This isn’t an order — it is merely a suggestion to stay away from mass for one day to show the depth of anger that is out thereTHE postman doesn’t need to knock twice at Jennifer Sleeman’s door.
For starters, her hearing is keen enough to tune into the cluck-cluck of her pair of laying hens who always announce the arrival of two eggs daily, lightly laid.
As well as that, she has become used to the familiar clatter that accompanies the postman’s presence. Nowadays her eyes and ears are fixed on the letterbox in the doorway of the bungalow she has built in Clonakilty in west Cork.
It is her morning alarm clock call to get up and on with the business of tending her vegetable garden, cleaning out the hen-house and, when the need arises, saving the world — and particularly the Vatican — from its own excesses.
Later this month she wants Catholic women to engage in a boycott of Sunday mass for a range of reasons, among them perpetual male dominance, the ban on the ordination of women, and to express horror at the paedophile scandals.
Ever since she sought to galvanise Irish Catholic women to make their voices heard, she has been receiving post by the bucket-full, most of it in her favour.
"Here’s one from Judge James McNulty," she explains. "He wishes me well. What a lovely man."
Another lovely man is the influential American writer and Newsweek columnist Robert Blair Kaiser.
According to him, Ms Sleeman is a revolutionary, albeit a gentle and refined one.
"She wants to let the Vatican and the Irish Church know that women are tired of being treated as second-class citizens," he says, full of admiration for the 80-year-old great-grandmother, who has called on women to boycott Sunday mass on September 26, a date chosen for no other reason than it is the eve of her 81st birthday.
A campaigner on a variety of issues for years, she is too sweet to be a crank, yet too formidable to be dismissed or ignored. Whatever the rights or wrongs of her boycott campaign, she has struck a chord with disaffected and disappointed members of the Catholic Church in Ireland.
"Not everyone agrees, with me," of course," she says brightly, pointing to the disparity between the thick bundle of ‘good letters’ and the sliver of ‘bad’ on her kitchen table, "but at least I hope it will make them pause for thought."
As revolutionaries go, Mrs Sleeman is more Mother Teresa than Joan of Arc. She doesn’t cut a commanding physical presence. Small and slight, with an air of quiet detachment, she is the Everywoman of Granny-hood.
She cooks on an old fashioned range cooker, grows pea-sized tomatoes in her back garden and her pantry is full of raspberry, strawberry and blackcurrant jams which she has nurtured from seed to jam-jar.
But these are merely preoccupations. Apart from her six children, 13 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, her twin passions are the environment and the Catholic Church. She is a convert to both belief systems.
Mrs Sleeman was originally baptised in the Presbyterian faith, and converted on marriage 54 years ago — but, she insists, by free choice — to Roman Catholicism. She also has been an environmental campaigner for decades.
Born in England in 1929, she spent her early childhood in South Africa where her father ran a farm in Cape province in what she terms the pre-Apartheid era.
"This was before mass emigration, so there were not that many black people in South Africa in those days. The first black man I saw was called Frank and he worked on our farm, looking after the cows."
Life along the Cape was idyllic for a youngster. "We didn’t have a plantation, or anything like that. Our house was quite small but there was great freedom there and my sister and I would ride our ponies for hours."
The Second World War changed all that when her father, who was in the Royal Navy Reserve, was called up and Jennifer was shipped off to her mother’s birthplace of Scotland, where her two sisters still live.
"Things were very different there and our existence was quite frugal during the war and my time there taught me to be very economical. On Sundays, we would attend the Church of Scotland, where my uncle was an Elder."
She met her husband, Brian, who was in the British Army, there and they married in 1949. Then she endured further uprooting when he was posted to the occupied city of Berlin.
"My life has been divided into sections," she says, "different incarnations, really. After the war Berlin was run by the Allies. We mixed with the French, Americans and Russians. We used to have dinner parties with tinned Spam while the Russians threw luxurious parties with champagne and lilacs on the dining tables flown in from Italy."
On her husband’s retirement, they came to Ireland, running a dairy farm near Killavullen in north Cork. "There were no African people to help me out there. I had to milk the cows myself."
She also had to care for six children, three boys and three girls. Later they moved to Ardfield in west Cork and it was in Clonakilty that she built a house for herself after her husband died of Alzheimer’s in 1988.
"I absolutely love it here in Clonakilty," she says. "The people are wonderful. Of all the places I have lived throughout my life, Clon is the place where I have always felt most at home."
Her hands-on approach to farming and gardening gave her an affinity with the earth and nature and she became an environmental campaigner. "I joined the Greens when it was still the Ecology Party. I did it because what the Greens are trying to achieve just makes sense to me, and I like things to make sense."
Jennifer is also a member of the Cork Food Web and in 2007 she was named the Cork Environmental Forum Outstanding Individual for her efforts to promote fair trade, another cause close to her heart.
But it is her Church campaign that has attracted most attention, partly because she is a convert and partly because her son is a monk at Glenstal, a dichotomy the media, in particular, has been quick to notice.
"Ours is quite an ecumenical family. My granddaughter, Emma, is a Buddhist nun in Scotland and one of my sons has converted to the Church of Ireland. That does not bother me. I am very happy about it."
SHE’S been amazed by the public’s response to her call for a mass boycott in every sense of the word.
"It has all been a bit overwhelming. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. There has been the odd person saying: ‘You should be going to mass more, not less.’ But the majority of people have been very kind and very supportive of the idea."
Her cause has been mentioned on several blogs on the internet where it is receiving support and she has generated media interested in Britain, Italy, Germany, France and the US.
"I had the BBC down here and they made a programme. I have to admit that I love all the attention I am getting", she says, disarmingly.
"I didn’t realise that my boycott coincides with the visit of the Pope to Britain so the BBC mentioned it in a programme on the visit. I don’t have a TV myself so I had to rush over to my daughter’s house to look at it."
Mrs Sleeman feels the church’s treatment of women is unfair and that they essentially treat them like second class citizens. She believes the Church does not appreciate the level of anger on this issue.
"I am not like the Catholic Church in that this isn’t an order — it is merely a suggestion to stay away from mass for one day to show the depth of anger that is out there. I think this might give people, who perhaps feel voiceless in the church, a voice. There are lots of women who feel very strongly about being able to do more within the church but are simply not being allowed to do so."
Jennifer is in a worthy tradition of Christian women who called for change and reform throughout the ages.
In the 14th century, St Bridget of Sweden, a mother of eight, regularly trekked off to Rome to give Pope Urban V a piece of her mind. Blair Kaiser, who reported on the second Vatican Council for Time magazine, sees Jennifer like that and believes she has probably started a revolution.
She doesn’t quite see it that way.
"I don’t consider myself a revolutionary," she says. "the whole idea is ridiculous. I joined the Roman Church by choice and I have no regrets. However it is obvious that it must change. I feel extremely sorry for ‘good’ priests. They are struggling, both with the outdatedness of the Church and the huge workload they now carry in parishes. In Clonakilty, there are now only two priests when we used to have six and they have three churches to tend to. I have a great friend in Knocknaheeny in Cork city and he has replaced three priests."
"The attitude of the Church towards half the world’s population does not make sense, given that there are many women who would make wonderful priests. The ageing ministry is literally dying, so unless the Church drags itself into the 21st century it will die, too, or, at least be very much diminished and I would hate for that to happen."