of Catholicism. You don’t learn much about them in a Catholic system but once you’re in a larger system, they’re very, very clear. You have something like seven rites that are Byzantine and you have the Armenians and the Coptics and the Chaldeans. So, those are all Catholics who have, out of their cultures, developed a church that you would only recognise in small pieces. So, we’ve always had multiple differences but we have never been trained to appreciate or recognise them as differences that do not destroy the seam of the church.

So, when you pull yourself together into groups and you begin good discussions of books and manuscripts and magazine articles that are really treating these as questions, should this happen, can this happen, has it ever happened, one of the things you’re going to run into are deaconesses and they went on being ordained in these other rights and especially in Greek orthodoxy itself, which still has deaconesses.

Now, you have to start by understanding you were a great church for the first seven councils of the church to begin with and all of that started at that level of history. So, it’s out there. We have an ordination right for deaconesses. Everybody knows it. Nobody’s hiding it. It’s in prayer books everywhere.

The Romans know it too and they’re just fighting now about what was the subject

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matter of the ordination. When I argue, what they’re really worrying about, is if you ordain a woman now, this smart crowd is going to remember that someplace in their education they ran straight into not fit for ordination. A dog is not fit for ordination and the woman is not fit for ordination.

But here you have the ordination of women that went on right up to the 14th Century and nobody said that wasn’t fit. We’re only now arguing about it. And the answer that the church is giving to this is the most reprehensible embarrassing answer that an intellectual institution should be seen dead with. I saw this in print, Mary, four days ago.

The answer to the deaconate problem in the Roman Catholic Church is this. Of course we’ll have male deacons and, yes, we will even have married priests, older men who have been proven viri probati. All good. Give it a Latin name, everybody knows Jesus wanted it. They wouldn’t dare to say it in their own. they’ll tell you that’s schismatic. So, they had this article a priest wrote it about this deaconate problem for women and he says, well, of course, there’s no real problem.

Yes, we’ve always had deaconesses in one of the rights or the other. Yes, we have the ordination ritual, we’ve always had it, but you can’t ordain women deaconesses because they would expect then to be ordained as a priest.

Now, here’s why I’m insulted by that right up to my hairline. When they ordained male deacons, married deacons, they did not say we can’t have married deacons. The next thing they’ll expect is that they’ll just move on to priesthood. But, you see, it’s right back to Thomas Aquinas. Women are not rational enough to be able to control their expectations.

UH Wasn’t that fantastic? Such great insights.

Such understanding. Imagine what sort of a church we might have if these two amazing women were organising our church. You are the women the Vatican couldn’t silence, and we hope they never do.

Thank you.

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