St Patrick's Day: Time to Call Out Snakes.

From our window.

It's always a tough time of year, but St Patrick bids us celebrate the coming Spring in the midst of the hardships that are its essential precondition. In Portugal the heavy rains are not enjoyed, even as they fill the empty reservoirs. In such a way does truth come into the world, an unwelcome guest. But how the world needs it! Somehow we seem to be afflicted with leaders who have a particularly strong aversion to it at the moment. Not to be outdone by Moscow and Washington, in Ireland we have our own version!

“Pope Francis has said that the issue of women’s ordination isn’t up for discussion, that women are permanently excluded from priesthood…. I believe that women should be ordained, I believe the theology on which that is based is pure codology. I’m not even going to be bothered arguing it. Sooner or later it’ll fall apart,  fall asunder under its own dead weight.”  -Ms Mary McAleese, as reported in thejournal.ie here.

Such is the pitch of the lady who is looking for ‘radical, innovative, strategic ideas’ for the inclusion of women in the life of the Church. As she slides along on the slime of such buzzwords, I would rather she scrawled up No Popery! But why  doesn’t she just show us how it’s done in one of the Protestant churches? Asked why she stays in the Catholic Church, she replies: “I stay because I choose to stay part of an institution that has no equal on the planet in terms of its outreach. No NGO does what the Church does. They inspire me.”

That’s about as bizarre a statement of faith as they come; it also seems about as two-faced as Mr Nigel Farage drawing his salary from the European Parliament. The Vatican was quite right to exclude her from the ‘Why Women Matter’ Conference in Rome, when that is her attitude. But if she did bother to make an argument, she would find that even many protestants would not agree with her. Has she read the essay on the subject of women priests by her countryman, C.S.Lewis, for instance?

I am not denying that there is a lot of work to be done in the matter of the role of women. I just don’t think Ms McAleese has got it right. Meanwhile, there have always been many smart people saying of the Catholic Church words like:- ‘Sooner or later it’ll fall apart, fall asunder under its own dead weight.’ When she uses that trendy little word ‘codology’ to describe the Pope’s teaching, does it not give her any pause for thought that the Gospel has been referred to as ‘pure folly’ ever since St Paul’s day? And meanwhile, that this same Folly has done far, far more for the dignity of women than the feminists will ever do? Has the world ever heard a more truly radical statement than Our Lady’s great hymn, the Magnificat?

In fact, the ‘codology’ on which the male priesthood is based is too big a subject for me here; but  I will attempt to give a personal account of my own reasoning. Attending Mass here in Portugal always renews my conviction that the preponderantly female congregations would not like to have priestesses presiding at all, and as for myself, I would not participate if there were.  

It was D.H.Lawrence who said that the Pope knows more about sex than an army of sex therapists. What might he have been getting at? In the most delicate and dignified way possible, Catholic liturgy as well as theology is laced with sexual imagery. Lawrence probably would have argued that it was the sex that was at the root of it all. However this matter of polarity in dynamic power  is reflected all through reality, in electricity for instance. It is built into the very structure of life, which in the end constitutes one big harmony; both the ding and the dong are absolutely necessary to this, and the one cannot do without the other. Struggling with the limitations of language, we may call, in electricity for instance, one pole ‘positive’ and the other ‘negative’. Is the former better than the latter? If one isolates one pole or the other, the whole thing shuts down.

In this respect, I would agree with Ms McAleese. The problem is that in her ‘advanced nations’, in the LaLa Land of modernity, differences have to be suppressed in the interests of ‘equality’, even between ‘positive and negative’ in more usual meanings of the word. None of your subjecting poor little snowflakes to the fact that their work may be plain bad, or even that if they turn to the right, then they cannot turn left! But poles are essential, two parts of any single transaction, and they cannot exist except in tandem. Such is the admittedly ultimately mysterious structure of reality. Concept begets conception.

In the basic transaction of the sexes, men give and women receive. Even thus, the Word of God came as a divine seed from without our world. Fundamental to our Faith, and in opposition to much contemporary

Photo by Ger K.

culture, the assertion stands that we do not find the means of salvation within ourselves or within Nature and that the focus of our lives needs to be beyond their daily round, if that same daily round is to discover its meaning. It is in their very immersion in ‘drudgery’ that so many women realise such truth, and thus on the whole tend to be better and more spiritual human beings than men. It is the humble among us who are closest to God’s heart, and the Pope’s too! But if you find sufficient meaning in Nature alone, well then priestesses are for you.

In contrast to the Latins, the English set out to enormously reduce if not eliminate the role of gender in their language. It is surely not a coincidence that now Anglophone culture is obsessed with ‘equality’ between the sexes, by which it tends to mean ironing out the differences between them as much as possible. A true feminism would rather, to my mind, celebrate them. A glance at contemporary culture hardly gives one confidence that it is producing much in the line of happiness or fulfillment; ‘barren’ seems a pretty good word to describe it in these times. Rather, how sweet it is to light up our lives with the ding, dong of sexual feelings! To do so, however, they need to be properly wired, as in marriage between a man and a woman. Again, by no mere coincidence, Ms McAleese does not agree. The Catholic Church and Faith however is clear, simple and coherent; she hopes and intends to take the words of the Prophet Isaiah to herself-

‘as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,

So shall your God rejoice over you.’