Former president Mary McAleese has criticised Pope Francis for treating those representing women and the laity at the Catholic Church’s synod on synodality “abysmally”.
Speaking to members of the Catholic Root and Branch reform movement in Leeds, England, at the weekend, she hit out at the “strident papal interventions both before and during the synod” by Pope Francis in relation to the church’s ban on women’s ordination to the priesthood and diaconate.
She said that she would love to see a rebellion at next month’s gathering of the synod in Rome by those representing women and the laity.
She also urged them to “raise Cain” because the synod “was designed not to open up but rather to constrain the path long since opened up by the people of God themselves, beginning with the widespread rejection of humanae vitae (ban on contraception) from the late 1960s on and the embrace of women’s rights and gay rights”.
A “much-hyped minimalist female and other lay voting presence” at the synod had tried to create the illusion of inclusion.
But that illusion of inclusion along with the illusion of freedom of speech and an open agenda were shattered by Pope Francis himself when he removed from the synod table the very issues which “the global faithful regarded as urgent”, such as involvement of women in decision-making and the ban on ordination, she said.
In July last year, Pope Francis said the ban on female ordination must be adhered to and that no one can publicly contradict it.
Then in April this year he “emphatically” ruled out ordination of women to the diaconate and priesthood “not after any study and not in any recognisable church or synodal process but in an interview with American CNN television”, Dr McAleese said.
“When I hear a pope telling me I must not publicly contradict something that my conscience tells me is baloney – sorry, I am not going to do that,” the 72-year-old said.
Contrary to the hoped-for changes, she said the synod had been “terminally undermined” and had “led us a merry three-year synodal dance back to papal and magisterial autocracy”.
Taking aim at Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich from Luxembourg’s criticism of those campaigning for reform on women’s ordination as “lobbyists”, Dr McAleese said: “The suffragettes fighting misogyny, the civil-rights activists fighting sectarianism, homophobia and racism, were called worse but in the end their truth is marching on leaving the hierarchy of the Catholic Church barely visible in the rear-view mirror.”
While the “lunatics who are running the church are quite capable of driving it into the ground”, Dr McAleese urged people to “stick with it” and not walk away in frustration despite its “messiness and madness and the hierarchical clumsiness”.
“We stay in order to try to nudge it in the direction of truth, just like the suffragettes of old and the civil rights activists who were beaten off the streets – we are not being beaten off the streets thank God.”