Fifty years ago, there was quite a level of surprise with the publication of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae that reiterated the Catholic Church's opposition to artificial birth control. As a result there were undoubtedly many Catholic women in Ireland who felt they had to engage in a process of compartmentalisation to balance their faith and their personal needs and desires.
Like many others, Ireland’s best known agony aunt Angela McNamara, a mother of four, was “gobsmacked” by the encyclical and her postbag grew in size to include correspondence that came from “women with selfish husbands; women whose own needs for intimacy were great; couples who had very little other pleasure in life . . . couples who argued and fought about the meaning of the encyclical”.
Interviewed about Humane Vitae decades later, former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald suggested it represented a position that was "non-credible in rational terms . . . and once the church took up a position which was non credible in rational terms its authority over the whole sexual area disintegrated".
In 1995 she warned there were Christian feminists within the Catholic Church 'who will not suffer sexist fools gladly'
It was also becoming clear that priests differed in their responses: “shopping around” for an “understanding” priest had begun. Another version of an Irish solution to an Irish problem was how some doctors facilitated women taking the pill; this newspaper reported in 1968 that the previous year, according to a pharmaceutical source, an estimated 15,000 women were on the pill in Ireland, 25 per cent for “medical reasons” and 75 per cent for “social reasons”.
Navigating a man’s world
In dealing with the church and its teachings, women 50 years ago were navigating a man’s world and undoubtedly an often misogynistic one. Some who had children were “churched” after they had given birth in order to be purified; one tenement dweller in Dublin recalled “the way it was you were like a fallen woman” even in marriage: “I thought I was a dirty woman because I had the child.”
There was much hope in the 1960s that things would change and not just in relation to contraception. The Second Vatican Council from 1962-5 promised much, but a book published in 2015 edited by Niall Coll, Ireland and Vatican II, contains repeated reminders of the failure to implement promised changes, especially in relation to the involvement of women. In 1992, a survey conducted under the auspices of the Commission for Justice and Peace among women who considered themselves committed Catholics revealed 68 per cent felt angered at the Church's treatment of women and only 11 per cent felt the church authorities were supportive of women.
Historian Oliver Rafferty, a Jesuit, stresses in this book that “the Second Vatican Council failed in any real sense to renew Irish Catholicism”. Interestingly, another one of the areas of failure identified is the lack of theologically trained lay people.
The papal visit did not in fact better equip the Catholic Church in Ireland to deal effectively with its challenges and problems
Mary McAleese is now one of the best known lay people to have studied canon law and her words carry a greater weight because of that, but it is not the case that the views she expressed earlier this month are just born of her recent doctorate or her exclusion from the Vatican. In 1995 she warned there were Christian feminists within the Catholic Church “who will not suffer sexist fools gladly”; she insisted it was extraordinary at a time when the church was struggling with vocations that it would make clear to women who “would wish to play their role in the future church as pastors . . . that their services are not required”.
The will of Christ
In relation to the doctrinal argument that a male priesthood is the will of Christ, she rejected the idea of “a God who for reasons which look suspiciously like dressed-up misogyny, has confined priesthood to men”. Because of the lack of a forum for feedback to be delivered to the male, decision-making levels of the church, women who wanted change had to be always “shouting from outside”.
They still are. And they still will be after Pope Francis makes his visit here in August, a trip formally confirmed this week. Once again, talk of renewal and revitalisation of the church on the back of a “charismatic” pope will be made, as was the case in 1979 when Pope John Paul II visited.
That visit may have generated huge crowds and a mood approximating giddy hysteria but, as one of the historians of Irish Catholicism, James Donnelly, has concluded: “The papal visit did not in fact better equip the Catholic Church in Ireland to deal effectively with its challenges and problems.” Nor will the impending visit of Pope Francis. Women looking to be taken seriously will still be “shouting from outside” which is deeply ironic given Francis’s stated commitment to open, honest consultation, characterised by what he calls parrhesia, the “boldness of speech” practised in the early church.
According to Archbishop John Charles McQuaid in 1971, contraception was “a right that cannot even exist”. It came to exist, but McAleese and those who share her views will be waiting in vain for women priests to exist.