MANY READERS will have had experiences so intense that they temporarily create a kind of insulated space where ordinary concerns do not penetrate and time keeps a different rhythm.Serious illness is one, the birth of a child is another, and death is a third.
The past two weeks have been like that for me, experiencing the final illness, death and funeral of my beloved 93-year-old father, Willie O’Brien.
Although he reached a great age, due in no small part to the 24-hour-a-day care he received from my brother Joe, it still was not easy to part with him.
When you emerge somewhat shakily from the cocoon such events create around you, it is always a mild shock to discover that the world has gone on merrily without you. The cost of Anglo Irish is still going up like a monkey playing with a cash register, Stephen Hawking has declared God redundant, and people are still discussing the proposed boycott of Mass on September 26th.
For what it’s worth, I think Jennifer Sleeman, the originator of the boycott idea, is a mighty woman. Check out her work on sustainability, and her part in getting Clonakilty declared Ireland’s first Fairtrade town. If we had more like her, we might not be sleepwalking our way to environmental disaster.
I understand very well her motivation in suggesting a boycott. She has provided a focus for people who are deeply frustrated with the Catholic Church for many reasons, including for its failure to deal adequately for so long with sexual abuse of children by clergy.
However, I would never have chosen a boycott of Sunday Mass. In fact, I would have suggested the opposite, that instead of staying away, women should take the top pews in every church and sit shoulder to shoulder on September 26th.
Such a gesture would not come easily. I don’t like sitting towards the front myself. It was my husband who persuaded me that if we had any hope of keeping our children’s interest in what was going on, they had to be able to see. So this mother broke reluctantly with years of rural conditioning and started moving up towards the front.
Women sitting together, close to the front, would be at once a gesture of solidarity, and so unusual as to be noteworthy. If women stay away, it is essentially a negative gesture.
Personally, I am not at all animated by the question of women’s ordination. To me, it reinforces the idea of a clerical caste, that you have to be ordained to have a “real” role. I am much more interested in the integration of lay people in decision-making and service at all levels of the church.
When I think of the history of the church, there were plenty of strong-minded women who effected reform from within, at a time when women were of such low status that such acts would have been scandalous. Think of Birgitta of Sweden, mother and grandmother, roundly criticising the popes of the time, or Catherine of Siena’s robust advice to pope Gregory XI.
Catherine Wiley, grandmother of 10, and founder of the Catholic Grandparents Association, is another mighty woman. She set up the association in order to celebrate the important role that grandparents play in families, and often part of that role is modelling a life based on faith and belief.
When I accepted an invitation, months ago, to speak at the fourth annual National Grandparents Pilgrimage in Knock, which is on tomorrow, I had no idea that my own children’s much-loved grandfather, Poppa, would die so soon beforehand.
I know that faith was the bedrock of my father’s life, underpinning the thousands of hours of service he gave to the Vincent de Paul, to other community activities, and to his church.
It enabled him to survive his home burning to the ground, with the loss of irreplaceable documents and local history that he had carefully preserved. It helped him to surmount even the sudden tragic death of his wife, Kathleen, to whom he was completely devoted.
I know he was a huge influence not only on my siblings, Liam, Joe and Anne, and me, but on his grandchildren, who were heartbroken at his passing. As my brother Joe said, our father lived from the era of the ass and cart to satellites.
He found meaning and sustenance in his faith through it all. I don’t want to be part of a generation that throws all of that away as worthless or out of date.
Nor do I want to return to an era where people supinely accepted the church as always right. I want to be part of a church that is robustly challenged to live up to the ideals it preaches. I know my father would have approved of Catherine Wiley’s suggestion last week that attendance at the National Grandparents Pilgrimage could become an alternative to the proposed Mass boycott.
(Believe me, not because I am speaking there. My father would have understood better than anyone that a speaker at Knock is incidental to the real point of the pilgrimage, which is to pray and be together in solidarity.)
Catherine suggested last week that people should turn out in thousands to the pilgrimage, in order to pray for the church, as now is not the time to stay away from Mass, but to go in greater numbers.
In ways, Jennifer Sleeman and Catherine Wiley are very similar. Both are dynamic women who get up and do something rather than sitting around bemoaning the state of affairs.
Both care passionately about their church. Both agree that reform is needed, though they would disagree on what form that reform should take.
I believe that reform will come about through those who choose to stay, rather than those who choose to walk away, even temporarily.
Women will play a central role.
Let’s make our presence felt.
SIC: IT/IE