I am a former seminarian in the Catholic church. There are many reasons why I chose to discontinue a vocation to the priesthood, but the attitude towards women, discussed in your editorial, is certainly one (The Guardian view on women in the Catholic church: let down yet again, 13 October). While my colleagues were disparaging female clergy in the Anglican communion as “vinaigrettes” (ie embittered “vicarettes”) and fearing the prospect of nuns in dog collars, the truth is that women – lay and in religious orders – keep the Catholic church going, often performing Eucharistic services and other para-liturgical rituals in lieu of a priest. They do this with zero recognition and often a lot of patronising contempt from an ageing and increasingly out of touch clergy.
And yet, routinely, the issue of female clergy is one that the lay faithful bring up time and again, not to mention those who have left the faith. Their complaints inevitably are ignored or are met with responses culled from Pope John Paul II’s letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. This is hardly surprising. To understand why, we have to look to the Catholic ideal of womanhood, defined by the Virgin Mary. As impossibly as she is both virgin and mother, the Catholic church also lauds her for her silence. The two incidents where her silence are particularly revered are telling: when she is told by Gabriel she is pregnant and when she watches Christ’s crucifixion. What possible respect are you ever going to have for the contributions of real women, who will always fall short of that ideal, if that’s what you think female perfection consists of?
William Rees
Brighton
