Madam,
An idea popped into my head yesterday which seems to be so blindingly obvious that I think I must be missing something, and I wonder if someone might help to enlighten me, please.
It is somewhat commonplace currently to speak of the Catholic Church not using the gifts of women, not treating women well, the need for a theology of women, and so forth. And I am of course aware of some of the behaviours that are interpreted in this way.
Suddenly, out of the blue, the question occurred to me: are men treated any better? Is what we / I have experienced because of gender, or is it because we are laity?
In order to debunk this idea I would need to know of ways in which lay men routinely are involved in the church in ways in which lay women are not. If one were to say that the men could at least go forward to ordination, then that would nicely underscore my point: that if men are not priests they are merely males who were eligible for priesthood but didn’t go for it and there is no other role precisely as lay men.
Do all the male laity thrive on a rich, lived ecclesiology and parish life, or have that possibility available to them should they choose it? Is their secular expertise and experience welcomed in a way that women’s is not?
One may say that of course the role of mother, father, etc. is valuable in the Church (I am myself single, but the role of the single person is another story, isn’t it?) but this seems to me to miss the point of the seminal canonical works of ecclesiology from the gospels and other New Testament writings down to the present day official church documents, to say nothing of the work of many, many theologians and practitioners.
I suppose what I am asking is this: do we really have a situation which at root is of gender inequality or a situation of clericalism?
So tell me, please, what is the point that I, as a lay person of the female gender, am missing?
Mary Stevens, Univeristy of St Andrews
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